death constant beyond love essay

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The Complexity of Life and Death in "Death Constant Beyond Love"

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“Death Constant Beyond Love” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In the short story “Death Constant Beyond Love” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez there is a constant and strong conflict between nature versus artificial life in general. As the story develops this concept translates into truth versus falseness which can be better interpreted as corruption, “spiritual or moral impurity or deviation from the ideal.” This story revolves around the senator but allows us to also encounter different aspects of his society. The senator represents the government, and then we meet the people of the place and learn about the economic system.  All these things appear as corrupted in addition to love, family, and work. Gabriel Garcia Marquez criticizes that society overall is corrupted.

At the beginning of the story we learn that the village is “an 
illusory 
village 
which 
by 
night 
was 
the 
furtive 
wharf 
for
smugglers’ ships, 
and
on 
the
 other 
hand, in
 broad 
daylight 
looked
 like 
the 
most 
useless
 inlet
 on
 the 
desert.” The setting of the story is set up as a place of deception. By night there is smuggling and day it looks “useless,” in other words the corruption happens in the night while daylight becomes the cover up to the corruption. The fact that the village defined as deceiving it foreshadows everything and everyone in this village will have two sides one of which is corruption.

Marquez continues to state “Then 
came
 the 
trucks 
with 
the 
rented 
Indians 
who 
were
 carried 
into 
the 
towns 
in
 order
to
 enlarge 
the 
crowds
 at 
public 
ceremonies.” This represents the government aspect of society whose corruption is emphasized by “rented Indians.” Like previously mentioned the senator is the representation of the government and the fact that Indians are used to enhance an illusion of a large “crowd” makes the senator as well as the government corrupted and deceiving.

Later in the story we meet Nelson Farina and we learn that “Ever 
since 
he 
had 
met 
Senator
 Onesimo 
Sanchez
 during
his 
first
 electoral 
campaign,
 Nelson 
Farina
 had
 begged 
for 
his 
help 
in
 getting
 a 
false 
identity 
card 
which 
would
 place
him
 beyond 
the
 reach
 of
 the
 law.” In this case, Nelson is the representation of the people and the fact that he wants a “false identity card” shows his desire to deceive the law. However, Nelson Farina represent more than just the people but also family. Nelson uses his daughter, Laura Farina, as means to an end. This becomes a corruption of the concept of family. Additionally this can also be seen as a deception of love due to the fact that it is not an act of love from the fathers side.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez portrays Rosal del Virrey and everything that composes the society in it with a deceiving side. This deception can be identified in the falseness of the people and the village itself. Going back to the title “Death Constant Beyond Love” I believe Marquez is trying to say that society can deceive one another except death. The death is the one thing that remains constant; the Senator was suppose die in six months and eleven days and at the end he does.

2 Responses to “Death Constant Beyond Love” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I completely agree with you in regards to your thoughts of corruption and deceit within the story. Corruption within the government is nothing new but Marquez portrays this corruption with an ironical twist. Senator Sanchez is constantly deceiving the people he will represent by offering false hopes to the people in the poorer districts. He provides them with small gifts which are actually really meaningful and a necessity to the people of the town in return for their votes. Meanwhile, Senator Sanchez has never listened to the favor of Nelson Farina until he realizes he has a beautiful young daughter. Senator Sanchez obliges to Farina’s requests of having a new identity in exchange for his daughter, but when he realizes his daughter holds the key to his happiness, Farina actually held that key. After obtaining his happiness through Farina’s daughter, Sanchez dies miserable, alone and in shame because of his affair with Farina’s daughter. By Senator Sanchez using his power to get Farina his new identity through corruption, to obtain his own happiness through Farina’s daughter, he actually died more miserable and alone had he not excercised his powers and spent his last dying days with his family.

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• February 2013

Death Constant Beyond Love

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"Death Constant Beyond Love" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• Critical Articles
• "The Master of Short Forms" by Gene H. Bell-Villada Gene H. Bell-Villada offers a detailed analysis, examining both style and content, of García Márquez’s short fiction, from his early efforts in the volume Big Mama’s Funeral to the pieces collected in the Spanish edition of Innocent Eréndira. Although the examination does not delve into the short-fiction output of the author’s mature years (Pilgrim Stories, for instance), the reader comes out with a clear, sustained understanding of the strategies and structures employed. Ernest Hemingway is listed as a major influence, and Bell-Villada points to traces of Macondo and of certain motifs in One Hundred Years of Solitude in “Tuesday Siesta,” “One Day after Saturday,” and “Big Mama’s Funeral.” He also reflects on No One Writes to the Colonel, which belongs to the in-between genre of the novella. It remains to be discussed how the sparse, restrained strokes that García Márquez employs in his short fiction give place to the baroque, abundant vision of his larger narratives.

