Durham, NC - It is strange to think that today there is a tribute to Marshall Meyer and that I am not able to be present. It is strange because Marshall is the person whom I remember with most devotion when I think of those sad days, that like many other Argentineans, I went through when I was a young man.

With Marshall we had such an intimate relationship during such tragic moments and yet we never made the time to discuss the simple issues that surround a friendship. Instead, disappearances, tortures, kidnapping, threats, rape, secrecy were the issues that fed our relationship.

What else could we talk about while waiting for hours in front of a prison of the dictatorship while waiting to be allowed to be with my father for a few minutes? And what other issues could we talk about when we returned home after leaving my father not only in prison but also on the verge of a new round of torture?

What could we speak about during those afternoons that we went from one police station to another asking if they had information on a missing person called Timerman?

Even now, I sometimes have difficulty understanding the decision Marshall made to risk his life, as well as that of his wife and children, for a few victims whom he hardly knew, for a country that was not his own and against some murderers who had not included him among their enemies.

Marshall could have been one more of the thousands of liars that are still saying that they did not know what was happening while their neighbors were kidnapped and murdered.

It is even more difficult to understand Marshall's decision to leave Argentina with the return of democracy. When he was already the hero of that struggle, its victims sanctified him, the country had made him one of their sons, and the murderers, powerless, recognized their serious mistake of not having killed him.

Marshall is the enigma of the just man. It is the man who speaks to God to ask him how to be a man.

The first time I accompanied Marshall to visit my father at the prison, we had to wait for several hours standing out in the open. Making us wait was one of their ways of humiliating the relatives of the prisoners. I was used to those tactics, but I was afraid Marshall would get fed up and would not come back to visit him.

Finally, I apologized to him for the long wait. Marshall hugged me, and with a smile that I always miss, said, "Hector, all of these hours we have been praying with our feet." There we began a dialogue on his teacher Abraham J. Heschel when he used to march with Martin Luther King in Selma.

When we finally entered the jail and while they patted him down, I heard Marshall thank the guard for the amazing hours he had to pray and prepare himself to visit Jacobo Timerman.

It is true that often we were in situations where it was more likely that we would be killed than to get out alive. And probably those are stories that should be told more often. But I never understood the meaning of Marshall's life and struggles more than when I saw that smile while we waited at the door of a prison.

And that smile is the one I wanted to share with you today.