EXCERPT In the main room of the Administration house, the old Administrator, adjusting his spectacles and leaning over his large registration book, was interrogating a bumpkin who stood before him with the use of coarse language and harsh slurs. In the room, roofed by bare tiles without a lining, there were only two windows overlooking the paddock, where it seemed there had once been a vegetable patch and a garden. There was still some cabbage and an Arabian jasmine plant growing in the otherwise bare beds. ‘Have you already chosen your plot, you good-for-nothing?’ asked the official, his quill aloft, throwing a bespectacled glance at the settler. The latter stammered, ‘Yes Sir, the sixty-fourth, next to Miss Martinha, on the other side of the Passarinho.’ ‘Not that one!’ started the Administrator. ‘I already have someone down. I might have known you were trying to get Mundico’s lot…’. The bureaucrat had indecorously reserved the best slice of land for his brat of a son.…