FEATURE | A Love Story that Never Was: A Brief Comparison between Eraserheads’ Ang Huling El Bimbo and Paz Marquez Benitez’s Dead Stars
If there is one thing that can swallow the entire universe whole, it’s love.
To write without conviction is to write senseless—not unattached, but senseless. It means that a piece of writing has never had the chance to stand for something. Good writing is the kind that hurts. Love is many things, but most of all, it is pain.
Pain may feel senseless, almost without worth, but it pulls something under our skin; as if the stardust within us recalls the wake of daylight, pushing a nerve that pumps out blood as if to tilt a line of synchronization in our other body parts: To love is to live.
Passion is vicious; however, it will set everything ablaze, filling every rough edge with all-encompassing fire and fueling this idea of ruin, ruin, ruin. A love that is bountiful and reciprocated is nothing short of magical, but a passionate love story that never was is enough to shake the stars awake.
Love can be many things, but as Shakespearean literature told us, a good tragic love story can make or break the world.
Storytelling Parallels
Dead Stars is the first Filipino short story written in English—a historical sign of Filipino education that was altered to house a foreign mindset. In 1925, the modern idea of feminism had not even arrived at the docks of our country, and yet Paz Marquez-Benitez illustrated two women that were products of their time, using her words to weave excitement, fear, and joy within the ordinary context.
Julia Salas, a girl from the province whose skin was osculated by the sun—passionate and lively—and Esperanza, the devoted and loving fiancee, an epitome of grace and fluidity, her skin akin to white silks. The nuance in their skin color and personalities played an important role in how the story ended. Alfredo Salazar was torn between two women, an early sign of a fickle heart still clearly present and seen in men today. In 1925, a man riddled with two women was not only distasteful but morally incorrect.
On the other hand, Ang Huling El Bimbo is a song from the album Cutterpillow by Eraserheads that has a record of 400,000 units, the biggest for a Filipino band. Recently, it even had a musical tailored for it. Everyone, even the children who were born decades after the song was made, knew it by heart.
It is the narration of childhood love ending on a tragic note. The girl, who was never named yet, was compared to Paraluman, a Filipina actress in the 1940s. The song is considered one of the most beautiful songs ever written in Original Philippine Music.
These two creations signal and narrate plots within the context in which they were made, but the shared thing that pins them to immortalization—to the perennial place of art—is love, specifically a love wasted on their youth.
Comparative Coming of Age
When a person allows herself to be loved, it means that she also allows herself to be defined by the person that loves her, and even when she’s gone, this love that shapes her identity holds out—so we may never know her, but we will know her by memory, and what’s more effective to mythologize a person than through nostalgia? What’s more painful to think about than what could have been?
A written love story that never quite burns is the love that hurts the most.
While Dead Stars and Ang Huling El Bimbo reel in the grief of lost love, the difference in their textual narration shows a difference. The song moves with brevity and conciseness, and the short story is densely packed with words.
Ang Huling El Bimbo is all about reminiscing about a memory of a girl that taught him how to dance, the girl whom he was excited to see after school, the girl whom he fell in love with for the first time, and the girl with whom he lost his light and whom he would never dance again.
Dead Stars is not only filled with the disillusionment of love but also with political undertones. Alfredo, a Filipino lawyer with Spanish ancestry, is torn between the morena Julia Salas, whose name suggests a home, and Esperanza, a mestiza and literal-minded person who pertains to the American mindset of superiority.
These two stories start by narrating the progression of their relationship, the longing, and the reminiscing of youth.
The progression in the relationship in Ang Huling El Bimbo starts here:
Pagkagaling sa 'skuwela ay
Dederetso na sa inyo
At buong maghapon ay
Tinuturuan mo ako
[...]Lumiliwanag ang buhay
Habang tayo'y magkaakbay
At dahan-dahang dumudulas
Ang kamay ko sa makinis mong braso
In Dead Stars:
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair, and the hours--warm, quiet March hours sped to the house on the hill. [...] Then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She by. He enjoyed talking with her, and it was evident that she liked his company; yet the feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course.
[...] “Up here I find--something–”
[...]. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman- like, asking, “Amusement?”
“No; youth--its spirit–”
“Are you so old?”
“And heart's desire.”
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
“Down there,” he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, “the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery.”
“Down there” beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.
“Mystery–” she answered lightly, “that is so brief–”
“Not in some,” quickly. “Not in you.”
“You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery.”
“I could study you all my life and still not find it.”
“So long?”
“I should like to.”
Then the longing:
Sana noon pa man ay
Sinabi na sa iyo
Kahit hindi na uso ay
Ito lang ang alam ko
Dead Stars:
Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life.
Then, of course, the grief that has marked them their entire lives:
Lumipas ang maraming taon
'Di na tayo nagkita
Balita ko'y may anak ka na
Ngunit walang asawa
Tagahugas ka raw
Ng pinggan sa may Ermita
At isang gabi'y nasagasaan
Sa isang madilim na eskinita, ha
Lahat ng pangarap ko'y
Bigla lang natunaw
Sa panaginip na lang pala kita maisasayaw
In Dead Stars:
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream? So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as a result of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.
Stories of Fiction, Depictions of Fate
The use of nostalgia in fiction is to demonstrate a home, a faraway dream that is not bounded by distance but by time and circumstance. Nostalgia is the quality of homesickness; the only way to get away is to peer over the past, scraping for any sign of a signal to relieve it, over and over—until the person in memory is no longer a person but a recollection of moments.
Dead Stars and Ang Huling El Bimbo bring out a certain hunger that will never be satisfied. There is so much we don’t know, and there is only enough for us to know. While the characters and personas in the stories wander in the cycle of grief, we, the audience, become bound to them too. We use these two art forms to recreate, redesign, reprogram, and mold them into something new.
Dead Stars and Ang Huling El Bimbo are immortalized because both have stood up for something. It enabled the audience to push the boundaries of the arts and use situations that we all know to inculcate and embed a point.
A love story that never was about reaching the end of the line, ang dulo ng hangganan. But of course, as people, we will be like the characters in the story, reliving the past. The person may be gone, but the love that holds her remains, and it will stay like that for eons to come. Good writing is always the writing that hurts.
Article: Cyril de la Cruz
Graphics: Patricia Mhae P. Santos
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