Midnight in Europe Read Online Free PDF Page A

out before him, he saw that the officer had turned his overcoat inside out. “What a shame,” the officer said. “You seem to have ripped the lining of your coat. No, no, I am mistaken, the lining has been cut open.” He stared at Castillo, then said, “Is there something you would like to tell me? To unburden yourself?”
    “It was like that when I bought it.”
    “Oh, of course it was.”
    When the officer tapped the bell, Castillo’s legs began to tremble. He feared he might collapse and thought, God, help me to stand up . An older woman with white hair in a bun stood next in line behind Castillo and, at the sound of the bell, Castillo heardher gasp. The giant finally appeared and as he took Castillo by the crook of the elbow the smell of rotten onions was overpowering. Leaning over, the giant whispered by Castillo’s ear: “Be a man.”
    He led Castillo up the two flights of stairs, then out the service entry. A few feet away, the handsome young man lay dead. He’d fallen forward, but Castillo could see his face.
    The giant said, “On your knees, comrade.”
    Castillo’s last thought was the name of a lover from long ago.
    Paris, 22 December, 1937. Cristián Ferrar, on his way home from the Coudert Frères law firm, stopped at the boulangerie on the tiny rue Grégoire de Tours and picked up a baguette for his dinner. Next, at the grocery store across the street, he bought a thick slice of orange Mimolette cheese, a garlic sausage, a tin of artichoke hearts, and a bottle of grocery-store Bordeaux. As the woman who kept the store wrapped it all in a sheet of newspaper—the right-wing Le Journal , he saw—she made a face, a sour mix of anger and disgust. “Have you heard, monsieur?” she said. “The Métro workers say they will strike on Christmas Day—for a week.”
    “I suspect they’ll get a new contract. Just in time, as usual.”
    “Imagine, monsieur, Christmas .”
    “Will you have to close the store?”
    “Oh no, I don’t live far away. But still …”
    “Then it won’t be so bad.”
    “Bad enough. Bonsoir, monsieur. Try to stay warm.”
    “Bonsoir, madame.”
    He set off toward home, tearing an end off the baguette and eating as he walked. It was cold. Cold and damp with a cutting little wind; a Paris specialty, a diabolical weather that forced its way through your clothing and chilled your very soul. Ferrar shivered and walked faster, entering the Place Saint-Sulpice, heading past the church of Saint-Sulpice toward his apartment. His refuge,where he looked forward to a quiet evening: he had a good chair in the room he used as a study, would settle by the coal-burning fireplace, would read—Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana —drink the bottle of wine, and smoke Gitanes, a blanket pulled tight around his shoulders.
    He’d grown up in rooms where you could hear clocks.
    The rhythmic ticking created a special silence, a hush, which was the perfect setting for the life of the Ferrar family. His father was a lost soul, an excessively gentle and reticent man dedicated to philately, stamp collecting. In Ferrar’s memory of him during the family’s time in Barcelona—the first twelve years of Ferrar’s life—his father was seated at a desk in his study, bending over a leather album, with some stamp, from Bechuanaland or Fiji, worth three somethings, quivering in a tweezers as he tried to slip his prize into a glassine envelope.
    Ferrar’s mother was, in a way, not dissimilar. Daily existence was always hard—when she tried to correct the maid, the maid didn’t hear her. She loved her children—Ferrar, a pious older sister, and two younger brothers, hellions both—but she couldn’t discipline them. Faced with disruption of any kind she was meek, and helpless. But Ferrar’s mother, like his father, had a singular obsession: she believed that her family, named Obrero, was of noble origin, a tiny leaf clinging to a dying branch of the extinct Bourbon-Braganza royal line. Extinct it