In Mediterranean antiquity, a cult of fathers worshipped the power of the sun
—or, rather, worshipped themselves in opposition to it, measured their strength
against that vicious god of light and heat, but because they could not spill heliacal blood
they selected an avatar, a creature they could breed up into divinity. They chose you,
and I understand why. The morrillo, the regal posture of your horns, like stones from sand
—they bestowed on you wild fury, so that stealing it back could mean conquering the sky.
But you were only little. I envision a Castilian countryside under a soft madrugada sky
and a coal-black calf suckling on its mother's teat, batting its long lashes, until the son
of a cold, kleos-hungry father tears through the field on horseback, howling up sand.
The calf cries out as the son, only thirteen, rears up his horse in an assertion of strength
he does not yet possess, sneering Monstruito, hoy eres pequeño, but someday you
will be a devil, and my sword shall make its piercings until your back is all blood.
For cock and dogfights, the chicks and pups are starved, raised in basements to seek blood,
but fighting calves are raised in green expanses, an honor reserved for avatars, an open sky
they share with the sacrificial lambs. Who has it better? The lambs are perfumed, while you
are bullied into slick perspiration, fumes expelled in addled snorts, woozy under a withering sun.
Which reason for death is the least humiliating? Paranoia, hunger, the performance of strength?
Eventually, the dog, cock, lamb, and bull will all find their bones buried under the same sand,
but not until the bull's sagging body is paraded through calle vieja to a university like a sand-
-stone castle. The latest doctorate recipient waits, itching to rupture bull skin, dip into bull blood
with gold-ringed fingers and bring the taste to his lips, then memorialize his cognitive strength
by painting his emblem, a sanguineous ligature, La V Victoria with nominal glyphs, to face sky
and city from the tallest point on the fachada. His family will rend meat from limb, the sun
coasting and setting over a celebration without end. Should you be happy, fighting bull? You
represent excellence in each prime of the alchemical trinity: physical, mental, spiritual. But you
struggle to think abstractly when the chaos of the arena is so immediate—the undulations of sand
beneath your stumbling hooves, the ferocious and neat-footed man with pikes glinting in a sun
that expands and retracts like a pupil. You try to retreat, but the entryway has disappeared. Blood
pounds in your ears, round the ring, all you see is the red storm blinding, seizing up your sky.
How could this be worship? There's nothing to do but charge forward with all your strength
and might, forcing out that prickly, subatomic impulse that keeps the tired fighting. Strength
emerges like mites from the winter, like the mother who lifts the car to save her child. You
feel the muscles tighten in your back, taut as teeth on the verge of the crack, arching to the sky
and as the pike sinks in, you thrash your horns and send the torero flying toward the sand.
Won't he recognize the skeleton attached to these horns? The deep weight in a lineage of blood
and bones forever defined by how they can be conquered? The man rises, beckoning his sun,
but your last swell of strength has dried up and evaporated into the sky.
As the torero ornaments his sword with your blood, your eyes drift up to a sun
warm as a mother's teat. You lay your body down to heavy sleep upon the sand.