The rose, which Senator Onésimo Sánchez carries to Rosal del Virrey on his suit, symbolizes the inevitability of death. Typically used as a symbol of love, García Márquez turns the image of the rose on its head by insisting—much as he does with the title of his story—that the one constant in life is not love but death.
When the rose is first introduced, it is already dying, just like the senator himself. The senator seems to pay particular attention to the rose. For instance, when he first reaches the city, he places it in a glass of water before having a snack or undressing. The senator’s fixation on keeping the rose alive gestures towards his tendency to avoid or deny the reality of death, which is also reflected in his staunch denial of his own terminal illness (which he never tells anyone about, seemingly because he doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth).
Later, when Laura Farina is in Senator Onésimo Sánchez’s office, she takes an interest in the rose and, when the senator explains to her what it is, she says she already knows. This scene can be interpreted as an older person explaining to someone much younger about death, but Laura Farina has indeed learned of death already since her mother has already passed away. The last paragraph of the story is peculiar, as it skips ahead six months: in the first sentence, Laura Farina and the senator are still alone in his office, laying next to each other, and she has her eyes “fixed” on the rose; by the last sentence—and the end of the story—the senator is dead. By including Laura Farina’s fixation on the rose in the same paragraph as the senator’s final moments, García Márquez emphasizes the rose as a symbol of the inevitability of death.
The Rose Quotes in Death Constant Beyond Love
Before he lay down he put in a glass of drinking water the rose he had kept alive all across the desert (…) and he took several analgesic pills 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.
Then she laid his head on her shoulder with 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 the at same position, debased and repudiated because of the public scandal with Laura Farina and weeping with rage at dying without her.
The Rose Symbol Timeline in Death Constant Beyond Love
