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serious men say, “I am enthralled by Mariano Moreno.” His portrait appeared everywhere, always retouched to eliminate the smallpox scars on his face. But Bustos shared the doubts his father, a landowner on the Pampa, had about Moreno: he was afraid the commercial interests of the port of Buenos Aires that the young economist defended in the name of the nation’s well-being would sacrifice the well-being of the interior.
    â€œWho’s going to buy products from La Rioja if he can get the same things cheaper from London? Even a poncho, my boy, even a pair of boots: the English (they’re crawling out of the woodwork!) can make them cheaper,” said Baltasar’s father, José Antonio.
    Baltasar shook his mane of honey-colored curls and paid no attention to economic or political arguments: it was not, he declared during our nights at the Café de Malcos, the price of ponchos or commercial competition between Spain and England that was the revolution’s main problem, but equality and justice. Why aren’t there laws valid for all nations and all classes? Why are there laws that take from the people who work and give to people who are idle?
    â€œThat”—his eyeglasses steamed over—“is the problem of the revolution.”
    But now the revolutionary junta presided over by Saavedra, Castelli, Moreno, and Belgrano gave all power to the military and the patriots in the professions. The Spanish functionaries were removed from office; the viceroy and the circuit judges were expelled to—where else?—the Canary Islands. History was moving with incomparable speed, but Baltasar Bustos slept with his head resting on a desk in the library, isolated from the decisive tumult in the streets, satisfied that he’d done his duty.
    What he’d dreamed was now a reality. A black child condemned to violence, hunger, and discrimination would sleep from now on in the soft bed of the nobility. Another child, white, destined for idleness and elegance, had lost all his privileges in a flash and would now be brought up amid the violence, hunger, and discrimination suffered by the blacks, whom the Creoles called “the damned race.”
    â€œEquality is valid for all classes,” the young hero declared to us, his friends in the Café de Malcos. “Without equality, there is no freedom: not for trade and not for the individual.” Surrounded by the sanctioned volumes approved with the nihil obstat, which gave off a peculiar aroma of incense and which became part of his cauchemar, Baltasar Bustos, using his arms as a pillow, tried to fall into the sleep of reason. The nightmare of reason reverberated like the bells and cannon shots of the morning of May 25 in Buenos Aires. And if this minor hero of equality could justify, in the name of justice, what he had done, passion, soul, the other side of his Enlightenment conviction told him: “Baltasar Bustos, you have mortally wounded the woman you think you love. You have committed an injustice against the most intimate nature of that woman. Ofelia Salamanca is a mother, and you, a vile kidnapper.”
    He woke up with a shock because his nightmare took place just as a flood of May light poured in through the building’s tall latticed windows. He woke up asking himself why in his dream he had used the French word cauchemar instead of nightmare. Because it sounded better in French? The glare behind him kept him from answering. He looked at the letters in the title of the book he’d fallen asleep over as if they were flies: from a distance of centuries, St. John Chrysostom condemned unconsummated love because it sinfully exalted desire.
    [4]
    He thought he’d slept for a long time—the length of a nightmare—but it hadn’t even been ten minutes. He had carried out the most audacious act of his life without calculating the full effect of his actions, without anticipating, above all, that the vision of