Morante on tour (IX): the master is reincarnated in a Goya canvas

There are afternoons that seem to be painted before they happen. Aranjuez offers that privilege in the endurance of summer: the carved-out plaza next to the Palace , the gardens where the drums of the Mutiny still resonate, the September air intoxicated with history and celebration. The Aranjuez plaza itself is severe (prison-like) on the outside and coquettish and elegant on the inside. The boxes and tapestries adorn it with a traditionalist spirit. And at the center of the ceremony appears Morante de la Puebla , himself transformed into a Goya character , as if he had escaped from an etching.

The hairnet and shoulder pads emulated the attire seen in nineteenth-century portraits by Pedro Romero . And the golden braiding hung from his chest like a wealth of Inca treasure . There was Morante, representing history in his immaculately clean shirt, depicting the executions, though the exuberance of his pink sash contained the drama.

This is not a simple aesthetic parallel. The figure of Morante embodies the same contradiction—the same creative dialectic—that exudes in Goya 's work: popular exaltation and the vertigo of tragedy . His wrists evoke the light of festive cartoons, the overflowing joy of festivals and pilgrimages, but also the dark tremor of the " Black Paintings ." He is a bullfighter who abandons himself and bleeds to death, who celebrates and condemns himself, who summons the people and leaves them overwhelmed in a spectral silence, no matter how many flowers are thrown at him on his return to the ring.

You only have to see him unfurl his cape to realize this duality . A Morante verónica could live in the cartoons of tapestries, among the majos and majas dancing with the lightness of the air, but it would also fit into an etching of the " Tauromaquias ," with the same sudden violence and the same dry drama of a black line on paper. Goya drew the famous "Martincho flying in the bullring," suspended in the impossible. Morante reproduces this vertigo: the moment when bullfighting seems to rise above the laws of gravity and common sense.

It was a pleasure to see him in Aranjuez, recovered from the goring in Pontevedra (August 10). Once again treading the abyss . Powerful with his left hand. Inspired and keen on resources and flourishes. Impressive with chest-length passes and the connection of his right-handed passes.

The Criado bull had a certain nobility, and the infamous Ribeiro Telles bullfighter didn't have a pass, so the maestro from La Puebla abbreviated the feat with grace. And he left Aranjuez with the prize of a sterling ear, which reassures his supporters. Not for its statistical value, but because it shows that the maestro has returned to where he was: hegemonic .

It's surprising that the stands at Aranjuez weren't filled. Neither the proximity of Madrid, nor Morante's return to the bullrings of the Peninsula (he reappeared on Wednesday in Melilla), nor the substantial lineup encouraged the "No Tickets Allowed" crowd, so the absent spectators missed Juan Ortega's fainting spell in the face of the needy fifth (two ears) and Pablo Aguado 's exquisite mid-height bullfighting with Cuvillo's large substitute bull.

It was a premonition of the resounding performance with the sixth. Aguado was helped by the best bull of the Criado bullfight, and he responded with as much inspiration as bullfighting skill. The natural passes flowed with harmony and Seville-like quality. The low passes and the assisted passes had a cathedral-like air, although the full essence of the performance could be recognized in the final passes , particularly one with the left hand whose eternal stroke secured the prize of two ears.

Pablo Aguado dressed impeccably in Aranjuez, also involved in the Goya-esque idiosyncrasy of an afternoon that turned into night and dust. And which lasted as long as the bullfights Don Francisco the Bullfighter used to attend, just like his Goya friends.

The "Tauromaquias" were not a repertoire of traditionalism, but rather a ferocious x-ray of the Spanish soul . They reveal the grandeur and barbarity of a festival that was never innocent... nor guilty. Morante shares that same intensity: his bullfighting not only beautifies, but interrogates; it not only adorns, but lays bare. When he arrives in Aranjuez, the bullring reminds us that the Mutiny it commemorates was not a festival, but an insurrection. And his figure becomes an aesthetic rebellion : an uprising against vulgarity, against the tyranny of practicality, against submission to logic.

Goya understood that the art of bullfighting was a metaphor for a country torn apart . Hence, his prints fluctuate between heroic exaltation and inevitable catastrophe: "The Butterfly Bull," "The Death of the Bullfighter," "The Panic in the Ring." Morante belongs to that first lineage, the one embodied by Pepe Hillo, Pedro Romero, and Costillares, contemporaries of the painter and subjects of his prints. Like them, he reconciles majesty and terror, grace and fatality. In a single bullfight, he can summon the joy of the pilgrimage and the sorrow of the Sabbath . In a single pass, he alternates between a knowing smile and the gravity of sacrifice . As in Goya, there is no possible conciliation between light and shadow , only the tension that confronts them and makes them indissoluble.

In Aranjuez, then, the bullring becomes a canvas . The sand is the rough paper of the etching. The bullfight, a moving painting where celebration and tragedy merge without reconciliation. And Morante appears as the central figure: simultaneously majismo and exorcism, cardboard and engraving, celebration and mourning. If Goya could have chosen a contemporary model, he would have found it in him. Because Morante doesn't just fight bulls: he also summons the memory of a country and projects it into the avant-garde, just as the Aragonese transformed tradition into modernity with the stroke of a burin.

The Mutiny of 1808 was not a street party, but a popular uprising that precipitated the abdication of a king. The bullfight held in his memory is not just any old celebration, but a confluence of the festive and the historical . And there, Morante stands as a riot in itself: against vulgarity, against progressive prohibitionism, against the decadent ghost of Pedro the Cruel.

** This summer, El Confidencial is publishing a series of chronicles that describe, from north to south, from east to west, the magical and triumphant season of José Antonio Morante de la Puebla. From the south in Málaga, we move to Bilbao for the ninth installment of the series.