Shadow of a Bull
By Maia Wojciechowska and Alvin Smith
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
Manolo was only three when his father, the great bullfighter Juan Olivar, died. But Juan is never far from Manolo's consciousness--how could he be, with the entire town of Arcangel waiting for the day Manolo will fulfill his father's legacy?
But Manolo has a secret he dares to share with no one--he is a coward, without afición, the love of the sport that enables a bullfighter to rise above his fear and face a raging bull. As the day when he must enter the ring approaches, Manolo finds himself questioning which requires more courage: to follow in his father's legendary footsteps or to pursue his own destiny?
Maia Wojciechowska
Maia Wojciechowska's family fled Poland during World War II and emigrated to the United States after the war. She worked as an undercover detective, a motorcycle racer, a translator for Radio Free Europe, and a bullfighter before turning to writing. She was a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who said she knew more about bullfighting than any other woman.
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Reviews for Shadow of a Bull
9 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A book about bullfighting seems like the last book I would want to read, but Shadow of a Bull is not just a book about bullfighting. Shadow of a Bull is a rich book about the trials of being the son of a hero, a book about the struggles of a boy trying to find his own way in a world that is attempting to force him to take a path the boy does not want to take. Manolo is the son of a magnificent bullfighter. When Manolo's father is killed in the ring, the people look to Manolo to become the man his father was. Manolo does not want to be a bullfighter. But he does not want to disappoint his mother and his father's friends and all the people of his town. He is afraid, paradoxically, of both the bull and of being a coward. He can find no way out.The author is somehow able to share with the reader the beauty and the horror of bullfighting. I was surprised to find that I could see bullfighting in a new way, as an art, as a heroic act, though I continue to feel revulsion as well.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shadow of a Bull is an intense coming of age story about a boy growing up in the shadow of his dead father, a famous Spanish bullfighter. Both Shadow of a Bull and Call It Courage (Newbery Medal, 1941) share the theme of a boy becoming a man by facing his fear. This was known at one time as a "boy book," much as domestic novels were "girl books." However, both girls and boys face fear, uncertainty, and self-doubt on the uneasy ascent into adulthood; and both will benefit from the depth of feeling that Maia Wojciechowska brings to this work.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The story follows Manolo as he tries to grow up in the shadow of his famous father. Beautifully written so that you can feel the pressures, the worries and all the fears that Manolo has to go through. You also get a look into the world of bullfighting. And although you may want to flip to the glossary in the back once in a while it never leaves you lost nor do the unfamiliar terms interrupt the flow of the narrative. It is a unique and touching coming of age story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This one's the tale of a matador in the making. Manolo Olivar is nine years old, the son of a famous bullfighter who was killed when Manolo was three. Everybody in his town is expecting him to follow in his father's footsteps, to bring glory back to his community. A group of bullfighting experts take him under their collective wing and start preparing him for his first match, to be held when he's twelve--just like his father. The question is, does Manolo want to be like his father? To the book's credit, it is not an easy question to answer. Manolo struggles with the question, all the while as he is being pushed along to a future others have chosen for him. It's a well written book that does a good job of expressing the thoughts and feelings of the characters and making the art of bullfighting come alive. My kneejerk reaction is to consider the sport cruel and bloodthirsty, but the story made me understand and halfway appreciate the views of the aficionados. It's a book y'all should check out.--J.
Book preview
Shadow of a Bull - Maia Wojciechowska
1
When Manolo was nine he became aware of three important facts in his life. First: the older he became, the more he looked like his father. Second: he, Manolo Olivar, was a coward. Third: everyone in the town of Arcangel expected him to grow up to be a famous bullfighter, like his father.
No one had to tell him these three things were true. He and everyone in the town of Arcangel knew the first and the last of these to be true. And the fact that he was a coward only he himself was aware of.
When he was almost nine, he grew three full inches. All of a sudden, as if overnight, he seemed to change. He became very thin, his nose lengthened, his limbs became awkwardly long, like those of a boy twice his age.
On the streets people began to turn around and remark about his resemblance to his father.
It’s the eyes! He has exactly the same look in his eyes!
The same sad eyes.
It’s not only the sadness. There is something more. Juan Olivar had eyes like no other man I’ve ever seen.
And now the boy has that look.
He also has his father’s thin, long nose. The same nose.
His was the longest nose in Spain.
"Why shouldn’t it have been? He was the bravest. And in a torero, a long nose means bravery."
Even with a short nose Juan Olivar would have been the bravest.
I don’t agree! There has never been a brave torero with a short nose.
You speak foolishly. I can name you a dozen …
This would lead into a fight of words, and Manolo would no longer be interested. The fact was that he had a long nose, like his father, and it seemed that this was to be his badge of courage.
Look at his face.
Just like his father’s. Always brooding.
A gypsy’s face.
There is no gypsy blood in the Olivars.
Yet the face is a gypsy’s face. Long, thin and dark.
He might grow even taller and thinner than his father.
That would be bad. The bulls then would always look too small.
If he grows very tall, they will make him fight the biggest bulls in Spain. Each time the people will want a bigger bull.
Until he will be made to fight cathedrals, not bulls.
They will make him fight seven-year-olds, weighing two tons.
There are no cows today in Spain that can drop bulls that would weigh two tons.
"I can name you twenty ganaderias with seven-year-old bulls that would weigh two tons. Easily two tons."
