On December 1, 1933, Francisco Romero López was born in Camas (Seville). Years later, that little boy who worked among the cows on the farm that Seville had given (perhaps as a “prize” for having ordered the execution of more than forty thousand people) to the coup-mongering General Queipo de Llano, listened to the olés that, pushed by the wind, over the Guadalquivir and Triana, they reached there from the La Maestranza bullring.
And there he nourished his bullfighting dreams who would later be “Pharaoh of Camas” and custodian of the little jar of essences that, from time to time, with his very small cape and muleta, he opened on bullfighting afternoons, even if it was only in a veronica, in the middle of the auction, in a graceful trench or in a natural cathedral. Or from the promenade, which for many was already worth the price of admission.
About the hardships of those years and the treatment that he and other children received on the landowners' farms (“Yoke flesh, he was born/More humiliated than beautiful/With his neck persecuted/By the yoke for his neck,” Miguel wrote Hernández), the future Curro Romero on the posters asked himself (as stated by the journalist Antonio Burgos in his book Curro Romero, the essence) Where am I going, am I going to have to be like this all my life?
Curro learned to bullfight - or rather, to handle bullfighting equipment because his bullfighting is not learned, it is carried in the soul and springs from the heart - on a soccer field with a gypsy bullfighter and his presentation in La Maestranza, on the 26th. May 1957 (three years after his debut, in La Pañoleta), replacing Mondeño, was the beginning of a legend that continues over time, beyond what, by surprise, would be his last. late in the rings, a charity festival in La Algaba (Seville) hand in hand with Morante de la Puebla, on October 22, 2000.
Saying Curro Romero is saying Seville. And vice versa. However, the alternative was not in La Maestranza, but in Valencia on March 18, 1959, with Gregorio Sánchez as godfather and from there to the April Fair.
As in any love relationship, the one between Seville and Curro has given rise to encounters and disagreements, glories and fights, and if on five occasions he left through the Puerta del Príncipe, which overlooks the Guadalquivir with Triana in the background, it was on the 19th of May 1966, Ascension Day (one of the “three Thursdays of the year that shine brighter than the sun”) when, for the benefit of the Red Cross, he locked himself alone in La Maestranza with six Urquijo bulls, cut off eight ears and “currismo” was established.
Curro Romero was not alone, although he was a lot, a bullfighter from Seville. De Las Ventas came out seven times on his shoulders, many also between pads, and the Madrid fans made him one of their own.
Curro Romero stopped time with his wallflower cape and altered the pulses with that little crutch that, with his shoes serene, his chest bulging, he offered to the bull so that it could pass around him, before the graceful finish of the trench or solemn of the trench. , to walk away with a “there that is!”
Curro Romero lives and speaks like he used to bullfight, slowly and in rhythm, almost a whisper.
Curro Romero, legend of time, like his friend Camarón.
