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.
He helped her a lot, all the time. He explained to her how to spread out the food for the cats in a way that would not attract too much attention. He helped her to cook the flesh in the pot, pointing out exactly when it would be ready. He corrected her every time she did something wrong, when she forgot and left a light on before going out.
“It was as if — as if he wasn’t dead, as if he was unemployed and always clinging to my side, hanging around me.”
Was there a touch of reproach in her voice when she said this? I think so.
When she went to the bathroom, Paco’s voice told her just how much toilet paper she should use so that it wasn’t wasted; he reminded her to wash her hands and put the bar of soap back in the dish.
“A place for everything and everything in its place, dear. How many times do I have to remind you?” Paco’s voice boomed constantly in her head.
When Irene turned up at the police station to report the disappearance of her husband, he whispered in her ear every single word she should tell the officer in charge of the case; in this respect she was fortunate enough to be able to rely on his help. But he also reminded her all the time about how she should make the meals, how to make the bed, where to begin vacuuming in order to make the best use of the cable trajectory. He shouted all the time when anything other than football was on the television. Weeks passed without Irene seeing Médico de familia.
“Frankly,” she said after a pause, turning towards me, “I got a bit fed up with him.”
I recall bursting into laughter.
“Don’t laugh,” she said, and I think she was biting the inside of her cheeks to stop herself from laughing. “Don’t blinking laugh,” she repeated, giving me a little thump on the arm.
I felt an urge to kiss her. I know it may sound absurd, but I loved that woman, and she had just opened up her heart to me. In a way, everything she had told me up till then (how she killed and carved up her husband) seemed somehow so distant and unreal. The real thing was her, just a few centimetres from me. Murderer or not (how do you suppose you can come to terms with that?), I loved her, and whoever said that love turns everybody into kamikazes was right. So I leaned towards her and kissed her.
I think I took her by surprise, because she resisted for a moment, but then her lips relaxed and our tongues played together for quite a while.
Had that woman killed her husband? It was impossible, and at the same time the most logical thing in the world. I would also have wanted to do it had I been in her position, and something deep down told me that was probably the reason why I loved her, because she had had the courage to do with Paco what I would not have been able to in a thousand hellish years with Raquel.
“I love you,” whispered Irene when we drew apart.
It gave me the creeps. She wanted to kiss me again, but I pulled away gently.
“So, what happened next?”
“Next?”
“Yes, since you’ve begun to tell me everything, please finish before I come to my senses.”
Irene smiled. She made herself comfortable again on the bench, ironed out a couple of creases on her dress, and began talking again.
For a while (she said) everything was all right. Nobody suspected anything. The neighbours comforted her and tried to give her hope of finding Paco alive. Kidnapping was mentioned, and Irene knew that some gossips spread the rumour that he had eloped with another woman, but nobody got even remotely close to the truth. In the neighborhood, the feline population increased in spectacular fashion, but nobody put two and two together.
But that voice in her head didn’t go away.
“It was horrible. He was always around, time and again. In the supermarket, he complained when I didn’t buy the chops he liked. I stopped going to the greengrocer’s because he just shouted: ‘Not that apple, the one above! The one above that, look! Can’t you see that one is bruised?’ ”
Irene began to regret having seasoned his meal with rat poison. Now Paco was with her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Finally, a month after the cats had polished off every last scrap of meat, she went to a psychologist and told him as much as she could: that her husband had disappeared, she feared he was dead, and occasionally she seemed to hear his voice. Even that watered-down version of the truth was enough to put the psychologist on the right lines.
“Do you feel guilty about his disappearance, Irene?” he asked her, adjusting his glasses with the middle finger of his right hand.
“Of course not,” she replied quickly.
“It would be the most normal thing in the world. When someone has a limb amputated, they continue to feel pain for a while after it is no longer there. It’s what they call phantom pain. You’ve only been married for a short time, it’s not surprising that...”
Irene paid for the consultancy, but never went back to see that psychologist.
“But I kept thinking about what he had told me, all that stuff about guilt and acknowledging our mistakes in order to make a new start. Paco said it was just baloney, but I think he was a bit scared. On the other hand, I had got to a point where I couldn’t suffer him any longer. Paco had become totally unbearable. So much so that one day I plucked up some courage and went to the police station where I had reported the disappearance of my husband.”
“And did you confess?” I asked, with my elbow leaning on the arm of the wooden bench.
Irene nodded.
“I confessed everything.”