At Wilson’s side, an older man also surveyed the area, but with an air of pride. He was a tall man, almost painfully thin, with a certain agelessness, and with the high leathery cheekbones of the caboclo. With his battered leather hat held by a thong beneath his chin, his leather jacket over a faded shirt, and his worn trousers stuffed into his accordion boots, he looked as if he would have been much more at home on a horse than standing, feet straddled apart, beside his dusty jeep.
“From there,” the old man said, and pointed, “up that ridge to that large mulungú with the red flowers, along the top to those rocks, down that little gully to the fence, and back along the fence to where we are. That’s the section I showed you on the plat. Twenty-five hundred hectares. All of it or a part, if you need less, but nothing smaller than a thousand hectares. It’s too valuable a parcel to split smaller.”
Wilson felt he had to at least try to act the part of a potential land purchaser. He shifted his brief case to his other hand, wishing that the exigencies of his role did not require him to wear a tie and jacket in the growing heat of the day. He also wished he had not been so taken with the Stanislavski method and had not loaded his brief case with several pounds of books dealing with title searches, especially since he had not had an opportunity as yet to unveil them for the old man’s admiration.
“And the price?” he asked. That had to be one of the basic queries.
“Twelve thousand cruzeiros per hectare.”
“That’s?”
“Roughly eight hundred dollars an acre,” said the old man, taking pity on him. He had dealt with the representatives of American companies before.
In his mind Wilson tried to remember if his friend at the First National Bank’s Rio branch had mentioned anything about what a reasonable price for land in this part of the country might be; he wished he had memorized some of the hints he had been given, rather than foolishly depending upon his own intuition. The old man seemed to read a different meaning into Wilson’s prolonged silence.
“It’s a good price,” he said, and stared out over the vast distances visible from their position on the hill. “Land is the only thing worth fighting for, worth having. It’s the only true value there is. It’s better than diamonds; it’s better than gold. You can’t eat diamonds or gold, but you can always eat from the land, and people know it, so its value always rises. And it’s always there, much more valuable than whatever walks over it or stands on it.” He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Wilson. “When the cattle are gone — as they are gone now — and when the factories are gone — as they, too, will be gone some day — the land will still be here. Much more valuable than now, much more valuable than anything that ever stood on it.” He seemed to come back to earth. “It’s a good price,” he repeated vaguely.
“I hadn’t been thinking of that,” Wilson said, remembering another question, this one certainly on his friend’s unwritten list. “Is water available?”
“How much do you need?”
A good question, Wilson thought. At the moment he would have been happy with a glassful, plus some ice cubes. “Not a great deal,” he said, temporizing, “but some.” Inspiration came. “For the boilers.”
“A reasonable amount of water can be furnished, yes,” the old man said, and stared off in the direction of the lake. “Water for production processes, or for cooling, has to be allocated and most of it must be pumped back to the lake after use. Water is still a problem here.” He raised a gnarled hand abruptly. “But it doesn’t diminish the value of the land!”
Wilson nodded and remembered another question. “And power?”
“We have ample power for most requirements. How much do you need?”
If Wilson knew little about water, he knew less about power. Water, at least, was measured in recognizable units and was visible; but power was doled out in things like amps or volts or whatever, all completely unintelligible, and seemed to be invisible, appearing when buttons were pressed. Still, he didn’t want to be ridiculous.
“Mostly for lighting and for a few small machines,” he said, proud of himself for his answer. “Most of the work is handwork.”
“But you still require boilers?”
“Just for—” Wilson stopped dead. Not for heating, obviously, not in that climate. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that question,” he said with an honesty that had been lacking until then.
“Product is a secret, eh? Well, we understand that,” the old man said. “It’s just that we’d like to know your exact requirements as soon as you feel you can divulge them. But there’s no problem. The city will run the power lines to the edge of your property; you’d have to take it from there.”
Wilson nodded and looked about. Above, in the empty sky, an urubú wheeled, searching the land below but finding nothing for its appetite. Below the hill on which they were standing, the road to São Luis ran straight between factories, each planted with flowers and grass, giving the landscape a neat checkerboard effect. For a moment Wilson wished he was actually there to buy property; it seemed a shabby thing to play this charade with the old man. But time was passing and there was work to do, shabby or not. He turned to the old man.
“Judge,” he said, “let me ask you a question. This site seems to be choice. How does it happen to be available? I would have imagined this tract would have been one of the first places to be sold.”
Judge Magalhães stared off into the distance for several moments before answering, as if wondering what to say. At last he sighed. “It is choice. And it was sold — or at least optioned for a very long time, by a very large company, at a good price. But the option was canceled just a few days ago.” He raised his shoulders.
Wilson frowned. “Why?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
“Could you tell me who they are?”
Judge Magalhães looked at Wilson with curiosity. “Why?”
“Well,” Wilson said, now finally seeing the direction he wanted to lead the conversation, “if there’s some reason they didn’t want the land, some reason that might also influence my principals, then quite obviously we would like to discuss the matter with them before closing.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the land,” the old man said a bit testily. “What can be wrong with land? Look at it. Walk over it. If you wanted it for a farm, or you wanted to sink a well for water, I’d be the first to tell you, you were wasting your time. But you say you don’t need much water, and you certainly don’t intend to farm it, or raise cattle on it, so what can be wrong with the land?”
“Still,” Wilson said — and he felt a bit proud of himself at his defense of his principal’s interests — “why did they cancel? Was it the Death Squad killings?” For a moment he wondered if he had gone too fast. The judge’s face lost all expression. Wilson went on quietly. “In any event I intended to speak to you about that. The papers at home have been comparing Paraíso with Argentina, and my principals have been a little concerned...” He allowed his voice to drift to silence.