The characters in “Death Constant Beyond Love” who do not have any sense of power or control over their lives feel a deep solitude and isolation. Senator Onésimo Sánchez—who’s come to the impoverished town Rosal del Virrey as part of a reelection campaign—has a great deal of power politically (he has been in office for at least twelve years), financially (his campaign is well-funded, and he has a rotating array of linen and silk clothes), and socially (his constituents appear to cherish him, and he has a wife and five children and a “happy home”). Yet, all of this is offset by the fact that he has been given a fatal prognosis and has only six months left to live. Rather than share his diagnosis, the senator tells no one, and thus is plagued throughout the story by an unavoidable feeling of isolation.
Other characters, too, appear to retreat from society when in a place of powerlessness. Nelson Farina, a criminal who’s taken refuge in Rosal del Virrey, doesn’t attend the senator’s speech this year because he seems to have accepted his powerlessness to make the senator do his bidding. Nelson is bitter and alone, swinging in his hammock, as the rest of the town flocks to the senator’s speech. And Laura Farina, Nelson Farina’s nineteen-year-old daughter, has perhaps the least amount of power; she is young, poor, and female, and she must listen to her father when he sends her to the senator’s office as a bribe. When Senator Onésimo Sánchez and Laura Farina are together, the senator comments that “no one loves [them],” because Laura has no mother and her only parent has used her as a bargaining chip. The senator connects with the young girl because he believes she is as alone as he is, despite their radically different positions in life. By showcasing characters who have a spectrum of social and interpersonal power but who, nevertheless, are lonely and isolated, García Márquez makes the case that solitude often comes from feeling a total lack of control over one’s life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Isolation and Powerlessness ThemeTracker
Isolation and Powerlessness 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.
He met her in Rosal del Virrey, 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 (…) so far from everything that no one would have suspected that someone capable of changing the destiny of anyone lived there.
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.
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.
