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plain. His soul and his nature seemed harmonious reflections of each other, mutually attracted like lovers. As Baltasar emerged from the bad dream of the herd of wild horses, that was the sensation he sought and appreciated with greater intensity. He regretted the presence in the coach of the complaining, chattering Spaniards, who kept him from consummating his marriage with the landscape. He let the rumble of the wheels over the stones and ruts of the road to Córdoba deafen him so that the desired communion could take place despite all obstacles, in the unassailable silence of his soul.
    What would these men he didn’t know who were traveling with him say if he told them what he was thinking?
    But instead of irritating them with a sonorous “Welcome to the pampa, you Spanish bastards!” Baltasar began to feel sorry for himself. Having identified himself with that face of infinity which is the great Argentine plain, he would have wanted to achieve his ideal in a flash: the identification of Baltasar Bustos’s soul with immortal nature. The reader of Rousseau knew that the soul, reunited with itself after discarding its useless baggage, can finally enjoy the universe and possess the beauty that enters the spirit through the five senses.
    Now alone on a mule, on the road to his father’s wretched estate, he finally had the opportunity to envision what the noisy presence of the contemptible Spanish bastards had blocked out during the trip from Buenos Aires. Yet the hubbub around him and the dream of the wild herd had allowed him a communion more certain, though thwarted, than had this solitude on muleback in which the pampa, its creeks, its peach trees, its leagues and leagues of hard lime soil inhabited only by maddened ostriches seemed to him so many bleak, opposing accidents. The pampa was no longer the mirror of God on earth. Now, instead of the much desired communion, all he saw on the horizon were problems, contradictions, untenable options, all crowding his overly receptive spirit.
    He left Buenos Aires carrying little baggage. A wicker suitcase, an umbrella, and three or four of his favorite books: La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Confessions, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The kidnapped child was not in his luggage. The wet nurse had disappeared along with her sister, the flogged mother of the black baby. He’d searched for her with his two friends, but their attempts had all failed. The two women had carried out their promise to Baltasar Bustos: the child of the Marquise de Cabra would live the life of the son of a sick, publicly flogged black prostitute. Justice, for Baltasar, would thus be carried out. In the suffering of the white child’s mother? The banks of the road darkened when he tried to justify his action (to himself, not to win sophistic arguments with his polemical friends: alone on a mule, with an umbrella, a wicker suitcase, and books by the Citizen of Geneva—with no one to speak to except nature, with which he sought to become one, freely and joyously). The goal of justice is not universal happiness. The person punished suffers so that the person rewarded may rejoice. That’s the norm. But it was a penal norm, worthy of the celebrated Italian Beccaria, not of the totally free Genevan, Rousseau. And the norm was even less sure in its application to the sufferer, in this case a woman for whom Baltasar Bustos—alone, twenty-four years of age, riding a mule—felt a passion that daily grew more unbridled.
    Didn’t the woman Ofelia Salamanca deserve a more immediate devotion and selflessness than that called for by the ideas of Baltasar Bustos (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) on Nature and Justice? The shadows of the banks pierced his soul when he replied to himself that this was true. He would never find nature or justice except through a real person, a beloved person moreover, especially if, as it became clearer with every moment in his