When I next saw Agua, he was agitated. I could tell, only because he wasn’t grinning. Ladiana had not been happy about my decision to fire her lawyer. It was before training and he was sitting in his room, really Bimbo’s room, slowly tightening his laces, securing his boxing boots: maroon coloured, lighter than a hummingbird, Agua splashed across them in white letters. I told him it was not only about the money, but that she had also arrived two and a half hours late for our appointment without offering any apology, and that says enough about a person.
‘Malditos abogados,’ he said, his grin returning.
I had never really seen Agua angry or even truly worried. He was either frivolously happy or pig-headed because Agua always knew best — except of course when it came to the bureaucracy of life when he would either roll over like a dead beetle or plop his head into the sand until he had convinced himself that it was not important. But if by infrequent chance he did have disquietudes, they quickly evaporated in the pools of sweat he produced dancing with rope, cuffing bags, or standing in front of another fighter and trading sixteen ounces of leather harder than he ought to have done while sparring— the last flakes of his concern swept away by the euphoria of the skirmish.