There are books that open like someone opening a window in the heat of the heat: waiting for air, dreaming of a draft, but fearing a door slamming. “Morante, full stop” (Espasa) is exactly that, a warm breath that enters the space and leaves a quiver of … albero in the stomach. A book written by Rubén Amón based on urgency, but not that of the one who escapes the fire, but that of the one who has been burning for a long time. Although, in reality, I think that Amón is not writing about a bullfighter but about a temperature. And he does it with his prose that is reminiscent of a trumpet solo: brilliant, excessive and sometimes over-the-top, but always leaving something resonant beyond each phrase.
The book begins on the last afternoon, with Morante in the media of Las Ventas, plucking his chestnut as if he were committing suicide. This gesture serves as an alibi for Amón to tell how an artist in apparent decline could be capable of setting fire to an entire country. Because, in reality, it is not a book about bullfighting, but about Spain, about this Spain capable of transforming everything into metaphor, except the metaphor, which becomes dogma. And what Amón tells is how Morantism became the unexpected crack in public discourse, how a man without social networks or “storytellers” was able to arouse more passions than all the cultural advisors combined and how a cornered art could only win when it stripped itself of arguments to limit itself to responding with truth and beauty.
The book is full of moments in which we see how Amon raises his inner voice. For example, when he writes that Morante “represents a kind of accidental leader,” we sense that he is actually talking about a country where leaders are always the result of chance. Spain needs symbols when reality takes over. And then Morante arrives, with his depression, his bohemianism and his purity as a broken artist, to become both a symbol and a symptom. Better yet, the vulnerability that underlies the text, the bullfighter as a broken man and this mixture of arrogance and fragility which explains, once again, that art is not a profession, but a condemnation. Amón writes it best: “Light comes from the darkness that inhabits the spirit of the bullfighter. »
And anyone who has seen enough geniuses breakthrough within while listening to the applause from outside understands that this sentence is not a resource but a diagnosis. And in the atmosphere remains the intuition that morantism is a nostalgia for the present, the feeling of having witnessed something unrepeatable that passes us by. Maybe life. Therefore, when Amón asks what will happen now, he is not referring to the bulls but to us, to a country that always needs an artist to recognize itself. The one who, as Lorca wrote, “climbs to the highest to show us the deepest”.
The book is not only extraordinary but above all necessary. Because he takes bullfighting literature out of the war of the cafrerío and the battle to bring it to the emotional place that belongs to it. Which is that of art. Morante didn’t fight for us, but he ended up talking to all of us. And we think how blessed is the chaos that makes the stars dance. Blessed also be Morante, who reminded us that even if the world is gray, there will always be a bullfighter who tries to stop time. And as long as there are people like Amon watching us, we can make it happen.
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