Elena: Yes, were you looking for something?
Alejandro: A sense of the miraculous in everyday life.
The Mask of Zorro, 1998
Alejandro and Elena—A Zorro Kind of Love
I woke in the middle of the night again, having dozed off on the recliner couch as I had done so often. It was 3 a.m. and I was not a bit sleepy. I had crashed early, gotten my six hours of sleep, and now the middle of the night yawned before me. What to do? Well, of course the answer was watch television.
I checked out the listing of movies running, and there it was—“The Mask of Zorro,” starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I would watch again, of course. I loved this movie, it had it all - - good versus evil, a hot leading man, a tempestuous dark-haired beauty, and that Welsh love of mine, Anthony Hopkins. I remembered how much my husband also loved this flick. Perhaps in our later years, when it was released, he yearned to be the fiery Alejandro, shaped by La Vega into the new iteration of Zorro. He maybe wanted to “save the night, save the day” and be the quintessential hero to the village folk. And me? I just wanted to have that breath-taking beauty of Ms. Zeta-Jones. I wanted to look like Snow White come to life, fight like a tiger with my epeé as she did, and end up with Zorro and live happily ever after.
In a way, I had. I had a dark-haired, hot leading man. Everyone adored him, as was evidenced by the turnout as his memorial service. He was friend to man and woman alike. He was a flirt. He was smart. He was kind and sensitive. He was, in his way, the “Alejandro” played by Antonio, but the one who lived on our street, somewhere in the great state of Georgia.
Did I even remotely approach the beauty of Elena that I yearned for? Heavens, no! There were days that I jokingly said that I prayed to just look humanoid. But it did not matter that I had reddish brown hair and average looks. For when we were young and my husband looked at me with love, in my mind I surpassed Elena and her beauty. He beheld what was good and kind in me and cherished it. But that was then.
I was reminded of this burning love of ours at the poignant moment when Elena’s dying father takes her hand and places it in Alejandro’s/Zorro’s. One can almost see the spark that is lighting a love of moviedom that will live forever. The kind of love that consumes one, that obsesses one, but in a good way. We had always talked about that first stage of love, and why it could not endure forever. We would laugh as we quickly came to our conclusion—a body could not sustain itself through 50 years or so of such a burning love. The mooning, yearning, passion, would wear out one's ticker in 10 years or so, because of its intensity.
So, we consoled ourselves with the fact that love burns deeply at first, but settles down to the everyday kind of love. Is it less? No. Are we a failure for not doing all the things to sustain this burning love? No. You just turn into people with a mortgage, a family, elders to take care of and untold other minutiae that you have to handle. We thought that perhaps we were offering ourselves a way out with this pat answer as to why this “Hollywood” version of love does not persist. But, we were realists. We knew we were not Antonio and Catherine, not their alter egos, Alejandro and Elena.
But it is nice to wake up one night, change the channel, and see this burning love again in the movies. It serves to remind you of what you once had, for one glorious moment you were consumed with such a love. You gave yourself to it with wild abandon, and like the Phoenix, rose from the ashes of that wild love to forge a relationship that would persist through your life. And, as I have now found out, persist even after death.