Hermosa Beach

pmelaragno 1 story

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Summary

Week of Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, 2008. A café on the zócalo. Ethan is working on a novel, his first. His waitress claims she was with her grandfather in 1996 bidding Ethan farewell in Oaxaca's old bus station. Her name is Dina and he remembers her. He remembers also how her grandfather had begged him to take her illegally across the border into Texas; something he could not possibly do. But today, as she must continue working, she asks him to visit her the following day in nearby Mitla. There is something he should see there, she says, and he surely has to agree; as in fact he had discovered years ago, that young Dina and her grandfather had both died attempting to cross into Texas. Dina is nowhere in Mitla and he will never see her again. But he does learn that her real name is Ariádina. Thus begins a synaptic pas de deux through Ethan's memory palace: Ariádina from Oaxaca and Ariadne from Prague, an art student he fell in love with in Paris. It was 1968, August, and the Prague Spring of that year was about to be crushed by Soviet tanks. It was exactly as her father had predicted, and the reason he forced her to seek exile in Paris. Now, with no communication with her father in Prague, she was determined to go home. After bidding Ethan farewell high in the belfry of Venice's Campanile di San Marco, she descended alone. He would never see her again.