27 pages • 54 minutes read
Gabriel García MárquezOne Of These Days
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Power and Vulnerability
The theme of power and vulnerability is central to the conflict between Aurelio and the Mayor in “One Of These Days.” Initially, the Mayor attempts to dominate Aurelio. Outside the dentist’s office, the Mayor wields a dictatorial level of power over the town. This is reflected in his behavior in the waiting room where he asserts his power over Aurelio’s son, using him as a mouthpiece to relay his messages to the dentist. When Aurelio tries to ignore the Mayor and deny him service, the Mayor reasserts his power by threatening the dentist with physical violence. The reversals of power and vulnerability within the story suggest that people will take advantage of one another when caught in corrupt and hierarchical contexts.
Within the town’s social structure, Aurelio has far less power than the Mayor. The narrative highlights his lack of education and hints at his poverty through descriptions of his clothing and office space. Aurelio himself acknowledges the Mayor’s destructive tyranny within their town, claiming that he is responsible for the deaths of 20 of “our men” who might either be citizens of the town or members of the same political party as Aurelio (75). This accusation makes the Mayor’s threat to shoot Aurelio seem more credible than hyperbolic. Despite their relative inequality, Aurelio pushes back against the Mayor’s oppression, seemingly unafraid of the consequences of crossing him and setting up the conflict between the two.
When the Mayor appears in his doorway, Aurelio is poised for an armed confrontation, his hand is resting on the drawer that holds his revolver, apparently hoping for an excuse to use it. When he sees the Mayor, however, he relents, softly closing the drawer. The Mayor appears not as a domineering authority but rather as a weakened and vulnerable man in pain. The physical vulnerability of the Mayor inverts the town’s social order: As Aurelio’s patient, the Mayor is subordinate to the dentist and the dentist can exercise complete control over him. The Mayor is keenly aware of this shift in their relationship and his apprehension is reflected in his body language as he watches every move the dentist makes. During the procedure, the Mayor attempts to reassert as much power as he can in his vulnerable position by showing as little pain as possible. Aurelio takes advantage of his position of power by explicitly using the pain of the procedure to punish the Mayor for the pain he has caused their town. However, the reversal of roles is fleeting. Once the Mayor has recovered himself after the procedure, he re-establishes that he is the town’s central authority. This suggests that harmful hierarchies of the powerful and the vulnerable are only further perpetuated when people take advantage of others in their community.
Political Corruption
In the short story “One Of These Days,” the theme of political corruption establishes the tense and violent atmosphere in the town that leads to the conflict between the two principal characters. The Mayor is only able to wield complete power over the town because of his political corruption, and Aurelio (like the 20 men who died) opposes the Mayor’s total authority. The historical events taking place in Colombia at the time García Márquez is writing certainly influence the theme of political corruption in his works. Yet there is an intentional lack of specificity in the narrative that allows for a more universal reading of the setting and the character of the Mayor since political corruption is not limited to a single society or historical moment. Regina James notes this lack of detail and argues, “In his earlier works, political issues are either allegorized or serve as an indistinct backdrop against which a conflict between characters or within a character is enacted” (“Liberals, Conservatives and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of Gabriel García Márquez,” Hispanófila, 82 [1984]: 79). Political corruption and oppression are assigned to nameless military and political authorities—such as “the Mayor” in “One Of These Days.” These authorities are not members of any one political party or citizens of any particular country or town. In this way, they serve as universal symbols of power-hungry leaders who put their own ambitions above the well-being of their citizens. The story hence conveys the harms of political corruption and shows that it results in death and pain, even for those in power (as seen in the tooth extraction).
As the Mayor is leaving Aurelio’s office, he instructs Aurelio to send him the bill. When Aurelio asks whether he should send it to the Mayor himself or to the town, the Mayor replies, “It’s the same damn thing” (76). This concluding line sums up the Mayor’s authoritarian mode of rule, in which he sees himself not as an elected representative of the town but as synonymous with the town itself—echoing a well-known aphorism attributed to the King Louis XIV: “l’état, c’est moi,” (the state, that is me). Though it’s not clear that Louis XIV ever actually spoke these words, they have become shorthand for those forms of tyranny in which the leader’s personal interests are considered inseparable from the interests of the state or nation. Under such political conditions, any dissent is easily cast as a traitorous attack on the state and its people. Between this pronouncement and the Mayor’s readiness to use violence to get his way in the first scene, the story offers a clear picture of political corruption even in the absence of any specific details about how the town is run.
The Coexistence of Retribution and Compassion
One of the central unanswered questions in the short story “One Of These Days” is why Aurelio doesn’t use anesthesia when pulling the Mayor’s tooth. Medically, there is no reason for Aurelio to deny the Mayor anesthesia even with an abscess. The excuse is offered in a perfunctory way, without explanation, as if Aurelio doesn’t expect the Mayor to believe it, only to accept it. That the Mayor does accept this non-explanation unquestioningly is evidence of his temporary powerlessness: In the town, the Mayor holds absolute power, but within the dentist’s office, while the Mayor is in great pain, Aurelio has all the power. He uses this power to right a wrong and announces the real reason for the Mayor’s undue suffering—“Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men” (75)—without anger, as if it could not be otherwise: The circumstances and Aurelio’s sense of justice require it.
In the scene between the dentist and the Mayor in García Márquez’s contemporaneous novel In Evil Hour, the dentist likewise claims he can’t use anesthesia because the mayor’s tooth is abscessed, but unlike Aurelio, he draws a direct connection between his decision not to use anesthesia and the harm caused by the mayor, stating that the mayor and his men kill without anesthesia (Moreno, Fernando. “La historia entre paréntesis. Una lectura de ‘Un día de estos’ de Gabriel García Márquez,” Caravelle, 93, 2009, p. 163). Aurelio makes no such statement in “One Of These Days,” yet he clearly sees a connection between the pain experienced by the Mayor during the procedure and the pain the Mayor has caused the town, stating that the pain is in payment for the deaths he has caused.
Even as he takes advantage of this moment to exact retribution for the men the Mayor has killed, Aurelio exhibits compassion toward his political enemy. From his response to the Mayor’s threats in the first scene, it’s clear that he does not act out of self-preservation. He does not fear for his life, and he could therefore simply refuse to treat the Mayor, leaving him to suffer in prolonged agony. He could also shoot him, taking a life in exchange for the lives of his friends. This is, in fact, what he plans to do until he sees the Mayor’s swollen, half-shaved face and pained expression. At this point, he closes the drawer with the gun and, speaking “softly,” invites the Mayor to sit down. In this moment, the balance of power between the two men is entirely inverted. Aurelio recognizes the person in front of him not as the all-powerful authoritarian ruler of his little town, but as a fellow human being who is vulnerable and in distress. His compassion does not obviate his sense of justice. He exacts retribution on behalf of his friends, and he lets the Mayor know what he is doing, but he does so “without rancor, rather with a bitter tenderness,” a phrase that registers the complex moral and emotional terrain he stands on in this climactic moment (75).
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