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• Last Updated: Oct 9, 2023 8:28 PM
• URL: https://libguides.southflorida.edu/literature/stories/death

Death Constant Beyond Love Essay Example

• Pages: 5 (1317 words)
• Published: August 7, 2016
• Type: Essay

In life, love and its many facets continue to change. The diversity, power, and confusion brought about by love are forever subjected to modification. In contrast, death, with all its mystery and strength, is one of the things that are unvarying in this world next to change. Simply put, as love is always changing, death is entirely constant. To better understand the many manifestations of love and death, it is worthwhile to analyze the story Death Constant Beyond Love by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The role and important implications of the said story are depicted in human's powerlessness when dealing with two of the most significant phases of life. The story stresses that in the face of love and death, a person either becomes alone and powerless or dependent. Death Constant Beyond Love:

An Overview The 1970 story written by Marquez aggressively discusses how corruption, politics, and poverty played a part in the life of the protagonist, Senator Onesimo Sanchez. He found the woman of his life six months and eleven days left before his death.

The Senator, typical of a corrupted official who receives bribes, fills up the emptiness in his life by loving a village girl named Laura Farina. However, the story ends with Onesimo passing away without being loved back by the love of his life. When faced by his imminent death, the Senator accepts it unmoved. However, when he meets and gets intrigued by the beauty of Laura, the compelling money-hungry Senator lightens up his boring life with the illusion of being loved by the woman. However, Sanchez's sensual and affectionate love for Laura is evidently just

fantasy because he remains to be alone and isolated until his death.

The pretentious love story between the Senator and Laura starts when he was surprisingly captured by the woman's beauty. This is unusual for a man such as Sanchez. Thus, he takes the instant attraction as a signal of a change in his boring life. Even when obviously told by Laura of her real intention when she said: “I'm not asking for much, Senator, just a donkey to haul water from Hanged Man's Well,” (467) Sanchez nonetheless continues to pursue the woman and becomes oblivious of his apparent erotic arousal.

Death Constant Beyond Love” is not only a vivid narrative of a man's greed and pretensions, but also an efficient representation of how a dying man made use of his artificial qualities to easily and unmindfully accept his death. To his advantage, he utilized his love and feeling of lust towards Laura which also made it easier for his weakened physical condition and state of mind to create a reality out of illusion. Sanchez lived with the idea that Laura did not actually love him or want to stay with him, causing his death to become less dreadful.

Unfortunately, by satisfying his only weakness, which is his love for Laura, it causes him to be more isolated as death starts to reclaim his life. Therefore, in the story, Sanchez was definitely no hero for the reason that he was unable to fill up the void both in his career and personal life. Rather, with too much anger bottled in his heart, he cried as he was losing his remaining life. Sanchez's

character screams of an intense power or influence, yet is silently fighting for loneliness or boredom (Marquez 471).

Death constant Beyond Love summary

Summing up, the story is not all about power and money but of a man, who when told of his death, created an illusion of love—a man who pretended hating someone by his side but sought for the love of his love when the time came that he closed his eyes. This made the action of Sanchez understandable and acceptable because his erotic obsession for Laura that eventually turned into true love. Thus, this might be the only reason that comforts him until death came to him. All of these were clearly shown in the story.

Marquez's writing style A closer style and textual analysis of the said Marquez's story disclosed his apparent utilization of the method of magical realism. This is noticeable in how Marquez hinted potential narratives beyond what he is actually narrating. This is aside from his evident ability to set a mood and make his readers understand deeply the characters of the Senator and Laura. This can be demonstrated in the following: ... jeeps of the retinue, the ministerial automobile, the color of strawberry soda, arrived.

Senator Onesimo Sanchez was placid and weatherless inside the air- conditioned car but as soon as he opened the door he was shaken by a gust of fire and his shirt of pure silk was soaked in a kind of light-colored soup and he felt many years older and more alone than ever. (464) Marquez's use of the word “weatherless” can simply suggests calmness but it is actually a feeling

of serenity that is nearly artificial. In fact, the said term can actually be only attributed to the air-conditioning system inside the Senator's car.

