"I didn't buy it for him. I was thinking of drinking it myself, but then..."
Then she thought it would be better if her husband drank it. Her husband, who every time he got home found reason to complain, to reproach her for the slightest thing, to tell her with words bathed in affection that she was useless.
She poisoned him. She dissolved rat poison in the bottle of wine, in the soup pan, in the chicken sauce. She wanted to make certain. Then she went out and left a note for Paco saying that she was off to see her sister, but lunch was in the fridge. She didn't want to be there when he died. She wasn't courageous enough.
Suddenly, the sirloin steak I had been enjoying up to that point no longer appealed to me. I dropped the fork on the edge of the plate and looked at Irene, without knowing for sure if I should believe what she was telling me. She was toying with a bit of fish, slowly breaking it into small pieces. Apart from that, her meal was still intact.
"Those are the things...” she began to say, but she looked away, nodded, and then looked at me again. “Well, the things you could find out. Do you still want to be with me?"
How the hell should I know?
We didn't finish the dinner. At least I didn't feel up to it. I paid the bill and we left the restaurant together. It had turned cooler outside. The nights are cold in October. When I felt in my pocket, next to my fingers, the warm bulge of the little box with the ring, I withdrew my hand quickly, as if something had bitten it.
* * * *
We took a long stroll together to the bay. The tide was high and the waves broke near the pier. The prostitutes had begun their procession through the Jardines de Pereda, but they didn't say anything. If you don't look at them, they don't look at you.
When we reached the Palacete, I turned to gaze at her. Irene was startled, as if she feared I was going to tell her something unpleasant. The sea behind her was an oil slick. Beyond that the lights of Somo and Pedreña twinkled, like gems in a black velvet display stand.
"What did you do next?” I asked finally.
"Next?"
"Yes, next. You went back home? Called the police? What did you do?"
Irene nodded and took a deep breath.
"I went back home."
* * * *
She went back home, but it wasn't easy. She had spent the evening wandering through the town, feeling that the whole world was watching her. She didn't dare go back, because she didn't know if Paco had eaten the soup and the chicken and drunk the wine that she had left for him, or if, on the contrary, after noticing the meal tasted strange, he had preferred to cook something himself. He was such a good cook!
However, at about nine in the evening she decided to return. She went up the stairs to put the moment off. They lived on the fourth floor; according to her own words, every step was a little Everest. When she got to her door, her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the key ring on the floor twice before she was able to put the key in the lock properly and open it.
"Holy smoke!” exclaimed Irene after a pause. She was scared to death!
She closed the door after her and crossed the hall. She moved forward, all ears. Paco used to eat with the telly on. From the corridor she could hear the newsreader handing over to the weather-girl. She stopped for a few minutes next to the kitchen door, rooted to the wall, listening for the sound of crockery, the noise of plates in the kitchen sink or Paco's groans as he lay dying on the linoleum. After a few minutes in which only the weather forecast broke the silence in the house, she went in.
* * * *
"He was dead, and the kitchen ... my God, the kitchen was a mess: plates scattered here and there, a chair overturned, pieces of chicken and noodles all over the place. Paco was in one corner. Fortunately he'd landed facedown, because if I'd seen his features, I ... I don't know..."
A bitter breeze like the sharp edge of a sheet of paper drifted through the bay and Irene shivered. I hesitated for a moment, but finally put my arm around her shoulder. That gesture I had repeated so many times over the last few months gave me the creeps on that occasion. Irene snuggled up to me and put her little head on my shoulder, with that combination of fear and admiration that I had fallen in love with. I turned my face towards her and looked at her, so small, so delicate. Who would have imagined she was a murderer? How can you know what's hidden behind any given face, what's rotting slowly under the gentle reflection of a calm bay?
Shit, who can know the first thing about another person? What other way is there of getting to know her, apart from asking questions until the whole truth comes out?
After all that I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I had to know everything. Beyond a certain point you have to know the details, you have to lift the blanket and look at the corpse, lower the window to pass next to the crashed car that has kept you waiting two hours on the motorway. Beyond a certain point it's no longer possible to change the channel during a Don't Drink and Drive advert.
Anyhow, we turned round. We had already reached Cuesta del Gas. Up ahead, Avenida de la Reina Victoria is long and, during the night, lonely. The case of the female teacher murdered there a couple of years before came to mind, so I insisted we go back.
"What did you do when the police arrived?"
But Irene shook her head.
"You didn't call the police?"
Irene shook her head again.
"Christ!"
"I was frightened."
"Frightened of what, for God's sake! He was already dead!"
Irene shrugged.
"I didn't want them telling me off again. The police, just like Paco, just like you now...” said Irene. Her bottom lip was trembling. I didn't know whether to make a run for it or console her or ... well, I didn't know what the hell to do.
"But then, what did you do?"
"Cleaning. I cleaned everything. I mopped and wiped up. I cleared the table and the hob. And when everything was as clean as a new pin, I sat down in the living room and switched on the telly. They were showing that series—I don't remember what it was called—that Emilio Aragón was in. I loved it. I always watched it although Paco thought it was garbage."
