He was tall, handsome, buzzy and hard-working. So much so that he exaggerated. Perhaps because he was fleeing from those years of his in his fatherland, in the agrarian and scarce Salamanca of Guijo de Ávila, where he was born. He went to school with a stove to keep warm. And the greatest gift of kings that he could dream of was an apple and not the one from the garden of the Hesperides. Roman Castro He worked so hard that he exaggerated and when he returned home after doing penance with the Great Power he would take off his tunic, put his feet in a chipped basin of salt water and put on his apron to attend to a clientele crazy about music. For the music of the violins that hung from the ceiling of his
tavern of Roman House, in the Plaza de los Venerables. He opened it in the convulsive Seville of 1934, although his son, Antonio Castro, confirms with an insurance policy that, at least, the establishment already existed in 1868, before the war in Cuba. Casa Román was a grocery store and taverns for absolute hits, as well as a pharmacy for special cases. A neighbor used to go every morning to seek her relief and asked Román for the ‘medicine’. Roman dispensed the pharmacopoeia in a small glass. The remedy was called Anís Machaco. And it wasn’t from Pfizer Laboratories…
Shop and tavern. That glorious and twin double t that Seville turned in its narrowest years in the direction of diversion and in a stop to give jarilla to the verdona that sang in the throat of the clientele. The store had a marble counter where you went and aviabas with a kilo of chickpeas for the stew of the day. The tavern had a wooden counter where music patients healed with two violinazos by Román that left two sublime notes dancing on brown paper. There rosemary murube discovered the last Jew in the Santa Cruz neighborhood, as the brilliant poet and writer defined Román. And there the most savvy lawyers of Mateos Gago street would gather to play dice with the boss, whom the gamblers tried to tango. Long was Roman, Jewish at last as defined by Murube, which made the lawyers believe that he ate them whole. Then the man came with the chalk, did the math and put a quarter and a half into the togados, and not exactly ham from the mountains…
Santa Cruz was then a neighborhood with a countess, a councilor for Festivals, a Texan who wanted to be a bullfighter and many tenement houses where the Seville of overwhelm survived, the one where the married couple and their children lived in a room without services or showers. no heating. On summer nights, the neighbors cooled their throats with the blonde from the neighborhood, with the usual Cruzcampo. Then they left jubilant when a caravan of horse-drawn carriages full of foreigners entered the neighborhood through Jamerdana, ended up in Venerables, headed down Gloria Street and went around Doña Elvira Square to make their way back. The guiris were blonde and with generous pink flesh that the parishioners celebrated as if that night they had conquered Monica Vitti. But the one who really conquered at Casa Román was the most Quevedesque man that the local Sevillian picaresque has given birth to. Don Pepe Pineda. The Marquis of Tento and Red. Without having any idea of Japanese, he ended up with two newborns, one from each arm, after having given him the bill for several portions of ham and chamomile. A great man who lost the history of local entrepreneurs and whom the Confederation of Entrepreneurs should raise to the rank of patron.
It was Mr. Pineda, during the filming of ‘Lawrence de Arabia’where he intervened with a djellaba that seemed to be made for his condition, the one he showed to Peter O´Toole the great difference that exists between roast beef and güeno ham. Where is it going to stop? O’Toole, so elegant and dandy, with those Saxon eyes and the blue blazer with a white handkerchief peeking out from the balcony of the upper pocket of his jacket, he became addicted to the genre. And Mr. Pepe Pineda was able to eat ham without the painful trance of pulling his wallet, he just pretended politely and Mr. Peter told him that there was no way, that he and the Columbia Pictures. Lawrence was a splendid movie. Pepe Pineda, a wonderful extra who grew fond of the word and went out on the street with that condition: that everything be extra for the pockets of others…
The British felt at home in that store of music and hymns to the joy of moyate. A Sevilla player, Ted Mcminnwritten like this but pronounced Manolín, lived in Santa Cruz and used to coincide with Jock Wallacethe coach who brought him from the islands and with Mortimore, the coach of Betis. Manolín was art. He would arrive at the tavern and say in a Sevillian bathed in Scotch: “Tito, give me ham.” He liked him so much that he promised to go out to the Sevilla field with a shirt where he put Casa Román. Antoñito Procesiones also visited the house and casually raised his voice and said: «Roman, give me what is mine». His was a telera, a bar of chocolate and a pitcher of water. He was always fried. They passed through that house doctor Fleming, Balduino Y Fabiola, Sandro Pertini, Indurain, Alberto Y Ascen, Passion Vega, Maria Jimenez, Imanol Arias and an unbeatable couple from the cinema of that time: Carmen Seville Y Vittorio De Sica. All of them united by an unbridled passion for the music of the violins, which made Román forget a harsh childhood of little hells at school to fight the pelúa and dream apples of Three Wise Men in the window of the old house in Guijo de Águila …
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