However, because of Marquez's magical realism style, the feeling of “weatherlessness,” also implies that the Senator, due to his illusions, as just unmoved by the displeasing and humid weather outside his vehicle. Moreover, the use of the phrases “gust of fire” can also be evaluated simply as warm air while the utilization of the word “fire” was to intentionally and assertively affect his readers' awareness. These terminologies are inevitable depictions of Sanchez's illusions that were expressed through the supernatural writing style of Marquez.

These words and the further use of other phrases such as “shirt of pure silk” and “light-colored soup” unconsciously revealed the apparent existence of the state of illusion which is apparent to both the writer and his character (464). Senator Sanchez and his boring routine Death Constant Beyond Love is a story with a lot of potential focal points. The story's main premise is that the constant quality and existence of death overcomes even the greatest degree of love.

This is simply because the latter is subjected to change and that it is death that made even one man's most illusionary affection to the girl of his life, being altered. It is also because of Sanchez's illusionary love that made him include the coming of death as part of his boring routine life. In fact, even in the face of death, the Senator pulled through with a reelection and carried on with his usual life. Sanchez was too controlled by his boring routine that even

the last point in his life such as his death actually did not alter his daily living and his intention to win the heart of Laura.

This is a manifestation of someone who is too bored that even death became a part of a routine. This is basically because the Senator has long been dead inside that made him feel that there is no need to change his life despite facing death. However, with Sanchez finally accepting the idea of death and just going for a last fling with Laura, the ending of the story, ultimately showed awakening on the part of the Senator with him realizing that concealed beneath his routine is his desire to have lived a meaningful life.

Recognizing the constant quality of his death and at the same time realizing that his love for Laura will be changed, Sanchez just decided to live his life to the fullest. Conclusion The said story served as a clear and moving explanation, not only to the fictional life of Senator Sanchez but to the whole humankind as well, that death will definitely and inevitably come its way. It also showed that beyond love, death is a human condition that needs to be expected as it is the one that will remain even love has ceased to exist.

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Death Constant Beyond Love

A short story

Senator Onésimo Sánchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life. He met her in Rosal del Virrey, an illusory village which by night was the furtive wharf for smugglers’ ships, and yet it seemed in broad daylight the most useless inlet on the desert, looking out on an arid and directionless sea, so far removed from everything that no one would have suspected that someone capable of changing the destiny of anyone lived there. Even its name was a kind of joke, because the only rose in that village was being worn by Senator Onásimo Sánchez himself on the same afternoon that he met Laura Farina.

It was an unavoidable stop in the electoral campaign he made every four years. The carnival wagons had arrived in the morning. Then came the trucks with the rented Indians who were carried into the towns in order to enlarge the crowds at public ceremonies. Shortly before eleven o’clock, along with the music and rockets and jeeps of the retinue, the ministerial automobile the color of strawberry soda arrived. Senator Onésimo Sánchez was placid and weatherless inside the air-conditioned car, but as soon as he opened the door he was shaken by a gust of fire and his shirt of pure silk was soaked in a kind of light-colored soup, and he felt many years older and more alone than ever. In real life he had just turned forty-two, had been graduated from Göttingen with honors as a metallurgical engineer, and was an avid reader, although without much success, of badly translated Latin classics. He was married to a radiant German woman who had given him five children and they were all happy in their home, he the happiest of all until they told him, three months before, that he would be dead forever by next Christmas.

While the preparations for the public rally were being completed, the senator managed to have an hour alone in the house they had set aside for him to rest in. Before he lay down he put into a glass of drinking water the rose he had kept alive all across the desert, lunched on the diet cereals which he took with him so as to avoid the repeated portions of fried goat that were waiting for him during the rest of the day, and took several painkillers before the time prescribed so that he would have the remedy ahead of the pain. Then he put the electric fan close to the hammock and stretched out naked for fifteen minutes in the shadow of the rose, making a great effort at mental distraction so as not to think about death while he dozed. Except for the doctors, no one knew that he had been sentenced to a fixed term, for he had decided to endure his secret all alone, with no change in his life, not out of pride but out of shame.

