Death Constant Beyond Love

In “Death Constant Beyond Love,” García Márquez’s signature magic realism returns to embody Senator Onésimo Sanchez’s experiences between life and death. Arriving in Rosal del Virrey, Sanchez’s election cohort brings illusions of crowds, wildlife, cool, and water to win over constituents. Like the paper butterfly that sticks to the wall, and like the money that floats in the air inside Sanchez’s room, these illusions seem to be at once artificial and real.

Sanchez, who is at the story’s beginning and ending sentences aware that he has “six months and eleven days to go before his death,” is disillusioned. He sees a sense of repetition in his life. His speech “had been memorized and ground out so many times” (Paragraph 4) and the cardboard “fictional world” (Paragraph 7) is so worn from the “terrible climate” that it, like the rose he works to keep alive, has faded (Paragraph 8). The important people of Rosal del Virrey also seem to be flat, the same as all the people everywhere. While he contemplates this sameness, death seems to have some “control” and “complicity” in his decisions and his thinking (Paragraph 18).

Although Laura is special, and perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world, Sanchez chooses to keep her padlocked and alone, just like him. Just as the rhythms of the campaign have imprisoned him, and just as death seems to make his decisions, he too wants her to be trapped. While Laura tells him that he’s “worse than the rest because you are different” (Paragraph 32), Sanchez still muses “that whether it’s you or someone else, it won’t be long before you’ll be dead and it won’t be long before your name won’t even be left” (Paragraph 31). Whatever illusions surround Sanchez, death and loneliness dominate the final paragraph, just as they dominate the first paragraph. Death, then, is the shaping influence of the story, both foreshadowing all events and concluding them.