Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [48]
Sometimes, I sat next to Mother in her post office counter on the wooden stool that Mother took there for its daily outing, licking the stamps for her, wearing aggressive looks for the benefit of the scaly Marta Stroud. Or I’d become a little lost wandering the city. I allowed myself to be upset by the growling of dogs chained up in yards, growls which instructed me to keep to my own part of the city. But slowly, slowly the city gave up its secrets to me, introducing me to tiny back streets which I had never known existed, revealing buildings which I must have passed countless times before but somehow had never seen. Entralla would sometimes sigh as I walked down a street and in its sigh it would introduce me to a balcony three stories up, brimming with extraordinary plants and pots or a small wooden house tucked between two brick ones or even a strangely shy mansion boasting two timid but muscly caryatids. When Entralla chooses to show itself, you must stop whatever it is that you are doing and allow the city to guide your eyes where it pleases, you must never continue on your journey saying to yourself that you will come back later, for when you do come back Entralla is sure to have withdrawn what it was earlier willing to reveal.
In those new days, I liked to sit on benches in Ventis Park and wearing skimpy outfits let the sun warm into every part of me, with human life all around, swirling about, being sometimes busy, sometimes not busy at all, just lolling about, loving to loll. But eventually, I’d wander the too familiar route back home again, considering that in the city I’m a timid thing, perhaps a few centimetres shorter than my real self, but at home, well, I’m at home. There, even with Irva and her inconsolable gloom, or perhaps because of it, I achieved full Alva height (186 centimetres).
And sometimes, when I was in Ventis Park, I might visit the zoo.
OPTIONAL EXCURSION 2. ENTRALLA ZOO. A third of our city’s largest park, Ventis Park (trolley buses 7, 9, 14), is taken up with the City Zoo. If we lack human visitors from foreign countries we can at least boast animals from numerous foreign locations, but what sad faces they have, trudging dolefully around their limited homes. They can push their heads against bars and look across the way to see other animals, staring back at them from their cages, mirroring their own unhappy looks. Outside each of their cages are plastic signs with maps of the world on them, with a little patch of the world shaded red to indicate the region where each species originated. Elephants from Burma. Rhinos from Sumatra. Pigmy hippopotami from Liberia and Sierra Leone. Whale-headed storks from the swamps of East Africa. Giant anteaters from South Africa. Hamadryas baboons from Southern Arabia. Okapi from the Congo. Giraffes from the Sahara. Orangutans from Southeast Asia. A solitary, retiring aye-aye from Madagascar. They are all here, all these and many more.
What noises they should make: sounds from all the corners of the world. But these animals, for the most part, have grown silent, have forgotten themselves, with their