He felt in full control of his free will when he appeared in public again at three in the afternoon, rested and clean, wearing a pair of coarse linen slacks and a floral shirt, and with his soul sustained by the anti-pain pills. Nevertheless, the erosion of death was much more pernicious than he had supposed, for as he went up onto the platform he felt a strange disdain for those who were fighting for the opportunity to shake his hand, and he didn’t feel sorry as he had at other times for the groups of barefoot Indians who could scarcely endure the hot saltpeter coals of the sterile little square. He silenced the applause with a wave of his hand, almost with rage, and he began to speak without gestures, his eyes fixed on the sea that was sighing with heat. His measured, deep voice had the quality of water in repose, but the speech that had been memorized and ground out so many times had not occurred to him as a means of telling the truth but rather as the opposite of a fatalistic pronouncement by Marcus Aurelius in the fourth book of his Meditations.

“We are here for the purpose of defeating nature,” he began, against all of his convictions. “We will no longer be foundlings in our own country, orphans of God in a realm of thirst and bad climate, exiles in our own land. We will be different people, ladies and gentlemen, we will be a great and happy people.”

There was a pattern to his circus. As he spoke, his aides threw clusters of paper birds into the air and the artificial creatures took on life, flew about the platform of planks, and went out to sea. At the same time, other men took some prop trees with felt leaves out of the wagons and planted them in the saltpeter soil behind the crowd. They finished by setting up a cardboard facade with makebelieve houses of red brick that had glass windows, and with it they covered the miserable shacks of real life.

The senator prolonged his speech with two quotations in Latin in order to give the farce more time. He promised rainmaking machines, portable breeders for livestock, the oils of happiness which would make vegetables grow in the saltpeter and clumps of pansies in the window boxes. When he saw that his world of fiction was all set up, he pointed to it. “That’s the way it will be for us, ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted. “Look! That’s the way it will be for us.”

The audience turned around. An ocean liner made of painted paper was passing behind the houses, and it was taller than the tallest houses in the artificial city. Only the senator himself noticed that since it had been set up and taken down and carried from one place to another, the superimposed cardboard town had also been eaten away by the terrible climate and that it was almost as poor and dusty as Rosal del Virrey.

For the first time in twelve years, Nelson Farina didn’t go to greet the senator. He listened to the speech from his hammock amidst the remains of his siesta, under the cool bower of a house of unplaned boards which he had built with the same pharmacist’s hands with which he had drawn and quartered his first wife. He had escaped from Devil’s Island and appeared in Rosal del Virrey on a ship loaded with innocent macaws, with a beautiful and blasphemous black woman he had found in Paramaribo and by whom he had a daughter. The woman died of natural causes a short while later, and she didn’t suffer the fate of the other, whose pieces had fertilized her own cauliflower patch, but was buried whole and with her Dutch name in the local cemetery. The daughter had inherited her color and her figure along with her father’s yellow and astonished eyes, and he had good reason to imagine that he was rearing the most beautiful woman in the world.

Ever since he had first met Senator Onésimo Sánchez during his first electoral campaign, Nelson Farina had begged for his help in getting a false identity card which would place him beyond the reach of the law. The senator, in a friendly but firm way, had refused. Nelson Farina never gave up, and for several years, every time he found the chance, he would repeat his request with a different recourse. But always he received the same answer. Therefore on this visit he remained in his hammock, condemned to rot alive in that burning den of buccaneers. When he heard the final applause, he lifted his head and, looking over the boards of the fence, he saw the back side of the farce: the props for the buildings, the framework of the trees, the hidden illusionists who were pushing the ocean liner along. He spat without rancor.

“Merde ,” he said. “C ' est le Blacamàn de la politique. ”

After the speech, as was customary, the senator took a walk through the streets of the town in the midst of the music and the rockets and besieged by the townspeople, who told him their troubles. The senator listened to them good-naturedly, and he always found some way to console everybody without having to do them any difficult favors. A woman up on the roof of a house with her six youngest children managed to make herself heard over the uproar and the fireworks.

“I’m not asking for much, Senator,” she said. “Just a donkey to haul water from Hanged Man’s Well.”

The senator noticed the six thin children. “What became of your husband?” he asked.

“He went to find his fortune on the island of Aruba,” the woman answered good-humoredly, “and what he found was a foreign woman, the kind that put diamonds in their teeth.”

The answer brought on a roar of laughter.

“All right,” the senator decided, “you’ll get your donkey.”

A short while later an aide of his brought a good pack donkey to the woman’s house, and on the rump it had a campaign slogan written in indelible paint so that no one would ever forget that it was a gift from the senator.

