Nervous as a schoolboy, I parked the car in the city center and took her to a restaurant in calle Rochí. The waiter showed us to our table and left us there, lulled by the sound of the piano, smiling while we toyed with the bread.
After a few minutes, the waiter came to take our order: I chose pepper sirloin steak, and I think she decided on salted bass; as a starter, we shared a salad. We ate the first course barely looking at each other. I had thought about leaving the reason for the dinner until dessert, but when the waiter took away the salad bowl and cleared the table for the main course I felt I couldn’t resist any longer, so I put my hand in my trouser pocket where the little box with the ring was. I decided to ask her to marry me at that very moment.
“Wait,” Irene stopped me, her voice trembling. I looked up and saw she was pale. The brooch shone coldly on her chest. “There are... there are a few things you have to know before... well, before whatever it is.”
The waiter arrived then with my sirloin steak and her bass. The moment had passed. The magic had disappeared, as if it had been swept away by an icy gust of wind. I took my hand out of my pocket.
“What kind of things?”
Irene shrugged.
“Things, in general. About my husband, mainly. I want you to know that...” Irene hesitated “...that he’ll always be with me. I will never forget him, I mean.”
I nodded while taking a mouthful of steak. I thought I understood what it meant to be widowed so young.
“But there are other things you don’t know either.”
“That doesn’t matter, dear,” I responded. “We have lots of time ahead of us for—”
“There are some things you might not like.”
A shiver ran down my spine. I had never seen her so serious. Her eyes (I think I already mentioned that they always sparkled, as if she was on the verge of laughter) were completely dry. I’m not making it up. They were dry like those of the fish glittering on her chest. I stretched my arm across the table and took her hand. She didn’t draw it back, but neither did she turn her hand to take mine, nor did she squeeze my fingers.
“Look, Irene,” I said, gulping, “I don’t think there’s anything about you that could upset me.”
“You don’t know how Paco died, for example, or where I studied teaching, or—”
“In Valladolid, I suppose, or the Open University.”
Irene nodded.
“In the OU, yes. In Soto del Real.”
I raised my eyebrows. Irene sighed.
“In a women’s prison.”
And then she told me how her husband died.
She had met Paco at school, one of these cases that everyone has heard about: the children who are described as partners by their classmates long before they really are, who study together at primary school, grow up together, go out with each other at thirteen, break up for a few months and get back together again, until one day they find themselves holding hands in the doorway of the local church, being showered in handfuls of rice thrown by their friends and relatives. Paco, according to what she said, had studied a module in occupational training (I don’t remember exactly whether electrical or mechanical engineering) and he did odd jobs for various local companies.
“He was a perfectionist,” those were the words Irene used to describe him, “so he was rapidly promoted.” Within a year and a half he was already maintenance supervisor in one of the area’s most important factories. He did everything properly and wanted to see everything done properly. A place for everything, and everything in its place, that was his motto.
I don’t suppose his workmates were very happy with that motto. Perfectionists — particularly when they are just above you in the pecking order — can make you uncomfortable. It’s like having a stone in your shoe, or a few grains of sand in your socks.
“He was a dab hand in the kitchen. He was a better cook than me, I tell you!” continued Irene, letting out a chuckle. “Most of the time, when he was on the morning shift and he arrived home in time to eat, he helped me cook lunch. He was a dear. He always put me right when I made a mistake. Always.”
I recall thinking I had known several people just like that in my student days: teachers who want everything done perfectly, with pinpoint accuracy, to their liking; pests that never let you rest until the dissertation is exactly the way they want it, with circular diagrams the exact colour they and only they can see in their mind and the explanation boxes with their bloody rounded edges. Yes, I had known people like that, but I found it difficult to come around to the idea of what it meant to grow up next to someone of that sort, to spend your whole life together with someone like Paco, always criticising you, always having to be right. I knew then the origin of Irene’s nervous movements, as if she always feared she was going to be reprimanded, a “That’s not the way to do it” shouted from behind her only a second before her husband said to her, “Bring it here, come on,” and took whatever it was out of her hands, to show her the correct way to do it.
“The thing is, I went through a bad time,” said Irene after a pause in which she wiped her lips with a napkin, took a sip of wine, and wiped her lips again. “A bad time... and I blamed him; it wasn’t his fault at all, poor thing. He only wanted to help me do things properly, because I was a bit clumsy and a bit... slow. But I thought he was a bad person, you know? And I didn’t deserve that kind of treatment from him, you know, always telling me off and all the rest of it. So I killed him.”
That’s how she said it, all of a sudden, a stream of words (I reckon) she had held back since the moment we met, which I’m sure she held back whenever she met anyone, as if a voice within her said, “Not yet, wait, don’t tell him or you’ll frighten him, that’s not the way to do things, dear, not like that.”
When she had finished, she stared at me, her neck drawn in, her lips pursed, her pupils occupying almost the whole iris, as if her whole body complained, saying, “Are you angry? Do you still love me?”
“Did you say that... that you killed him?” I stuttered, looking around to make sure that nobody else had heard these words.
Irene nodded, and some look akin to desperation appeared on her face.
“That’s why they took me to Soto del Real.”
“But how...?”
“I poisoned him.”
She poisoned him. The words bounced around my head like Ping-Pong balls: She poisoned him, she poisoned him... According to what she told me next, she had bought rat poison the week before, for no particular reason, simply because the drugstore was having a closing-down sale: two bottles for the price of one. That intervening week, however, prevented her from pleading temporary insanity during the trial. Her husband’s murder had been premeditated, said the public prosecutor on the stand; she bought the poison a week before, in the sales, for God’s sake.
“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.