Melania is a cansin human and former assassin of the Organization of Shadows. The archive links her to Elhenor Atias, who resurrected her and with whom she had her daughter Moran Atias. The chronicle remembers her as reformed in her last steps.
The Italian layer
In the Invisible Cities corpus a Melania appears tied to the Milanese arc: “the assassin, the woman born of the dead,” who slits the throat of Beatrice d’Este in the birth of her son Massimiliano. The dead woman, questioned, names her killer: “Melania.”
She is deliberately connected with the invisible city Melania, Calvino’s “city of the dead”: a square where fixed theatrical roles (the braggart soldier, the courtesan, the miserly father, the lovesick daughter) are embodied by demons who empty the bodies they occupy. Malcantete, queen of the succubi and intimate enemy of Graz, directs them.
Open questions
- Whether the cansin Melania and the Milanese Melania are the same woman is left open.