In the first lines of García Márquez’s story, readers learn Sanchez’s “sentence”: he has “six months and eleven days to go before his death” when he meets “the woman of his life” (Paragraph 1). Together, he and Laura are imprisoned in loneliness. Sanchez is aware, by the time he meets her, that he is “sentenced to a fixed term,” and he likes to keep that secret and suffer in silence (Paragraph 3).

Readers do not ever learn whether Sanchez receives the key from Laura’s father and “unlocks” her. The satisfaction of sex goes unfulfilled in the story; unlike Laura’s father, who cycles through women who die in the end, Sanchez may not ever consummate his relationship with Laura. What matters is both characters together, Laura fixated on the rose and Sanchez “[given] in to terror” (Paragraph 35).

Fate seems to control their temperaments—as Aries, the sign of solitude, is supposed to communicate—but it also controls their actions. Laura believes in “her fate” and the senator believes in the power of death (Paragraph 29). The two ideas seem to mean the same thing: both limit their bodies’ senses of autonomy. Fate, then, and forces beyond imagination are the imprisoning forces.