I got the impression that this was said with a degree of pride in her voice.
We sat on one of those benches in Castelar that look directly onto the boats rocking in Puerto Chico. The halyards echoed as they rattled on the masts of the sailing boats. I, admittedly, was in a state approaching shock and at that point had decided to accept whatever she said to me. That's why, instead of jumping off the bench and beginning to cry out like a madman because the woman I loved had killed her husband and then sat down to watch Médico de familia, a soap opera about a family doctor, I merely asked her if she remembered anything about that day's episode, but she shook her head, pinching her bottom lip with her thumb and the index finger of her right hand.
"No, to be honest, I don't remember what episode it was, but I don't think Emilio Aragón was still with Lydia Bosch, because I'd already seen the installment with the wedding in Soto del Real. I switched on the telly but no, I didn't pay much attention, really. In fact, I was thinking about what to do next.
"Well, in this neighborhood there were many cats, so..."
* * * *
It was an old neighborhood next to an overgrown park. The cats kept the rats under control, that's why the neighbours were delighted with the cats and put out the previous day's leftovers by the doorway for them, in little plastic plates or crumpled-up tinfoil. It was common at five o'clock in the evening to see half a dozen alley cats prowling around the area, waiting for their ration of leftovers. On Boxing Day they had a special menu.
Irene thought it would be a good idea for the cats to eat her husband's remains. Sitting on the sofa in the living room, pinching her bottom lip with her thumb and index finger while she watched the grandfather scold Chechu for lying about the exam results, she decided that the best course of action would be to chop her husband's body into pieces small enough to boil in the pressure cooker
, so that the flesh came away from the bone. When she was a little girl she had taken part in the pig slaughter in Quintanilla del Colmenar, so she had some idea about how to chop up meat.
"The problem was, I didn't dare turn him around and look at his face,” said Irene with a vacant gaze. “I loved Paco. I didn't understand how I had been able to do that. What could I have been thinking? How was I going to manage to chop him up while he was looking at me? I was desperate!"
However, after a while, a solution occurred to her. Taking advantage of a commercial break, she got up off the sofa and went back to the kitchen. After raking around in one of the drawers, she took out a plastic bag. Once she had put it on her husband's head, she turned the body over. Paco had been sick before he died, and his shirt was a mess, so Irene stripped him and threw the dirty laundry into the washing machine.
"It's better to wash off those stains as soon as possible,” she said. “If not, the marks remain."
After putting the washing machine on, she returned to the kitchen. I pictured her then, running about the house with those little steps of hers, short and nervous, without totally realizing the seriousness of what she had done, and what she was about to do. She certainly would have disheveled hair and tension in her face. She said she couldn't find any suitable knives and had to look in her husband's toolbox, but actually I think she was too nervous to see anything except the naked corpse on the floor.
Looking back, in retrospect, I wonder how it is possible that I didn't make a run for it that night. I still had six months ahead of me before the entrance exams were held, enough time to make up the lost hours; and, furthermore, the half-completed draft of the novel I had dreamed of was lying unfinished on my desk. Why did I stay there? I don't know.
To be honest, I felt safe. I listened to Irene coldly and with some scepticism, like the time, at the age of eight, when I listened carefully to the stories of my imaginative twelve-year-old friend telling me at playtime about his adventures as a secret CIA spy: without believing all of them, but savouring the possibility (just the possibility) that they were true.
But with Irene it wasn't the same. We weren't primary-school children, neither of us were kids. I didn't have any reason to doubt what she was telling me except—except the outlandishness of the whole thing, of course. It was all totally absurd, grotesque, like a bad horror film that basically makes you laugh.
Irene, visibly affected, was telling me how she had killed her husband, and I was treating it all like a story, like entertainment, savouring the possibility (just the possibility) that it wasn't true.
"Then I took one of Paco's saws and carried it to the kitchen,” said Irene, next to me. I looked at her. She was gorgeous under the streetlight.
"What saw?” I asked, going round the bend.
"A big metal one, like this,” she replied, drawing a rectangle in the air.
"A hacksaw. It wouldn't have a blade to cut metal, would it?” I said, enjoying myself.
"Well, yes, I found that out later, but at that time I didn't know how to use the other handsaw, it had very large teeth! So I picked up the hacksaw and took it to the kitchen."
She kneeled down next to Paco's body, on a folded towel so that she didn't hurt her knees, and began to move the saw over her husband's right arm, at elbow level. The blade sank slowly in, covering everything in blood. She soon began to perspire.
"I, well, I think I was crying, because despite the plastic bag that was Paco, you know? I knew every single scar of his, every one of his moles. It was Paco. I heard a voice inside me ... a quiet voice that told me I was doing it wrong, that it was going to be a right mess, that wasn't the way to ... to chop up a person, that I would have to put a plastic sheet underneath to collect the blood, that, basically, I was a bad wife."
Irene was devastated. I felt sorry for her, and wouldn't deny I felt a bit guilty about putting pressure on her to keep talking. She had probably been in a terrible state that night in the kitchen. Who knows what depths she plummeted to after what she did that day?
