Many of us who come from the Caribbean are astounded when people speak of the “implausibility” of magical realism. For in our worldview, as in our much-loved Gabriel García Márquez’s, a lot of what is considered magically realistic seems to us much more realistic than magical. Of course a woman can live inside her cat as Eva does in the 1948 short story “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” We have an aunt who’s done that. And remember our neighbor who died but kept growing in his coffin, as in his 1947 story “The Third Resignation”? Our parents swear that’s true.

What seems more unusual are those moments when the world is calm, almost normal; when there are no wars, no dictators; when a writer survives a life of strife to live seventy-five glorious and prodigious years and continues to write at the top of his form as Gabo has. Or when a character, an ordinary dentist, takes revenge on a murderer, as in this excerpt from a 1962 short story by Gabriel García Márquez, “One of These Days,” translated by Gregory Rabassa and J. S. Bernstein:

The Mayor appeared at the door. He had shaved the left side of his face, but the other side, swollen and in pain, had a five-day-old beard. The dentist saw many nights of desperation in his dull eyes. He closed the drawer with his fingertips and said softly:

“Sit down.”

“Good morning,” said the Mayor.

“Morning,” said the dentist.

While the instruments were boiling, the Mayor leaned his skull on the headrest of the chair and felt better. His breath was icy. It was a poor office: an old wooden chair, the pedal drill, a glass case with ceramic bottles. Opposite the chair was a window with a shoulder-high cloth curtain. When he felt the dentist approach, the Mayor braced his heels and opened his mouth.

Aurelio Escovar turned his head toward the light. After inspecting the infected tooth, he closed the Mayor’s jaw with a cautious pressure of his fingers.“It has to be without anesthesia,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you have an abscess.”

The Mayor looked him in the eye. “All right,” he said, and tried to smile. The dentist did not return the smile. He brought the basin of sterilized instruments to the worktable and took them out of the water with a pair of cold tweezers, still without hurrying. Then he pushed the spittoon with the tip of his shoe, and went to wash his hands in the washbasin. He did all this without looking at the Mayor. But the Mayor didn’t take his eyes off him.

It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist spread his feet and grabbed the tooth with the hot forceps. The Mayor seized the arms of the chair, braced his feet with all his strength, and felt an icy void in his kidneys, but didn’t make a sound. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without rancor, rather with a bitter tenderness, he said:

“Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men.”

The Mayor felt a crunch of bones in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears. But he didn’t breathe until he felt the tooth come out. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so foreign to his pain that he failed to understand the torture of the five previous nights.

Bent over the spittoon, sweating, panting, he unbuttoned his tunic and reached for the handkerchief in his pants pocket. The dentist gave him a clean cloth.“Dry your tears,” he said.

The Mayor did. He was trembling. While the dentist washed his hands, he saw the crumbling ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider’s eggs and dead insects. The dentist returned, drying his hands.

“Go to bed,” he said, “and gargle with salt water.”The Mayor stood up, said good-bye with a casual military salute, and walked toward the door, stretching his legs, without buttoning up his tunic.

“Send the bill,” he said.

“To you or the town?”

The Mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen:“It’s the same damn thing.”