Death Constant Beyond Love

The “circus” of Sanchez’s campaign uses illusions to captivate a vulnerable audience. Hired men enhance the crowd’s numbers. There are paper birds, prop trees, and even false houses to reimagine the village without its “miserable real-life shacks” (Paragraph 6). The senator himself notices that the “cardboard town had been eaten away by the terrible climate and that it was almost as poor and dusty as Rosal del Virrey” (Paragraph 8). He cannot convince himself that the imagined world is or could be real, because the larger environmental power erodes at it.

The small illusions that humans can create, then, have no power over the forces of nature. But García Márquez also creates space for magic or illusion to be real. When Laura notices the paper butterfly stick to the wall, the reader has an opportunity to decide whether the butterfly, a single cog in the greater machine of the illusion, has truly become part of the decoration, “painted,” as the guard says, “on the wall” (Paragraph 20).

When Laura enters Sanchez’s room, the illusion disappears: the source of the paper’s animation seems clear, and when the senator turns off the fan, the magically floating money settles to the ground. Yet the idea of inexplicable motion coming from nowhere still connects to the theme of life and death. Objects invested with motion (like the paper butterflies) or meaning (like the living rose) seem to present Sanchez and Laura, respectively, with ways of thinking about living and dying. 

The narrator describes the landscape and plot of this narrative as flat and directionless both in its form and in its content. Because the story begins with the expected event of Sanchez’s death and ends with the actual event, there is one stable certainty throughout it. In this way, the story reflects the ocean described at the story’s beginning as “arid and without direction,” a description that would just as easily suit the desert landscape.

Sanchez’s public ceremonies stop in each place, “every four years,” with the same collection of goods and illusions (Paragraph 2). Even though this is the first campaign he travels on while sick, he understands that he will receive rich meat and that certain performance will be expected, and he plans his existence off of the sameness. But as he rests, he recognizes that he feels “sentenced to a fixed term,” and he wants “no change in his life,” a preservation of this sameness, “not because of pride but out of shame” (Paragraph 3).

Laura might be “the most beautiful woman in the world,” yet meetings with village leaders are always the same. Sanchez is not “used to sudden love affairs” (Paragraph 28). He must actually think about this new event in his life, which death has brought to him. Scandal seems to break the cycle of repetition in his life, even though the sense of being imprisoned in loneliness (represented by the padlock that remains around Laura’s waist) is constant.