But Alfredo Salazar was a coward or was just egoistic.

He did not do what Esperanza

told him to do. He ignored Esperanza’s advice. This reflects the society Alfredo
Salazar lives in. In a male dominated society, man is the founding principle
and the woman is the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such
distinction is tightly held in place, the whole system can function
effectively.

According to post-structuralists, in deconstruction, oppositions are interrelated.

Oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown partly to
undermine each other in the process of textual meaning. Woman is the opposite,
the “other” of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly
negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally, man is
what he is only by ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite; defining
himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up
and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to asset his unique,
autonomous existence.

Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his

knowledge, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he
is not, a constant reminder of what he is. Not only is a man’s being
parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding
and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is
because she may not be quite so other after all.

He cares so much about his reputation; it was as if he would be a lesser man if he

turned his back on their wedding.

“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.”

Dead stars refer to Alfredo Salazar’s loss– lost youth and lost love. He missed his
youth and Julia Salas. “I miss you.” What other message is there? Nothing else,
except exactly just that, “I miss you”, and everything else is pulled along into it, like a
chain reaction. Unlike “I love you” and the lies that go along with it, “I miss you” is
honest and sincere, you only say it when you mean it, and you don’t have to mean it
in a big way to really mean it. Unlike “I want you” and its expectations, “I miss you”
offers all it has, and waits for nothing in return. Unlike “I need you” and its desperate
whines, “I miss you” stands on its own, a whole entity in just three words, devoid of
arms that cling to you for life.

I miss you” means everything and nothing, it is unflinching and honest. It is upbeat
and simple, with wisps of longing and clouds of hope. You miss people you used to
love, people you used to want, people you used to need. But most of the time the
missing is all that’s left, and that’s OK, there’s nothing else you’d change. The missing
implies a past that remains in its rightful place. Or it implies the reality and
possibilities of the present. It is hope and love and lust and peace all at the same time.
Some people say that when they met that person, it was akin to “coming home”. And
missing is this manifestation of home-sickness, the way people return to their
homelands to die, the way all the comfort the world has to offer is nothing compared
to the feeling of being in someone’s arms.

And that’s why he misses his youth and Julia you, because they’re not there anymore,
and because every time he think about his youth and Julia, that’s all that he thinks.
He misses her, and the world turns for both of them, and he can’t wait until she
comes home.
“Love–he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere
fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a
glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a
combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love
was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as
he divined it might be.”  Alfredo Salazar in Dead Stars.

A Night in the Hills by Paz Marquez-Benitez, for me, is less poignant than Dad Stars.
It talks about Gerardo Luna’s dream of going to the forest and I find it somehow
philosophical.

“No, not Peregrina for him! Not even for his own sake, much less Sotera’s.”

It was stated how he despised the thought of marrying Peregrina but at the end of the
story, we see that he would ask her to marry him.

We see how women are just men’s second choice…or last choice when
their dreams go awry.