PETER MELARAGNO: BETWEEN THE WINDS HOME CORTES CUBA VENICE ROME THE NOVEL MISC DV@PMELARAGNO.COM |
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The week of Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, 2008.
A café on the zócalo where Ethan is working on a novel. His waitress interrupts to claim she was with her grandfather in 1996 as they bid Ethan farewell in the old bus station. Her name is Dina and he remembers her. As she must continue working, she asks if he might visit her the following day in nearby Mitla, where there is something he should see. He agrees, even as he knows that young Dina had disappeared in 1996, along with her grandfather, as they crossed illegally into Texas.
But he finds Dina nowhere in Mitla; he will never see her again. What he does learn is that her real name was Ariádina. Thus begins a synaptic pas de deux through Ethan’s memory palace: Ariádina from Oaxaca and Ariadne from Prague, an art student he’d fallen in love with in Paris.
It was 1968, August, and the Prague Spring of that year was about to be crushed by invading Soviet tanks. Fearing for her father back in Prague, Ariadne was going home. After good-byes high in the belfry of Venice’s iconic Campanile di San Marco, she descends the tower alone. He would never see her again.
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Originally fromProvidence, RI, Peter Melaragno is a documentary producer/director currently living in Florida. Between the Winds is his first novel, its principal locales being Oaxaca, Los Angeles, Paris, Venice, and Providence.