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?