Along the short stretch of street he made other smaller gestures, and he even gave a spoonful of medicine to a sick man who had had his bed brought to the door of his house so he could see him pass. At the last corner, through the boards of the fence, he saw Nelson Farina in his hammock, looking ashen and gloomy, but, nonetheless, the senator greeted him, with no show of affection:

“Hello, how are you?”

Nelson Farina turned in his hammock and soaked him in the sad amber of his look.

“Moi , vous savez , ” he said.

His daughter came out into the yard when she heard the greeting. She was wearing a cheap, faded guajiro Indian robe, her head was decorated with colored bows, and her face was painted as protection against the sun, but even in that state of disrepair it was possible to imagine that there had never been another so beautiful in the whole world. The senator was left breathless. “I’ll be damned!” he breathed in surprise. “The Lord does the craziest things!”

That night Nelson Farina dressed his daughter up in her best clothes and sent her to the senator. Two guards armed with rifles who were nodding from the heat in the borrowed house ordered her to wait on the only chair in the vestibule.

The senator was in the next room meeting with the important people of Rosal del Virrey, whom he had gathered together in order to sing for them the truths he had left out of his speeches. They looked so much like the ones he always met in every town in the desert that even the senator himself was sick and tired of that perpetual same nightly session. His shirt was soaked with sweat and he was trying to dry it on his body with the hot breeze from an electric fan that was buzzing like a horsefly in the heavy heat of the room.

“We, of course, can’t eat paper birds,” he said. “You and I know that the day there are trees and flowers in this heap of goat dung, the day there are shad instead of worms in the water holes, that day neither you nor I will have anything to do here, do I make myself clear?”

No one answered. While he was speaking, the senator had torn a sheet off the calendar and fashioned a paper butterfly out of it with his hands. He tossed it into the air current coming from the fan with no particular aim and the butterfly flew about the room and then went out through the half-open door. The senator went on speaking with a control aided by the complicity of death.

“Therefore,” he said, “I don’t have to repeat to you what you already know too well: that my reelection is a better piece of business for you than it is for me, because I’m fed up with stagnant water and Indian sweat, while you people, on the other hand, make your living from it.”

Laura Farina saw the paper butterfly come out. Only she saw it because the guards in the vestibule had fallen asleep on the steps, hugging their rifles. After a few turns, the large lithographed butterfly unfolded completely, flattened against the wall, and remained stuck there. Laura Farina tried to pull it off with her nails. One of the guards, who woke up with the applause from the next room, noticed her vain attempt.

“It won’t come off,” he said sleepily. “It’s painted on the wall.”

Laura Farina sat down again when the men began to come out of the meeting. The senator stood in the door of the room with his hand on the latch, and he noticed Laura Farina only when the vestibule was empty.

“What are you doing here?”

“C’est de la part de mon père ,” she said.

The senator understood. He scrutinized the sleeping guards, then he scrutinized Laura Farina, whose unusual beauty was even more demanding than his pain, and he resolved then that death had made his decision for him.

“Come in,” he told her.

Laura Farina was struck dumb standing in the doorway to the room: thousands of banknotes were floating in the air, flapping like the butterfly. But the senator turned off the fan and the bills were left without air and alighted on the objects in the room.

“You see,” he smiled, “even shit can fly.”

Laura Farina sat down on a schoolboy’s stool. Her skin was smooth and firm with the same color and the same solar density as crude oil, her hair was the mane of a young mare, and her huge eyes were brighter than the light. The senator followed the thread of her look and finally found the rose that had been tarnished by the saltpeter,

“It’s a rose,” he said.

“Yes,” she said with a trace of perplexity, “I learned what they were in Riohacha.”

The senator sat down on an army cot, talking about roses as he unbuttoned his shirt. On the side where he imagined his heart to be inside his chest he had a corsair’s tattoo of a heart pierced by an arrow. He threw the soaked shirt to the floor and asked Laura Farina to help him off with his boots.

She kneeled down facing the cot. The senator continued to scrutinize her, thoughtfully, and while she was untying the laces he wondered which one of them would end up with the bad luck of that encounter.

“You’re just a child,” he said.

“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “I’ll be nineteen in April.”

The senator became interested.

“What day?”

“The eleventh,” she said.

The senator felt better. “We’re both Aries,” he said. And, smiling, he added:

“It’s the sign of solitude.”

