Death and nature loom large in “Death Constant Beyond Love,” both as things that cannot be avoided or defeated. García Márquez emphasizes death’s presence by acknowledging in the first sentence that the protagonist, Senator Onésimo Sánchez, has “six months and eleven days to go before his death.” The senator chooses to tell no one of his illness, either out of fear, stubbornness, or both, and he goes about his political business as though he is not dying. In addition to keeping his diagnosis a secret, the senator takes his prescribed medication ahead of schedule, hoping to stave off the pain associated with his illness. However, despite these efforts to ignore his prognosis, the senator feels himself changed: he is more irritable than before, finding himself annoyed with the citizens of Rosal del Virrey, forceful when he speaks, and, ultimately, reckless when he agrees to an affair with Laura Farina, a young woman sent to the senator as a bribe by her father who needed a favor from the senator. Through the senator’s behavior, García Márquez suggests the impossibility of avoiding the effects of mortality.
Moreover, this attempt to avoid death is mirrored in the senator’s (hollow) suggestion to his constituents that they can “defeat nature” and change the dismal conditions of the city’s climate. The senator knows this is impossible, that Rosal del Virrey will never be fertile land. The climate is always hot, arid, and even when the senator sits in an air-conditioned car (avoiding nature by being “weatherless”) he eventually has to leave it, and it is getting hit with a gust of hot air that reminds him of his own mortality. Additionally, by having his aides construct wooden houses and place them in front of the real shacks the villagers live in, he is suggesting an alternate reality, one apart from nature. However, he cannot avoid nature’s inevitable destructive hand, as the senator realizes that even the cardboard houses meant to symbolize a better life for the townspeople are run down on account of the real climate.
Ultimately, through both Senator Onésimo Sánchez’s reaction to a fatal diagnosis and his broader attempts to avoid natural realities, García Márquez suggests the importance of recognizing that death and natural decay are inevitable parts of existence.
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Death, Nature, and Inevitability Quotes in Death Constant Beyond Love
Senator Onésimo Sánchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life.
Senator Onésimo Sánchez was placid and weatherless inside the airconditioned 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.
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.
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 good luck 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 bear the hot saltpeter coals of the sterile little square.
“We are here for the purpose of defeating nature” he began, against all 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 a different people, ladies and gentlemen, we will be a great and happy people.”
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 been eaten away by the terrible climate and that it was almost as poor and dusty as Rosal del Virrey.
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.
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.
