John Sohn looked young and I thought maybe he was my age, but it’s hard to guess Korean people’s ages. He gave me a little anesthesia, drilled my teeth, and filled the holes he’d made with paste. All with a perfect smile and without hurting me at any point. I liked him, so I told him how I painted heads against concrete. John Sohn was silent for a moment, which turned out to be like a moment of “illumination”—which made me think we had something important in common—and he said, “That’s just what I’ve been looking for.” He invited me to have dinner in one of those real Korean restaurants. I mean, not a touristy one, but the kind you enter through a little door you wouldn’t think led anywhere, and then inside it turns out there’s a whole Korean world. Big round tables even if you have only two people, and the menu in Korean, and all the waiters are Korean, and all the customers are Korean. John Sohn chose a traditional dish for me and gave the waiter precise instructions on how to prepare it. John Sohn needed someone to paint a gigantic painting for his waiting room. He said the important thing was the tooth. He wanted to make a deal: I’d paint the picture, and he would fix all my teeth. He explained why he wanted the painting, how it would affect the customers, and the value of advertising in his culture. He talked nonstop, like Aníbal, and I like it when someone else does all the talking. When we finished eating, John Sohn introduced me to some Koreans at the table next to us, and we had coffee with them. Now, I don’t speak Korean, so I didn’t understand anything. But watching them talk helped me realize that now I had a dentist friend, and I had an important deal with my dentist friend, and that that was very good.
I spent many days working on John’s picture, until one morning I woke up on the sofa in the studio, looked at the canvas, and felt a deep gratitude: his friendship had given me my best picture. I called him at his office and John was very happy, I know because when something excites him he talks even faster, and sometimes he talks in Korean. He said he would come over for lunch. It was the first time a friend had come to visit me. I organized the paintings a little, making sure to leave the best ones in view. I picked up my clothes and carried them up to the bedroom, and brought the used plates and glasses to the kitchen. I took food from the fridge and set it out on a tray. When John arrived he looked all around for the picture, but I told him that it “wasn’t time yet,” and he respected that because Koreans know a lot about respect, or at least that’s what he always said. So we sat down to lunch. I asked if he wanted more salt, if he preferred something hot, if I could pour him more soda. But everything was fine with him. I thought how maybe he could come over some night to watch movies or chat about whatever. We could take a photo together to display somewhere, like people do with “family and friends.” But I didn’t say anything about that yet. John ate and talked. He did it all at once, and it didn’t bother me because that’s intimacy, it’s part of being friends. I don’t know how he got on the subject, but he started talking about “Korean kids” and education in his country. Kids start school at six in the morning and they leave at noon the next day; that is, they spend almost a day and a half in school and they have only five hours free, which they use to go home, sleep a little, and return. He said those are the things that distinguish the Koreans from the Argentines, that set them apart from the rest of the world.
I didn’t like that, but you can’t like everything about a friend, that’s what I believe. And I think that all in all, in spite of his comments, we were fine. I smiled. “I want you to see the painting,” I told him. We walked to the center of the room. He took a few steps back, calculating the distance, and when I felt the time was right, I pulled off the sheet that covered the picture. John had small, fine hands, like a woman’s, and he was always moving them to explain what he was thinking. But his hands stayed still, hanging from his arms like they were dead. I asked what was wrong. He said that the painting was supposed to be about the tooth. That what he wanted was a gigantic painting for his waiting room, a painting of a tooth. He repeated that several times.
We looked at the painting together: the face of a Korean crashing against the black and white tiles of a waiting room very much like John’s. My hand isn’t there pounding the head, it’s falling on its own, and the first thing that hits the gleaming tiles, the thing that receives the whole weight of the fall, is one of the Korean’s teeth. It has a vertical crack that, an instant later, will split it right down the middle. I couldn’t understand what wasn’t working for John—the painting was perfect. And I realized I wasn’t willing to change a thing. Then John said that’s how it always was at the end of the day, and he started in again on the subject of Korean education. He said we Argentines are slackers. That we don’t like to work, and that’s why our country is the way it is. That it would never change, because we were how we were, and he left.
Now, that really bothered me. I mean a lot. Because my mother and Aníbal are Argentines, too, and they work a lot, and it bothers me when people talk without knowing what they’re talking about. But I told myself that John was my friend. I contained my rage, and I felt very proud of that.