Alva and Irva (14 page)

You will find the World Hotel by finding the McDonald’s restaurant. The restaurant is extremely visible; the hotel, at least at first, is not. The World Hotel, formerly the Paulus Hotel, changed its name shortly after our earthquake, when many buildings had their names changed just to strengthen a feeling of newness and of hope. There was even a man on J. F. Kennedy Street called Mindus who suddenly and without any warning insisted he was now to be called Mark. Just so he felt new. A most confusing business. But as far as the hotel was concerned, the name changing was made for professional reasons. It was felt that the moment the hotel mentioned the word ‘World’ on its stationery, men and women from every conceivable country would suddenly come rushing through its swivel doors. They didn’t. These things take time. There is a mumbled rumour that a Holiday Inn wishes to place itself in a very prize position overlooking Ventis Park, but I am unable to confirm this matter for you—perhaps if such a presence were to arrive here then the World Hotel would quickly lose what shifting populations it so tenuously
possesses. When the World Hotel first became the World Hotel they flew flags of many countries from its grand terrace (now the second storey of the expanding McDonald’s restaurant). Truly, the people were supposed to gasp, this was an international place. The people stared at those flags. And the longer they stared the more they worried—didn’t the French Flag have vertical and not horizontal stripes; did the American Flag have enough stars; did the Australian flag really have a kangaroo in its centre? And then they realised that the flags were homemade, bold but ersatz productions: they were sheets from the old Paulus Hotel, which even had the word ‘Paulus’ stitched into them, cut up and sprayed with car paint.

In between McDonald’s and a large pharmacy are two marble urns growing plastic orchids and in between the urns is a revolving door. Please enter the World Hotel, a building in the Modernist style constructed in 1938-39.

THE PICCOLO MONDO BISTRO. Inside the lobby with its marble-tiled flooring, with its pillars shaped with moulding plaster into palm trees, with its red flock wallpapered walls (with proud blisters), with its threadbare leather sofas (whose visible springs aim any day to launch themselves), with its formica-topped tables (on which rest glass ashtrays as big as sinks), is a bellboy, in his sixties, puffing on an anorexic cigar, willing to take you up to the fourth floor where the Piccolo Mondo is to be found. Take the opportunity, as you cross the large hallway, to view the reception desk with its vast, heavy, leather-bound ledger, and behind that the black plastic notice board on which the prices of rooms are carefully listed with white plastic click-in numbers. Please note that there are two different prices, one for nationals, one for foreigners. Note also the wall of keys behind the desk. Two hundred little wooden niches. Imagine what rendezvous of secret love, what fumblings of purchased love, what loveless loneliness have rumpled the sheets of the World Hotel and imagine what variety of dreams have woken so many guests to the black night, which always seems darker still inside those various allotted spaces. One human life (the bastard
daughter of some miserable American heiress) even arrived on the third floor in room 327 and seven lives over many years have departed in these beds, forever ignorant of the knocking of the maid’s forceful hand, with lonely, polished shoes waiting patiently outside. But if all these rooms have one thing in common it is that they are not home, they are mere temporary lodgings with unfamiliar, unfriendly beds. Like Venice with its transitory population of tourists, the inhabitants here are always changing. Like Venice, no one stays except the staff. But like the frowning Ezra Pound who remained in that ancient and rotting Italian gone-to-seed Disneyland, here too there is an exception, for on the fifth floor, in rooms with a balcony overlooking the city, lives the old retired former mayor of our country, forever dictating to his resourceful secretary the memories, always professional, never personal, of his years in office. Ambras Cetts, suite 500. He never leaves his rooms. People come and people go but not Ambras Cetts, cancer patient. His travels, beyond excursions to the lavatory, to his bedroom, bathroom, sitting room, balcony, have ended.

Enter the lift. Your copy of this history will be all the information required for the bellboy, still enjoying his cigar, to launch you to this excellent bistro, by pressing with one of his yellowed fingers the button numbered ‘4’.

I cannot say exactly why the restaurant was misleadingly named Piccolo Mondo, for its Italian wording would indicate a place celebrated for pasta or pizzas which it is not especially, though both are available. It was surely named thus to add to the international flavour of the place; it might just as easily have been called La Petite Monde or even Die Kleine Welt or The Little World, but for some reason the Italian version was preferred. The first thing that you will notice about the restaurant, beyond its thirty round tables all with well-starched tablecloths, are the various ornaments that clutter the ledge which runs around three-quarters of this large room. On this ledge are nearly three hundred items of international treasure, among them: a pink rubber Michelangelo’s
David
; a three dimensional terracotta version of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
; a plastic gondola with flashing lights; a small, framed photograph of
the Mona Lisa that winks at you as you move across the room; a bottle of shampoo shaped as the Virgin whose head, when turned anti-clockwise, opens the bottle; a brass Eiffel Tower that plays the Marseillaise when turned upside down; a candle in the shape of the Arc de Triomph; a clockwork tin Napoleon; a pair of dolls of Prince Charles and Princess Diana; a miniature Brandenburg Gate; various small busts of Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh … and so on and so forth. There are numerous buildings beneath transparent plastic domes which if shaken produce a ‘snow storm’ effect, representing the Tower of London, Mount Rushmore, Saint Peter’s in Rome; there is even a small plastic replica of Lubatkin’s Tower in this style (but more of that later).