Laura Farina wasn’t paying attention because she didn’t know what to do with the boots. The senator, for his part, didn’t know what to do with Laura Farina, because he wasn’t used to sudden love affairs, and besides, he knew that the one at hand had its origins in indignity. Just to have some time to think, he held Laura Farina tightly between his knees, embraced her about the waist, and lay down on his back on the cot. Then he realized that she was naked under her dress, for her body gave off the dark fragrance of an animal of the woods, but her heart was frightened and her skin disturbed by a glacial sweat.

“No one loves us,” he sighed.

Laura Farina tried to say something, but there was only enough air for her to breathe. He laid her down beside him to help her; he put out the light and the room was in the shadow of the rose. She abandoned herself to the mercies of her fate. The senator caressed her slowly, seeking her with his hand, barely touching her, but where he expected to find her, he came across something iron that was in the way.

“What have you got there?”

“A padlock,” she said.

“What in hell . . . !” the senator said furiously and asked what he knew only too well. “Where’s the key?”

Laura Farina gave a breath of relief.

“My papa has it,” she answered. “He told me to tell you to send one of your people to get it and to send along with him a written promise that you’ll straighten out his situation.”

The senator grew tense. “Frog bastard,” he murmured indignantly. Then he closed his eyes in order to relax, and he met himself in the darkness. Remember, he remembered, 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.

He waited for the shudder to pass.

“Tell me one thing,” he asked then. “What have you heard about me?”

“Do you want the honest-to-God truth?”

“The honest-to-God truth.”

“Well,” Laura Farina ventured, “they say you’re worse than the rest because you’re different.”

The senator didn’t get upset. He remained silent for a long time with his eyes closed, and when he opened them again he seemed to have returned from his most hidden instincts.

“Oh, what the hell,” he decided, “tell your son of a bitch of a father that I’ll straighten out his situation.”

“If you want, I can go get the key myself,” Laura Farina said.

The senator held her back.

“Forget about the key,” he said, “and sleep a while with me. It’s good to be with someone when you’re so alone.”

Then she laid his head on her shoulder, her eyes fixed on the rose. The senator held her about the waist, sank his face into woods animal armpit, and gave in to terror. Six months and eleven days later he would die in that same position, degraded and repudiated because of the public scandal with Laura Farina, and weeping with rage at dying without her.

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.

Death Constant Beyond Love

Gabriel garcía márquez, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions, senator onésimo sánchez, laura farina, nelson farina.

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• Extended family
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• Family History
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Love in “Death Constant Beyond Love” Analysis

The strength and confusion of love lies in its diversity. Love is an individualized emotion. It is a part of who we are. Love does not look for equality, but it persists on balance. Love exists in every smile, every pounding heart, and the sweet taste of every kiss. Love is an emotional feeling in the soul and the basis of everyday life. However on earth and in this life, love is forever changing and death is the only constant. The role and significance of love in “Death Constant beyond Love”, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is that of powerlessness. It emphasizes the human condition of being alone and elpless in the face of love, life and death.

Love is powerless in the face of death. All of its complicities, confusions, and alterations can not compete with the ultimate confrontation Of life, which is death. Senator On©simo Sanchez has money, power, and respect. Yet, he is isolated because of the lack of love in his life and the very money, power, and respect that he has. He is alone because he chooses to be, but his choice was no match to love. Love plays an important part in his life, because the lack of it contributes to his desolation. When he saw Farina, he was instantly taken back by her beauty.

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According to the story “The Senator was left breathless” when he saw her. He held so much power, and yet he was powerless to the lustful feelings of love that he held for the teenage girl. The lack of love in the town was apparent to the reader and because of it; the town was filled with lies and scandal, and was on the verge of deterioration. “… in broad daylight looked like the most useless inlet on the desert… ” The love of the town was lacking and so due to the lack of patriarchy the town had to make its living off of smuggling in concubines and other illegal things. .. village by night was the furtive wharf for smugglers’ ships… ” People in the town were starving and they were powerless because they thought their leaders loved them and their village, but they were being misled by them. The senator finds out that he is going to die and he decides to bear that burden alone. Death is inevitable in that everyone will die, but to live a life knowing the time that death will come alone is a torture that no one should have to bear. This life was the senator’s choice, but when love came, like death, he couldn’t avoid it.

