(by Jason Horowitz nytimes.com November 12, 2025)
José Antonio Morante Camacho, arguably the greatest bullfighter of his generation, lay flat on his back in the middle of the arena.
A 1,220-pound bull had just flipped him in the air, prompting a gasp from the sold-out crowd in Madrid’s Las Ventas, Spain’s most hallowed bullfighting ring.
As the 46-year-old, known across the Spanish-speaking world as Morante de la Puebla, did a mental scan of his scarred body, other matadors rushed to carry him off. Brought safely to the ring’s red perimeter wall, he got up, grimaced and walked off the pain. He eventually returned to the fight, drawing the bull close with elegant sweeps of his cape that elicited cries of olé.
When it was over, the bull was dead, the rare prize of its ears were hoisted in Mr. Morante’s hands and a blizzard of white handkerchiefs waved in appreciation.
The bullfighter embraced Spain’s leading far-right politician, bathed in a shower of flowers, Spanish flags and cigars. He turned back to the center of the ring where, with tears on his weathered face, he removed a symbolic pigtail, clipped to the back of his hair. Everyone weeping along with him knew what that meant. Morante de la Puebla was calling it quits.
“I felt an artistic exhaustion,” Mr. Morante said a few days after the Oct. 12 fight, in an interview at his riverside farm in La Puebla del Río, his hometown outside Seville in southern Spain. In whispered, languid sentences, Mr. Morante, wearing a wool Gucci suit and fedora, said he felt no lessening of his skills and that his career had been “upwards, upwards, upwards.” But, he said, “I’ve decided to stop before I fall.”
The withdrawal of Mr. Morante deprives bullfighting aficionados of a legend admired for his artistry, courage and imagination. Impresarios say they will miss his ability to fill the seats and the end of a rivalry with a rising Peruvian matinee idol. The leader of the nationalist Vox party, Santiago Abascal, had in Mr. Morante a direct line to die-hard fans of an increasingly polarizing and conservative-coded pastime.
But even many of the Spaniards who want to follow the example of some regions and ban bullfighting across the country appreciated Mr. Morante as a rare original, not just for his Elvis impersonator mutton chops and psychedelic rock band outfits but for his bravery in publicly wrestling with mental health problems.
“It exists, and I don’t like to deceive anyone,” he said as he sipped coffee to wash down medication that he said sapped his strength and caused fluctuations in his weight. He talked about his experience with electroshock therapy, his diagnosis of depersonalization, bouts of weeping and his decision to spend much of the year in Portugal, because, he said, “my doctor is there.” And while he acknowledged that fans thank him for destigmatizing mental illness, he added with a quivering smile that “it’s harder to stand in front of a bull.”
He and his family still live in his hometown, where locals drink beers under bullheads and photos of him in a bar that bears his name.
His farm by the river has a bull ring and a ballroom annex featuring taxidermized bullheads, antique bullfighting posters and lighted vitrines displaying his sequined matador costumes. His living room is decorated with the heads and tails of his greatest triumphs, shrines to some of Spain’s most storied matadors and sculptures of cherubs and saints.
A plate featuring Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco hangs by the kitchen counter, near scores of bronze trophies and a stack of his trademark pink and green capes, stained with blood and branded Morante de la Puebla. The place had filled up over the years, he said. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
Mr. Morante grew up close by in a small house marked with a plaque above a narrow door and exposed electric wiring. As a child, he said, he faked sleep as his father, who lugged sacks of rice in a nearby factory, carried him into the arena, a ruse designed to avoid paying for a second ticket. Once inside, Mr. Morante said he would open his eyes and soak up “a divine place.”
At home, he stuck a sausage on the end of a stick draped with a red muleta cape and pretended that the family’s dog, Paloma, was a bull. His mother yelled at him, but by 6 years old, he confronted his first young cow in a local corral, and suffered his first collision. But then he got up. “I felt that something unstoppable surged in my blood,” he said.
