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Saturday, August 06, 2005
Inscrutable love
By Henrylito D. Tacio
THE tender love story of Romeo and Juliet lingers to titillate the imagination of many. The undying and unselfish love of Cyrano de Bergerac for Roxanne - immortalized in the play by Edmond Rostand- makes people, particularly the ladies, misty-eyed.
Jane Eyre finding fulfillment at last in the love of Rochester sends tingles up and down my sister's spines. The age gap between the main characters of the poignant novel, The Rotary, does not bother women at all. Instead, people glory in the idea that "love conquers all."
Skeptics, however, dismiss that these great romances are mere products of the imagination and that they only nurture our escapist tendencies at best.
Romantic tales they may be. But there could be some factual bases or real-life models behind each great love story. For real-life romances can be more intriguing and complex than the fictional yarns dished out by William Shakespeare and his ilk and wrought with more twists and tangles and sub-plots than are possible in any Mills and Boon novel.
Some men are at a loss on how to approach a female stranger who caught their fancy. Abraham Lincon, the 16th president of the United States, had no such problem although he was rather homely-looking.
Abe (Lincoln's nickname) was then a budding lawyer and was often invited to grace social events. In one such occasion, a young debutante caught his eyes. She was surrounded by male admirers and so Abe thought of a way to make her notice him. When the orchestra was playing a dance music, Abe approached the girl and seriously said, "Miss Todd, I want to dance with you in the worst way possible." And that was exactly how he danced with her!
Ms. Todd was greatly amused by the antics of Abe and barriers to a closer relationship were torn down. That young debutante later became Mrs. Lincoln. Had Abe danced with her in some other way, one doubts if he could have made her notice him.
Theirs is a love story that reads like a movie script. Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner were everybody's ideal young couple in love when they married in 1957. And in the tradition of boy-meets-girl, boy must lose girl, so they were divorced in 1962. Ten years passed. They each married someone else and each had a child. These marriages broke up. But Hollywood was not to be denied another twist. Bob and Natalie rekindled their love and remarried in 1972 - until a tragedy took the life of Natalie.
All is fair in love - and war. But that's not always the case. When Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman left her husband for 12 years for Italian director Roberto Rossellini, America was shocked. Cries of outrage were heard from Hollywood to Washington, D.C., where Senator Edwin C. Johnson delivered an impassioned speech over an hour long from the Senate floor. He called the actress "a free-love cultist," "a powerful influence of evil," and "Hollywood's apostle of degradation." The birth of their son, Robertino, in February, 1950, brought new outcries of damnation.
Anyone who is in love, they claim, always has a rendezvous with death. Every ticking of the clock is a call of death. When lovers walk arm-in-arm in lovey-dovey fashion, they plunge themselves into the burning oil of death.
This incredible story of love and self-sacrifice happened in the snowy Austrian Alps while Andre Laurent and his beautiful wife, Catherine, were on their honeymoon. Both were keen rock climbers. That's how they met, and that's why they went to Austria on their honeymoon. A friend of Andre's recalls, "Catherine waited at the bottom of the cliff while her husband made the first ascent. I believe he was about 60 feet above the ground when he slipped and fell."
Catherine had no time to act - just react. She did what her heart told her she must do: she threw herself under the body of her husband.
"She broke her husband's fall and saved his life," Andre's friend comments. "But she did it at the cost of her own."
Here's a love story that reached beyond death. In the 1780s, the life of a young man named Pierre Fragonard was going well. He had a thriving taxidermy and veterinary practice. But the thing most near and dear to him was his lovely fiancée, Elise.
Shortly before their wedding day, however, the girl died suddenly. Mad with despair, Pierre refused to surrender her body to the authorities and instead locked all the doors to his shop, threatening to kill anyone who entered.
For the next few days, Pierre worked frantically around the clock embalming and preserving the body of his beloved while at the same time he embalmed a horse. Today, the incredible "Horseman of Death" - as it is now called- can be viewed at the French Palace of Discovery.
But while his statue of the lady and the horse lives on, Pierre has been lost in the pages of history.
Yes, even in love, truth is stranger than fiction.
(August 6, 2005 issue)
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