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Ofelia Salamanca would captivate him with all the force of the inevitable. He dreamed about her—the sweet part of his dream—the way Tantalus dreamed of the fruit and water that continually eluded his grasp. A tantalizing woman: he desired her, desired not to possess her, so he could go on desiring her, desired not to have done what he had, desired—dreaming all the while—never having to stand before her, saying: “Here is your son, madame. I ask you to love me despite what I’ve done.”
    He didn’t have time, because he looked, sensibly, at his watch, which resembled him (blind crystal, round body, gilt glitter), and realized that it was only twelve-thirty at night. The glow at his back was, nevertheless, that of daylight. But that was the heat not of May but of February. And the books began to crackle suspiciously. The threatened leaves in the sacred books were reverting, becoming, tout court, dead leaves. The creak of the bindings and the shelves was not only a hint of what was to come but also the result of the leaves that really were burning outside: Baltasar Bustos ran, opened the library door, scurried to the hall that led to the patio, and saw his fiery curls reflected in the courtyard in flames. The ivy blazed, the muslin blazed, the bedroom was ablaze. The servants gathered in the patio shrieked. Baltasar Bustos instinctively, cruelly looked for the black wet nurse among them. There she was, just for an instant, lulling a swaddled baby, which he could not see, in her arms. But then she was gone. Baltasar Bustos couldn’t decide whether to follow her or to stay where he was, which is what he did, mesmerized by the sight of the fire vomiting out of the balcony of the presiding judge’s quarters.
    Twenty-five candles blaze, one for each year of the mother’s life. The flammable drapes blaze. The cradle blazes. The child is consumed by the flames. Disfigured, burned beyond recognition, the black child seems to be just a child killed in a fire. Even white children turn black when they are burned to death.
    [5]
    â€œWhat will happen here,” declared the Marquis de Cabra, the judge appointed by the king to preside over the Superior Court convened to try the two viceroys, Sobremonte and Liniers, “is that instead of enduring the distant authority of Madrid, Argentina will endure the nearby tyranny of the port of Buenos Aires. You,” he went on in his after-dinner chat to the illustrious assembly of creole and Spanish merchants from the port, “will have to decide whether to open the gates of commerce or to close them. The Crown had to make that decision about its colonies. If you close those gates, you will protect the producers of wine, sugar, and textiles in the far-off provinces. But you will ruin yourselves here in Buenos Aires. If you open the gates, you will become richer, but the interior will suffer because it will not be able to compete with the English. The interior will want to secede from Buenos Aires, but you need economic as well as political power, so there will be civil war. In the end you will be governed by the military.”
    â€œThe military? But they’re all revolutionaries, allied with that pack of scheming lawyers, doctors, and pamphleteers who’ve popped up out of nowhere,” Don Adolfo Mugica, a grain merchant, indignantly observed.
    â€œThe military men won prestige by defeating the English in 1806, and they will derive even more prestige from fighting the Spanish now. Their allies are the Buenos Aires professional class—unimportant people: clerks, poor priests, God knows what,” said Don Ricardo Mallea, famous for his donations to convents that expressed their gratitude by hiding his illegal merchandise.
    â€œLet them all defeat Spain, and then they’ll have to decide between defeating Buenos Aires—that is, all of you—or defeating the merchants from the interior, who will demand protection from