He dropped out of school and forged papers at age 14 to participate in the ring. At 17 he debuted, against his mother’s wishes, as a matador. He recalled his youthful “beauty” and success. But by the time he was 20, he said, his mother was weeping at his plan to marry a girl from the town, and leave home. That was the day, he said, that he suffered a mental crisis.
“I looked in the mirror. I didn’t seem like myself,” he explained. He began to weep uncontrollably, he said, and felt as though he was living outside his own body. A doctor diagnosed him with depression and a dissociative disorder, and soon after, he said, he received electroshock therapy in Miami, where a friend suggested medicine was more advanced. It helped a little, he said, but his condition remained.
In 2008, after three years of marriage and the birth of a son, he split from his first wife. He said he grew accustomed to the solitude caused by his condition, which was only compounded by the solitude of facing down bulls in the ring. Nevertheless, his career blossomed. While Mr. Morante spoke with envy about the sponsorships and stratospheric salaries of soccer stars, he earned — and spent — millions.
In 2010, he remarried. But as his family expanded with two daughters, the election of a left-wing government clearly antagonistic to bullfighting imperiled his profession.
Mr. Morante said he went “asking for a little help,” from Mr. Abascal, the hard-right leader who, he said, “doesn’t know much” about bullfighting, but who eagerly went to bat for a hero to his political base. “Show the deep Spain,” Mr. Abascal texted Mr. Morante during the interview at the farm.
Mr. Morante’s triumphs helped bring in bigger crowds, and bullfighting became more popular with younger conservatives. But his personal demons haunted him.
Confidantes in town said his mood swung wildly depending on how he did in the ring. He sat out some bullfights, and in others, he dispatched bulls he didn’t like the look of with efficient, lackluster performances.
He eventually got back on track with the help of Pedro Jorge Marqués, a childhood friend from Portugal who had become a dentist and his manager and who lived with Mr. Morante’s mother when in Puebla.
But during Mr. Morante’s absences, other stars rose, including the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. This summer, the two had words in the ring, and Mr. Rey infuriated Mr. Morante by telling him to take it easy: “Maestro, smoke a cigar slowly.”
Mr. Morante, who admitted, with a puff on a Cuban, that cigars relaxed him, said he decided a rivalry was good “only if it’s noble and in front of the bull.” The two had made up, he said, but added he had no interest in seeing “Afternoons of Solitude,” an award-winning documentary focused on Mr. Rey, who, he said, “looked for” attention.
On Oct. 12, Mr. Morante assured that all attention focused on him. He said he had made a deal with God that if he triumphed in Madrid he would call it a day. “The combination of my mental health issues, the suffering, it wasn’t a joyful situation,” he said. “But it was one of satisfaction. For having fulfilled a dream.”
And as if in a dream, thousands of young, preppy bullfighting fans stormed the ring and carried him out on their shoulders through the arena’s famous gate of triumph, though their ripping at his shimmering matador costume for souvenirs, he said, was “very distressing.” The evening ended with him on the balcony of a famous Madrid hotel blowing kisses to the crowd in a special silk striped nightgown that he had packed, he said, “just in case” he triumphed and went out in style.
The problem now, he said, was that he had no other interests. “Nothing” he said. “Nothing.” Contrary to bullfighting gossip, he said, he and his wife were still together, though, he added with a shrug, “I don’t know until when.” A local farmer who dropped off a couple of golden pheasants to raise on the farm began to weep when Mr. Morante signed for him one of the capes stacked in the kitchen.
“What else am I going to do with them?” Mr. Morante said.
His weary eyes instead lit up when Mr. Marqués told him promoters were already plotting to bring him back.
“I had a dream about that,” Mr. Morante said, adding, “let’s not call it a complete retirement. It’s a rest.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/world/europe/spain-bullfighting-morante-camacho.html
No comments:
Post a Comment