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MARCHING POWDER

never had many visitors to his room except for one girl who came to see him a few times a week. She was quite a lot younger than he was, and apart from the fact that her name was Raquel and that she was from Santa Cruz, no one knew anything about her. Whenever she came to see him, the door would remain locked until it was time for visitors to leave, at which point he would walk her to the main gate and wait with her in the queue until she left.

Abregon later told me that Raquel was his wife, although it seemed to me, from the way they acted, that they hadn’t known each other for very long, maybe since just before he went to prison, or maybe even while he was inside. He never told me the full story, not even when we became brothers. Anyway, it seemed that Raquel was going to stick by him. Anyone whose wife or girlfriend stands by them and visits them all the time in prison is a lucky man.

When Abregon and I did finally meet, we established a kind of mutual respect immediately. He already knew who I was, because all the foreigners in the prison stood out a mile, and I knew about him by reputation. After a few months we became good friends, and eventually I was one of the very few people he allowed into his room. Even then, we never really discussed personal things too much. Abregon was fairly secretive about his past and we always spoke about things in a general, roundabout kind of way. I liked the way that he talked negocios, though; he talked about it a lot, but he never boasted about his direct involvement because he never needed to.

In fact, he never told me anything about himself even when, after several more months of friendship, we made a brotherhood pact: we swore that we would always do whatever we could to look after each other, and whichever one of us got out first couldn’t rest until the other one was free.

It was strange to have someone that I could count on as a brother, but who wouldn’t tell me anything important about his life. However, that was the way it was with us and the fact that he was so serious and disciplined about it made me even more confident that I could trust him in everything. I knew that he would never get me in trouble if something went wrong with any of our joint negocios, which is why I agreed to do that first prison deal.