"As I was sawing off my husband's arm, the voice got louder and louder until I finally recognised it."
Kneeling on the towel next to Paco's body, with the bloody saw still in her hand, with her blouse splattered in blood and a crazy look on her face because she didn't manage to cut off the arm as it should be done, she recognised the voice she was hearing inside her head.
* * * *
"It was Paco's voice,” Irene murmured.
I nodded. I was expecting something like that, really. In fact, it would have surprised me to hear anything different at that stage. In a way, it was the only thing that made any sense. I suppose, in her position, I would have heard my mother's voice.
A woman approached from the esplanade, walking slowly. She pressed her bag tight against her side, as if she was worried that at any moment someone might snatch it. I waited until she was some distance from our bench before carrying on.
"And what did he say to you?” I asked her.
Irene blushed, cleared her throat, and then lowered her voice by two octaves. “He said, ‘What the hell are you doing with that hacksaw in your hand, dear? Do me a favour and get the handsaw, can't you see that's for metal?’”
My laugh reverberated like a clap of thunder in the silence of the city. The woman with the bag, who was already ten metres ahead, hesitated and turned round to look at me for a second before walking on, this time more quickly. I kept on laughing, deeply relieved.
It was all a joke. Now I got it, she hadn't killed her husband. She had made everything up, and I had taken the bait, hook, line, and sinker. It did not exactly match her usual sense of humour (which was rather inoffensive—the odd pun, the odd risqué joke) but, damn it, at least she wasn't a murderer.
I was still laughing when I turned to admit defeat, but what I saw froze the laugh on my lips.
Irene was serious, deadly serious.
"What are you laughing at?"
"It's all a joke, isn't it?” I replied, and I believe for the first time I thought that it wasn't, that she wasn't joking.
"What is?” said Irene, with an insecure smile.
"That you killed your husband. Everything."
This led to an uncomfortable silence, until she replied, “Listen, it's not at all easy for me to tell you this. If you are going to laugh..."
"No, no,” I apologised. “Look. Forgive me. Go on."
"No, it's all the same, really."
"No, go on, please. Did you do it?"
"What?"
"The saw. Did you do it?"
"Yes, of course."
* * * *
Irene did as she was told, and found out that, as usual, her husband was right. Thanks to the handsaw she made quicker progress, and before the clock struck twelve she had chopped up the corpse and put the entrails into a bucket. The question of the head remained, of course, but Paco told her not to worry about that.
"We'll bury it on the hills, it's not a big deal,” said that inner voice once the blood in the bucket had been emptied into the toilet bowl and flushed several times. “What's important now is deciding what we're going to do with the bones."
"I don't know,” replied Irene aloud, while she went back to the kitchen with the bucket she had cleaned under the spray of the shower. “Cats don't eat bones, and some of these bones are very large. Dogs, perhaps..."
"Forget the dogs,” answered the voice. “I'll tell you what we'll do."
* * * *
This was the most absurd story I'd ever heard, and I can assure you that I heard more than one absurd story when I was making a living in the 7 SINS. Had I really been about to ask that woman to marry me? Had the evening really started with me picking her up at the gates of the high school where—for God's sake—she gave night classes? How was it possible for us to get to this extreme in just a few hours?
I looked at Irene. She continued talking and stared out at the bay, her hands gesticulating in the air while she explained to me
that she had ground the bones into small fragments that she then crushed in the Thermomix until they were reduced to a greyish powder. She talked about this in the same matter-of-fact way she would have explained to me how to make cod croquettes. Sometimes she hesitated for a few seconds, as if she was listening to the voice she recalled, Paco's voice, and then went on talking.
I think if I had left, she would have kept talking and talking all night on that bench, without caring that nobody was listening to her. Was it true what she told me? I suppose it's a fair question, especially after everything she had said up to this point in the story. Well, I didn't know it then, but sometime later (when I got over the shock of that night), I did a bit of research on the Internet, just a bit: put a name in a search engine and read the results related to that name.
Yes, it was true. Irene had been imprisoned in Soto del Real in 1996, charged with first-degree murder with aggravating factors: She poisons husband and feeds him to cats, said the caption below the photo in which Irene's small dark eyes had been touched up, giving them a yellowish shine: The neighbours were alarmed by the unusual number of cats populating the area but didn't raise the alarm, they wrote in the piece. Once analysed by forensic specialists, the dust on the park's gravel paths was discovered to contain very high levels of calcium. That and other evidence, which is confidential information for the moment, appears to indicate that I.J.M. did not lie when she claimed to have pulverised the remains of her husband's bones.
Yes, it was true, it was all true.
"The idea to grind the bones was Paco's,” continued Irene, “and it was a great idea, really. It would never have occurred to me in a hundred years. Such a darling..."
Irene kept talking. I listened, in wonder.
* * * *
From that time on, Paco—his voice, at least—went everywhere with her. It accompanied her on each walk in the park, when she scattered the fine grey powder her husband's bones had been reduced to. And he talked to her. He always talked to her.
EQMM, September-October 2007 Page 21
