José Castro and his wife were like a family to Lara Marloweduring her time as this paper's Paris correspondent
THE RUE de Bellechasse is sad, because José Castro is dead. Monsieur Castro was no relation to the Cuban lider massimo, nor was he one of the public figures I wrote about as this newspaper’s France correspondent. His widow, Otilia, is the concierge of the building where I lived from 2001 until 2009, and they are like family to me.
Though Madame Castro held the official title of gardienne, the couple were a priceless “twofer”, a husband-and-wife team who shared the hoovering, mopping and polishing. Together they knew every nook and cranny of the 130-year-old apartment building. They were its longest residents, having moved into the shoebox-sized loge in the 1970s. Their sons, Bernard and José, grew up in the loge and attended school nearby in rue Las Cases.
For eight years, Madame Castro’s smile brightened my mornings. Monsieur Castro left early for his job as the head of a maintenance team at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport. Most days, he took a passenger in his little white lorry, a distinguished lawyer from the first floor of the building, whom he dropped off in the 17th district. Working at my desk in the afternoons, I’d hear cheerful chatter as Monsieur Castro’s small grand-daughters, Luisa and Noémie, followed him around the building.
When public transport strikes sowed traffic chaos and I had a plane to catch, Monsieur Castro drove me to Roissy. Over the years, he fixed my leaking kitchen sink and my oven door, rigged a lamp for my piano music, sawed off the top of a too-tall Christmas tree. He took pride in the small thing well done. When I travelled, Madame Castro looked after my cat, who adored her. The Castros were fundamentally good, and I trusted them completely.
On Friday afternoon, as I prepared to head back to Washington at the end of my spring holiday, Monsieur and Madame Castro were watching television when a massive heart attack killed him in seconds. “He left me,” she repeated to me incredulously. “He didn’t deserve this.” Now, like myself and tens of thousands of would-be travellers, the Castros are stranded in Paris. Monsieur Castro’s casket waits in a funeral home for flights to resume, so he can be buried in his beloved Galicia.
After queuing at Air France for four hours on Saturday to rebook my own flight, I asked if there was anything the airline could do to ensure that Monsieur Castro’s remains are repatriated quickly. “Everybody has problems,” an Air France agent snapped. “We can’t make exceptions.” But this is a bereavement, I protested. “Not even for bereavements,” she answered.
The Castros were a throwback to another time, when immigrants came from Catholic countries, and no Parisian apartment block survived without a concierge. Young men and women met at dances, courted, married, had children and stayed together.
José met Otilia at the Bataclan dance hall in Paris’s Oberkampf district on Christmas Eve 1973. She worked as a cleaner in a doctor’s clinic. He washed windows for a living. Both hailed from Galicia, northwestern Spain; he from the mountain, she from the plain, 80km apart. At age 25, Otilia was considered an old maid. José was three years her senior. It was, she said through her tears, un vrai coup de foudre, love at first sight. For more than 36 years, they were never apart.
Though their sons have dual nationality, the Castros remained Spanish. “He said we had to be proud of our origins,” Madame Castro explained. The couple spent every August in Galicia, and refurbished an old stone house there for their retirement. The last time I saw Monsieur Castro alive, 24 hours before his heart attack, he grinned when he showed me the leather folder containing his pension papers. “I am going to retire in June,” he announced.
The day after Monsieur Castro died, Madame Castro put on a clean apron, wheeled the rubbish bins in through the cobblestone entry, hung laundry in the back courtyard. “If I don’t work, I’ll go crazy,” she said. “The children want me to sleep at their house, but I want to stay here, with our good memories . . . A few minutes before my husband died, we were laughing. I said, ‘Papie, we’re getting old now; two grand-daughters and a third on the way.’ He said, ‘Yes, Mamie, we must start thinking of ourselves soon’.”