Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [44]
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,