Short Story Review - "Dentist"

"Dentist" is probably my favorite story from Roberto Bolaño's short story collection Last Evenings on Earth. It concerns a writer (presumably one of Bolaño's alter egos, of which many of the collections protagonists seem to be) visiting a friend's hometown. The friend is the titular dentist, and the narrator wonders why he (the dentist) chose to remain in his hometown, rather than move to Mexico City, as do many Mexican intellectuals. As the story opens, we learn that the writer had been planning on relaxing, as his life was in a transitional period, but his friend is quite distraught, due to the death of a patient at a free clinic he volunteers at.

The story seems to be an allegory for Bolaño's feelings on art -- or at least Bolaño setting out a set of aesthetics for comment. The following passage is preceded by the dentist's encounter with a painter whose work he admires. An awkward misunderstanding results in the dentist being insulted, and then beaten up when he attempts to recover. After recounting this to the writer, and railing against the painter, the writer observes that this is a singular anecdote in a man's life, and doesn't discredit his work. The dentist responds as follows:

But that’s where art comes from, he said: life stories. Art history comes along only much later. That what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing/that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression of and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular.
And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home.
But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.
With a gleam in his eye he stared at me for a moment. The death of the Indian woman from gum cancer had obviously affected him more than I had realized at first.
So now you’re wondering what I mean by the secret story? asked my friend. Well, the secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another and we don’t realize that’s a lie.

Immediately afterwards, the dentist begins waving someone over to their table -- an Indian boy, named Jose Ramirez, who he clarifies to the writer that he'd met through his clinic. The boy seems like a relatively unremarkable adolescent, who's clearly the product of poverty, and already has spent significant time working in the fields -- his hands are "iron". On their second meeting with Ramirez, it's revealed that he is a writer as well, and the dentist regards him as a major talent: "And then my friend declared that there were very few writers alive on par with the boy sitting there before us. I swear to God: very few." The writer, rather than tacitly agreeing, expresses doubt, which results in the confirmation of the dentist's assertion. The boy is truly a singular talent.

The story closes with the writer and the dentist waiting in the dentist's clinic for a patient who never shows.