When the senator told Farina that no one loved them, he was addressing the fact that they were both lonely and in need of companionship and love. Through a reader’s interpretation, it could be said that Nelson did not love his daughter because he used her body as a pawn to get what he wanted from the senator. She was being sold to buy freedom and security. Love played a significant role in Nelson Farina’s life because after he killed his wife and escaped from prison, he found love with a black woman. After she died of natural causes, he and his daughter had to live isolated and incognito o that he would not be sent back to jail.

Nelson asked the senator for a change in identity so that he would be safe, but the senator always refused. The love that he was missing was apparent in his actions. It showed the love he’s lacking because he was so lonely in that he had nobody except his lovely daughter. The line “No one loves us” means that no one is really loved exactly because people are more interested in having their needs met than meeting others’ needs. Everyone comes for some thing no matter what it is. Love is supposed to be an exchange between people who get the most of what they xpect.

However, greed inhibits a person’s ability to know when they are content with what they have and when their needs have been fulfilled. These people in the Story would be the village, the representatives and the people who live there. The representatives took so much from the people that they were left with nothing. They got rich off of the other people’s poverty and suffering. Because of this, they continuously took what was not necessary and gave the bare minimum or nothing at all to sustain their “love” and wealth. Senator Sanchez saw his society in general as cruel and heartless.

The greed hat fueled so many of the town’s discussions was also the greed that fueled the false hopes of love and improvement. It was erroneous of the town’s people to think that there was any love between their representatives and them, because true love is selfless and it couldn’t be found in that village. The love that the people witnessed, or thought there was, was probably more selfish than it was selfless. It was more of a love by instinct, if even that, than it was a love that was learned and nurtured. The people were motivated by their infinite human need. If there was ever a time when a need was met, nother appeared.

They were never satisfied; therefore their love, like their representatives’ love, was always an instinct rather than genuine. Senator Sanchez was isolated because he was in a town without his friends and family and he did not have anyone around him who would accept the fact that he was human and therefore could make mistakes. He was alone because he was expected to behave a certain way and was not allowed to differentiate from that path. He had to face the fact that he was going to die and no one would remember him or what he did because he was never really that important in the first place.

He found love and yet he was still alone and helpless because he was faced with life’s only constant, which is death. He knew that his lustful love did not stand a chance in a battle with death so his loneliness was never really cured. The senator did not care about sleeping with Farina; he was only interested in escaping from his loneliness even if it was only for a couple of minutes. He was alone and not even death could change that. He followed the same perpetual routine daily and it started to become irritating to him. There was nothing the Senator could do to stop death.

There was nothing he ould do to stop his search of love. The scandal that would spread before and after his death would only contribute to his loneliness and there would never be a solution to it. Whether or not he slept with Farina would only be know to him and her. “… he would die in that same position, debased and repudiated because of the public scandal with Laura Farina.. This means that the town would create their own images of what happened and their views of him would change, and he would no longer be their “god-like” figure.

The senator was held in such high respects to the town that he almost eemed immortal. He was not allowed to hurt, or cry, or die, because he was immortal and that sealed his fate to his lonely, loveless life. He was brought down to a common level and his mortality was restored by death and love. As much as he tried to maintain control over his life even after he discovered that he would die soon, he could not control the factor of love and the way he reacted to it. In closing, love possesses the unique ability to evolve, change, and grow over the course of our lives.

Our thoughts and perceptions are given credibility by ur experiences and the paths that we follow in our quest for love. Love has the ability to adapt to environments everywhere, but death is the only unchanging thing in life. Love presents a role of powerlessness which emphasizes the human need for companionship and condition of loneliness. Death is constantly occurring and love happens by chance; but, just as there is no solution to death, there has never been a solution to love. In that respect, death and love are constants; thus making “death constant beyond love” and “love constant beyond death” interchangeable facts of life.

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Death Constant Beyond Love

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The metaphor of the rose is prominent in García Márquez’s short story. But other tangible objects seem to operate metaphorically. Specifically, items like the fan seem to represent supernatural forces. Even though they seem grounded in tangibility, the illusions that they produce, of air motion and shadows, are larger than the object itself might suggest. These reverberations literally give air a heightened sense of importance within the text.

Paper birds and paper butterflies also operate as metaphors, particularly in their trajectories. They mimic a real, living object, but the story traces them back to their creators and shows them to be harmless objects. At the same time, they seem to represent efforts at freedom. Freedom, especially freedom from death, becomes impossible: the birds sink to the ground when they lose the currents or illusions of air.

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