The image is chilling and hypnotic, as only those in which death is felt to hover unseen can be. But this one, moreover, is terribly beautiful. It could be an oil painting, a sculpture, the ninot indultat by popular acclaim of Valencia’s best falla. We see in it a man as strong as he is fragile, dressed in peacock blue and gold, suspended in the air like a puppet at the moment of being gored rectally by a 500-kilo bull. The man has a name, of course: José Antonio Morante Camacho, 46 years old, Morante de la Puebla for the posters for almost three decades. The bull, too: Clandestino, a four-year-old raised in the countryside to be fought in the bullring. After the photo, both met different fates. The man has already left the ICU and is recovering from the internal damage caused by the goring. The bull will have already been butchered in the slaughterhouse, after collapsing from the third sword thrust of the bullfighter who stepped in, and will soon be fine cured meat. So far, the account of the events of Morante’s goring on April 20, 2026, in the Maestranza de Sevilla.
They will accuse me of being prosaic, and they would not be wrong. I am by no means immune to the beauty of bullfighting. The images, the words, the liturgy, the timing. They still enchant me, and I use them without even being aware of it. But one day I attended a bullfight from the barrier, I saw, heard, smelled, felt, and tasted the acrid flavor of horror in my throat after the beauty, and I never saw them with the same eyes again. Because the bull bleeds, urinates, defecates, vomits, bellows, spits foam from its mouth. The bullring smells of blood, sweat, feces. It stinks. Bullfighting enthusiasts abstract all of this away and focus on the struggle between the bullfighter and the bull with death as a certain possibility, that beautiful fallacy. Morante’s case is, moreover, irresistible. A man consumed in his own flame, always between the abyss of depression and the false peak of euphoria, always anxious. He retired on October 12, National Day, no less, and returned on Easter Sunday, what better date, because, although when he untied his pigtail he said he could no longer cope with the world of bullfighting, he cannot live without bullfighting. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t know how. I find Morante’s restless existence much more interesting and moving than all the syrupy praise his choristers drown him in, even if he enjoys it. From the fans who believe they see a hero where there is only a man, to the businessmen who count his sick days for his return to the arena so they don’t have to refund the tickets they sold at his expense, to almost all the singers of his praises who run out of hyperboles when extolling his feats. In this case, I much prefer the cold, beautiful, exact prose of the medical report. Morante is torn inside and out. And no, no, I am not one of those who believe that Clandestino has exacted just revenge for the 7,980 cattle killed in Spanish bullrings in 2025. I always prefer the death of a bull to that of a man, or woman, in any job. Because Morante’s incident is nothing more than a work accident, like those that have caused 118 deaths without fanfare in Spain so far this year, the last two just yesterday, falling from a construction scaffold. So I hope Morante recovers, takes heart, and finds meaning in his life. Whatever it may be.
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