Name me one! Just one! A hundred years ago, yes. Not today.
And again there would be an argument that might last for hours, if not days.
He’s growing fast. How old is he this year?
Don’t worry, he will be twelve soon enough.
Give him time. He is only a boy.
"So was Juan Olivar. At twelve one is not a man. Even though one is a matador, one is not a man."
People always talked about Manolo on the streets. They talked about him, not behind his back, but all around him, in front and alongside and behind, not caring at all if he was within earshot or even standing and listening to them. It was a habit of the people of Arcangel.
And there was a reason for it. There have always been five things that people fear: war, disease, flood, hunger, and death. And of these, death has always been feared the most.
In Spain, however, people have found a way of cheating death. They summon it to appear in the afternoon in the bull ring, and they make it face a man. Death—a fighting bull with horns as weapons—is killed by a bullfighter. And the people are there watching death being cheated of its right.
In Arcangel the people had had their very own killer of death, Juan Olivar. He had been their own hero and their magician. Juan Olivar made their dreams come true: victory of man over death. The old saying, Today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, and always the same,
was no longer true.
But one day their killer of death met a bull that would not be deprived of his right. And the people of Arcangel, robbed of their pride, deprived of their magician, lost their hero. And when they lost him, each day became exactly like the one that preceded it and the one that would follow it.
Now the town of Arcangel was waiting, for that hero had left them a son who was growing up to once again take arms against death. They were waiting for the son to be like his father.
2
No matter how hard he tried, Manolo could not remember his father. He had been only three when the bull, Patatero,
drove his right horn through his father’s heart. He was three when, one afternoon, two deaths happened almost at the same instant: the death of his father, and the death of his killer, the bull.
What he himself could not remember was the one thing the town of Arcangel did remember. The town not only remembered, it was alive with the legend of Juan Olivar. Its very existence seemed to depend on one man’s fame, one man’s glory, one man’s death. There was nothing else to set Arcangel apart from other small Spanish towns. Juan Olivar alive, and even more dead, had created a town that lived on his name.
Sometimes Manolo thought Arcangel must not have existed before his father. Everywhere he turned he found shrines to the memory of the man he did not remember. In people’s homes pictures of his father were kept alongside those of the saints. In every café there was his father in hundreds of photographs and dozens of posters: fighting a bull, waiting for the bull’s charge, standing over the bull he had killed.
In the main square of Arcangel a great statue of his father and a bull, taller than any building, looked down over the red rooftops. His father’s lean hands held the muleta, the cloth carved in stone seemed to blow in the wind; his father’s sad eyes sighted down the length of the sword at the lowered head of the bull.
Another statue, almost as tall, stood in the cemetery, marking his father’s grave. That one did not have a bull. His father stood alone, very erect, very thin, against the sky. His eyes were raised and Manolo, standing on the ground, could not see if they were sad. In his father’s right hand were a bull’s hoof, tail, and two ears; in his left, he held a bouquet of flowers.
And then, there was the museum, a building that housed the legend’s heritage. Here there were the books that told about his father and copies of all the articles people had written about him. There was a copy of the painting that hung in his own house: a great life-size painting of his father in the red-and-gold traje de luces. The one he wore the day he was killed. There was a poster that had once hung outside Arcangel’s bull ring announcing his father’s first novillada when he was thirteen.
And also, there, at one end of the building, at the very farthest end, was Patatero’s
head. Mounted. Almost alive. Frightening in its power: the neck very strong, the horns very long and sharp, the eyes open and mean.
Manolo remembered when the people of Arcangel had built the museum. They had built it brick by brick, each inhabitant in turn carrying one brick: a procession of sad-eyed people in black. They, perhaps only his mother, or maybe the people of the town, had made him stand and wait and watch. It had taken a whole day, and he had grown very tired and had fallen asleep because he was only four and did not yet know about pride.
And still they talked, endlessly, everywhere, about Juan Olivar. They talked about Manolo’s grandfather too; but very rarely, because although he too had been a bullfighter, he had not been considered a very good one. His grandfather had not died in the bull ring; he had died in a fire that had swept the town; died saving his son, Juan. But while he lived, he had fought bulls. He had fought over a thousand of them, even more than his son, but he was not remembered except as Juan’s father.
The father Manolo did not remember had become the one and only hero of the people of the town. They knew everything he had done and everything he had said. They knew how wide and how deep were his wounds. And they even knew, or at least claimed they knew, what he had thought.
Most of all they knew that Juan Olivar’s destiny as a great bullfighter had been known from the very beginning, from his birth. They never tired talking of it. They repeated themselves again and again. And still everyone listened. And everyone added or took from the story as he saw it.
He wasn’t more than two hours old,
someone would recall, when Señora Olivar sent for Maria Alvar…
At that time Maria must have been a hundred and three…
The old gypsy was more than that, at least a hundred and fifteen.
How old Maria Alvar was doesn’t matter. Juan was barely born when the greatest gypsy fortuneteller who ever lived…
Some said that her power to see into the future so clearly came straight from the devil.
Who knows!
There was a much greater gypsy fortuneteller in Granada at the time!
Who? Flora? She was never as great as old Maria. Besides Maria taught Flora all she knew.
"Maria Alvar could look at a newborn baby, and without cards, without stars, without anything at all,