“Death Constant Beyond Love” centers on Senator Onésimo Sánchez, a politician who’s campaigning for reelection in Rosal del Virrey, a small island town. Rosal del Virrey is dried up, impoverished, and crime-ridden, but the senator’s campaign focuses on masking reality and making outlandish promises rather than proposing practical solutions to the town’s problems. For instance, his political aides create a “world of fiction” by paying people to inflate the size of the crowd at his speech and putting up prop trees and cardboard buildings to cover the townspeople’s “miserable shacks.” And during his speech, the senator assures the people that he’ll give them “rainmaking machines” to make their crops grow, among other impossible solutions. Yet despite all of this dishonesty, the townspeople still trust and revere the senator, swarming him after the speech to confide in him and ask him for help. In a later meeting with town officials, it’s revealed that he doesn’t even believe in his own campaign—the officials are pressuring him to fool the townspeople because his reelection will benefit them. In other words, he’s betraying not only his constituents but also his own moral compass. The story thus critiques the fanfare and false posturing that’s common in politics, and it pessimistically suggests that it’s easy for even the most deceitful and manipulative politicians to gain loyal followings.
Furthermore, the story continuously blurs the line between artifice and reality to highlight the absurdity of life in Rosal del Virrey. The story uses magical realism—as when the senator’s aides release paper birds that seem to actually come alive and fly into the sea—to emphasize that one can never fully distinguish reality from artifice in a place where corrupt politicians and criminals run amok. Even the reference to roses in the island’s name is an ironic joke that obscures the truth, since it’s actually an arid, desolate, economically depressed place where no roses grow. Finally, when the criminal Nelson Farina sends his daughter Laura Farina to have sex with the Senator Onésimo Sánchez, seemingly as a kind of peace offering, even the senator is duped: he discovers that the young woman is actually wearing a chastity belt that he can only unlock if he gives in to Farina’s extortion. Through its use of magical realism and dark absurdist humor, “Death Constant Beyond Love” suggests that in a place where deceptive people hold power, the truth is never certain.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Politics, Deception, and Absurdity ThemeTracker
Politics, Deception, and Absurdity Quotes in Death Constant Beyond Love
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.
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.”
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.
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.