The wall behind the bar is papered with banknotes from some seventy different countries, illustrations of so many men and women famous in so many different lands; a version of the History of the World could be made simply by listing their various contributions. The remaining wall space is decorated with large photographs of buildings from our city only, by far the largest representing the World Hotel (a black and white photograph taken before the arrival of the McDonald’s establishment).

Allow yourself to be drawn towards the table indicated by your waiter and once seated take your time to peruse the menu, the special menu provided for those bearing the volume
Alva and Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City,
written in English; a kind of English at least, in which ‘cruditées’, for example, are translated as ‘assorted pigments’. But I am sure the intelligent among you will soon, and with some delight, be capable of extracting the true identities of all the extraordinary offerings. There is no 10 per cent reduction here, but the folded laminated cardboard in front of you should more than compensate for that fact. The special menu is divided into two. The left-hand section is titled ‘Piccolo Mondo according to Irva Dapps’; the right-hand section ‘Grando Mondo according to Alva Dapps’. The special menu for those holders of
Alva and Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City
is given over to the particular culinary preferences of the two subjects of this history. From this menu you will learn that Irva preferred to eat only food traditional to our
country and that Alva preferred to eat only food traditional to other countries. While in the entrées section, for example, you will observe that Irva is more than happy to eat beetroot and onion soup topped with sour cream (it is in fact the only option), Alva’s more eclectic desires range from calamares, to salade niçoise, to spring rolls, to prawn cocktail, to roasted goat’s cheese, to various antipasti, to chicken samosas, to fried curried chicken livers, to moules marinière. I would suggest varying your choice to include at least one item from each side of the menu so that you are, during those brief moments when the food enters your mouth, tasting what it was that Alva and Irva loved to taste, for then as you masticate you will have a more total experience of the Dapps twins. If you are having problems choosing, I would like to alert you to a few recommendations to be found on the menu’s reverse and made by foreign visitors who have been pleased to add their suggestions. ‘The salads at the Piccolo Mondo are far larger than the salads in any other of the local restaurants.’—Sukrita Paul Kumar, Delhi, India. ‘The pigs’ trotters with mushed corn are so good that you’ll return to the city just to taste them again.’—Asdis Thorhalsdottir, Reykjavik, Iceland. ‘The bread and butter pudding is better than any I’ve tasted at home, better even than my mum’s, but don’t tell her that.’—Isadora Carter, London, Great Britain. Choose. Eat. And, as the Americans say, enjoy. Do not be put off by the mobile phone disturbances of the nouveau riche males entertaining their youthful, beautiful, but predominantly silent, female companions. These men make up most of the custom here.

After you have eaten, I advise the participation of some coffee with which both Alva and Irva, reuniting for once, would have completed their meal. Or perhaps even a glass of our local Lubatkin brandy.

Arsenal Street

A
BOVE AND BELOW.
High and low. Everywhere and nowhere. Upside and downside. Forwards and backwards. Upwards and downwards. Outwards and inwards. Outside and inside. Over and under. Alva and Irva.

A
T FIRST WE
didn’t really notice the great changes in her. She had a cold certainly but there was every expectation that she’d be better soon. When she didn’t speak we assumed she would in time, that she’d grow tired of not speaking; that her speaking would come back. And after a week of her not speaking we began to get used to it, we grew accustomed to this Irva of ours who didn’t speak. It became perfectly ordinary for us to have this silent Irva in our home. We didn’t feel we were neglecting her, just that she had chosen to be silent. It was her decision. In time she’d grow bored of it. We’d wait her out. And did they ever notice, I wonder, that I spoke now far more than usual, that I was speaking, so it seemed to me, for two?

And with the silence there was the other thing, which took us a while to understand. My sister had decided never to leave home again. Anything beyond home was out of reach for her, Mexico or Pilias Street, Tasmania or Cathedral Square, Manila or the Public Library were all the same distance away; an insuperable distance that she could not dare to travel. She was happy where she was, why move? In the beginning, Mother and Grandfather even encouraged her to stay at home, she had a cold after all. Better to sit quietly at
home. Better to stay quiet and sit still, and wait peacefully for recovery. So for a while no one commented that she hadn’t been outside. And nobody commented that I was out more than usual, that I was busy rushing about the city, that I couldn’t keep still.

I
HAD MARKED
myself with my school compass, I had deliberately separated myself from Irva. And Irva almost immediately had started sneezing. Then she got the shivers. Then she stayed at home. Then she stopped speaking.

They gave her some pills, she never went anywhere around the house without her bottle of pills, their rattling always betraying a change in her location, but mostly she would be found scrunched up on her bed facing the wall. Her capacity for sleep in those days was enormous.