Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [1]
DUE TO the absolute harmony of its location, crowned with its magnificent ruined fortress, its marvellous churches and excellently constructed secular buildings, Entralla offers priceless treasures for any sensitive visitor. Location, architecture and time, as if three great friends, have conspired to create a masterpiece. If the city, the opposite of nature, is the pinnacle of man’s achievements, then this city, as I am sure you will agree once you have had a chance to peruse it, may represent a supreme example from which many another city’s beauty may be judged.
Though it must be admitted: Entralla, through some spite of fate, is not a famous city. Yet it is ours and we are proud of it. Somehow you have come to us and you are welcome. Look about you, see churches, cunningly restored, of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and classical architecture; the clues to the twins’ lives lie all about the city, in the buildings, in the inhabitants. So see people now, our people, overfed and underfed, ripe and stale. See our city moving urgently and sedentarily about its business. Welcome and look about you please. Throughout Entralla there are various statues of people, busts or full length, in metal or in stone. Foreigners may look at these statues and wonder whom they represent, for all the proud faces will mean nothing to them. These sculptures are the famous people of Entralla. Their names are irrelevant to all the other peoples of the world, their times and deeds remain obscure, there are no books published to explain who they are and why they have been thought worthy of commemoration. They are not mentioned in the official guidebook to Entralla which, though available in one book store only, is published in five of the more popular languages of the world. But it is only thirty pages long. And it must seem to our few foreign visitors that our sculptures and monuments represent a little people of no worldly importance, as if our city were only a village and that we had chosen to immortalise local characters, such as typically can be found in a village—the priest, the mayor, the fat butcher, the idiot. But Entralla is a city and not a village.
As the world is daily shrunk by technology it has finally been decided that one history should be made available to a larger public. It has also been decided that I, August Hirkus, a slightly balding man in my fifties, neither thin nor fat, with little about me that might attract attention, a man whom people may even describe as possessing plain or bland features, that I should write the introduction and various other passages to this history since I knew many of the people concerned and since I went to live abroad some years ago, and returned with a knowledge of the English language—that language which is supposedly the most popular in the world—so that I might translate this history into this popular English language, thereby allowing as many people as possible to learn it.
Of course some foreigners will say, ‘You are wrong, there are at least two concrete incidents in your city that made international news.’ This knowledgeable foreigner would boast that the name of Entralla was certainly familiar to him and that he had even seen brief shots of the city on television. Such people are few, such people are precious. It is true that Entralla suffered from an earthquake some years ago and much damage was inflicted upon it. And for a while afterwards many foreign visitors came, but these visitors were businessmen and businesswomen who showed interest only in repairing our city, and in repairing it as they saw fit. They have all gone now.
The other concrete incident that occurred in Entralla which may