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).