Marquez captures the peculiar nature of medical (or in this case dental) power in this tale of manipulation. Escovar the dentist is not a powerful man in this town; he is not wealthy and his office is poorly supplied and dirty. The mayor is the epitome of apparently corrupt, even murderous, political power. But the infection entirely reverses this hierarchy, placing the mayor at the dentist’s mercy.

The power is profound, but temporary, for as soon as Escovar has removed the tooth, the mayor is released from him--looking at the extracted tooth, the mayor "failed to understand his torture of the five previous nights"--and when he leaves, the mayor reiterates that he and the town are "the same thing," that his power extends beyond himself. Nonetheless, we are left with a strong reminder of the democracy of at least some kinds of bodily suffering, and of the access this gives the medical professions to an extraordinary kind of control over the experiences of others.

Finally it is as if the dentist, no longer able to withhold treatment (not because the mayor threatens to shoot him, but simply because he is a dentist and a professional), tells himself that hurting the mayor will affirm his own power for revenge or political resistance. In fact, though, his treatment is so effective that he releases the mayor both from the pain and from his grasp and restores the very situation he, the dentist, abhors. As the title implies, though, he seems to have learnt something new about his own power, that "one of these days . . . . " A short and pithy story which would be interesting to use along with William Carlos Williams’s The Use of Force (annotated by Felice Aull, also annotated by Pamela Moore and Jack Coulehan)-or even hated--patient.