Never Any End to Paris Read Online Free PDF Page B

crime. Trotsky’s family continued to live in the house for a while after the assassination, and after them, there was no one else. Identical to the day of the assassination, Trotsky’s study was kept in very good shape with, for example, the entire library complete. The only thing missing from the crime scene was the ice pick the Stalinist Ramón Mercader had used to kill him. I’d seen the film and visualized, memorized the murder scene, but I never imagined, as I was watching the film, that one day I would be there in person, at the very scene of the crime, I never imagined I would see Trotsky’s study
in real life
, that room where something happened that changed the course of history.
    I went to see the study with my friend Christopher, a Mexican writer who lived in Coyoacán, a few steps away from the crime scene. There was nobody else in the house, so, at a certain moment, we found ourselves alone in front of Trotsky’s desk, not knowing what to do or say. You could hear the buzzing of a mosquito. I found it hard to disassociate that study from the one that appeared in the fiction of Losey’s movie. Even so, I tried not to forget that this was the
real
place where Trotsky had been assassinated. So — I thought — this is a historic place. I couldn’t think of anything else. I just kept repeating obtusely to myself, this is a historic place. I looked down at the floor, just for something to do, I looked at the carpet and then, in the middle of the silence and overcome by a strange sensation that fluctuated between anodyne and transcendental (what we feel when faced with any supposedly important historic event), I saw, or thought I saw, one of Trotsky’s bloodstains on the carpet, not completely cleaned up, or else not darkened enough by the passing of time.
    I focused on the bloodstain, felt a grotesque temptation — in order to do something — to cross myself. I realized I was silently practicing a new form of irony. “I saw the stain the other day,” I imagined saying when I returned to Barcelona and people asked me how things had gone in Mexico. “What stain?” they would ask me, and then, instead of keeping quiet and sinking completely into my new re-invented irony, that is, into the silence of a wordless irony, I would return to classic irony. “Oh nothing,” I would reply, “I was just saying that I saw Trotsky’s blood
in real life
.”

17
     
    I’ve also seen Paris
in real life
. Although I haven’t lived in the city for years, I always have the feeling that I’m still there. Remember the slogan of the idol of my youth, the writer Hemingway: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you.”
    Naturally, I don’t know every single street in Paris, but I’ve at least heard them all mentioned or read their names somewhere. Even if I wanted to, I would find it very hard to get lost in Paris. I have lots of reference points. I almost always know which direction to take in the Metro. In Barcelona, since the dizzying changes leading up to the Olympic Games and afterwards that have transformed this once elegant and secretive city into an overwhelming touristy place, I’m much more likely to get lost. If I were dropped, for example, in an empty street in the Olympic Village, it would take me a long time to get my bearings, let alone find a bus or a subway station.
    In Paris I know the bus timetables very well and I know how to explain my desired route to a taxi driver. Paris is fantastic among other reasons because, unlike, say, German or Spanish cities, it has retained the names of many of its streets for centuries. Aside from this, I’m familiar with the characteristics of the neighborhoods in Paris, I can easily identify churches and other monuments, and I know where the stations are. Many places are linked to precise memories: there are houses where friends I haven’t seen for ages used to live — the old