A tale of eternal love

In some ancient time, at the edge of a jutting cliff, two lovers tied their long black hair together into a single knot, and acting as if they were entirely alone, they looked deeply into each other’s eyes and kissed for the final time. Then they leaped over the long, deep cliff into the roaring waters below.

In a more recent time, one man molded their story and memory to a form that sprung from his heart, of a creative symbol of deep eternal love. Very recently, two lovers stared into each others eyes to profess their love and union…and brought forth the symbol once more. This is an article of the many nuances of love and the energy that brings it constantly forward.

In the island of Guam, Chamorros have looked to the jutting peak above Tumon Bay with reverence. The high point on the cliff was known as Two Lovers Point (Puntan Dos Amantes). Research on the legend tells “of a young maiden, so alluring was her beauty that no man could behold her without feeling his heart moved. Her Spanish father and native mother had brilliant plans for her future. So when a mighty and rich but old and cruel sea captain became stricken with her charms and asked for her hand in marriage, they readily consented to the suitor’s request. The maiden was distraught. Her heart was for her lover — a poor, humble, native boy whose adoration for her was ever true. She told her parents of her love for the boy and pleaded with them to be allowed to marry the love of her heart. When they refused to heed her wish, she went to the boy at their sweet meeting place. The lovers wept and finally, in desperation, ran away together. While the wedding party waited, they made their way to a point of land that reaches out into Tumon Bay. The furious rejected suitor sent out soldiers in pursuit. When the boy and the girl heard their approaching footsteps, they tied their hair together, clenched each other in their arms, and, with a promise of eternal devotion upon their lips, threw themselves over the sheer cliff into the cruel deep waters below.”

In 1984, Filipino sculptor Eduardo Castrillo was invited by the government of Guam and the Calvo family to make a monument to celebrate this legend. This was to be the first public art piece in the country. And there arose two brass forms in a spiral entwine.

“I was so fortunate to have been given a chance to do this, unfortunately, the base of where my sculpture was attached was made by other foreign contractors, and did not withstand the strong winds and typhoons of Guam, causing the monument to fall,” says Castrillo. When 175-mph winds raged across Guam in 2002, typhoon Pongsona twisted and knocked the Two Lovers statue to the ground. Believing the damage was too great to repair the brass lovers, it was sold as scrap, leaving Two Lovers Point empty of its namesake.

Eleven years later, when David Barnhouse courted Nancy Mayer in the spring of 2013, he took her to Two Lovers Point. Sitting on the edge of the cliff, David told Nancy the legend and the tragedy of the broken brass lovers, adding that locals believed the statue still lay, bent and broken, in a scrapyard. If the statue still exists, David vowed that day, “I will buy the Two Lovers, have them repaired and bring the statue back here as a symbol of our love.”

When Nancy moved to Guam and married David later that year, she began searching for the statue like a mother looking for her lost child. Two years passed. Then one day, when she had almost given up hope, Nancy met Moses  Chong, owner of Green Guam Corp.

“Have you ever heard about the Two Lovers statue and what became of it?” she asked him.

“Yes,” Moses said, “I own the statue. It is in my scrapyard. I bought it for scrap, but I never had the heart to melt it down.”

Nancy immediately called David jokingly saying “Guess what you’re buying today?” That day, Island CERTS Corp. (ICC) bought the statue. With the help of the staff of David’s son’s company, Guam Crane Services, Moses strapped the lovers on his boom truck and transported it to a shop in Harmon, where volunteer workers spent weeks trying to unbend the legs and release the brass from the rusted and twisted foundation steel. They hired welding fabricator Armando Nazareta, who spent the next five months tediously separating the rusted pipe from the brass, unbending and reshaping the sculpture and shining it to its original hew.

On her Facebook page, Nancy wrote, “Today has been one of those surreal days: we found the mangled Two Lovers statue at the start of the year. It took determination and skill and love and dedication of our entire ICC staff and the coordination of the Calvo family to pull this off. At first, I thought the statue was thrown away as trash, but the truth was that the Calvo family flew a sculptor all the way from Italy to look at the statue and see if it could be restored. The sculptor said that it was too far gone, and he was close to being right. Mando Nazareta has spent three months full-time working on this statue. The interior foundation metal was completely rotten. Just to pull that away from the brass, refabricate pieces and the foundation took amazing artisan skill. The sweetest part of his story? Mando actually covered the statue at night with a blanket. He said the statue was sacred to the people of Guam, and he has treated it with the respect it is due. And me? I am absolutely exhausted. I didn’t do any of the physical work today, just took photos. But the emotional pathos of this project, and watching it come to its fruition after all this time and energy…The purpose of this is the return of this beautiful piece of art to its rightful place. This is the second truly good thing I have ever done in my life, so I feel good about.”

On Oct. 15, the second wedding anniversary of the two modern lovers, David and Nancy Barnhouse, the staff of ICC loaded the statue onto the boom truck and returned the monument to Two Lovers Point with a re-dedication ceremony, and a priest to bless the monument (upon the Calvo family’s request). The priest said, “May the Two Lovers statue be a reminder that eternal love is possible when two mortals fall in love.”

“I am extremely elated that sensitive individuals have volunteered to revive the monument, for it is a sterling symbol of the strength and loving character of the Guamanian people.” Truly, there are still altruistic people who believe in preservation, in the values that art can impart and impact, in restoring the beauty of what was and can still be,” sculptor Castrillo concluded.

And for all who were involved in this, and those who see the monument now know that love lives forever.