Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

No Bones About It by Marc R. Soto[1]

© 2007 by Marc R. Soto; translation © 2007 by Steven Porter

Marc R. Soto was born in Cantabria, in northern Spain, and currently works as a software programmer in Madrid. He uses his spare time to write short stories, and is the winner of several literary awards, including a prize for young talent sponsored by Spain’s largest publisher. One collection of his stories is already in print in Spain, and another is scheduled for release later this year. His work has never before appeared in the U.S.

Irene had one of those insipid and vaguely mouselike faces you immediately associate with religion teachers and old maids who work in libraries: eyes small and dark, slightly watery, as if they were always about to laugh or cry; lips that pursed outwards from her pointed chin when she smiled; hair, fine and straight, cut in a classic bob; teeth, small and even, with no trace of tobacco or coffee. She didn’t have a spectacular figure, nor did she dress in a provocative manner. Everything about her was straight, sober, and calm, like the cloister of a Cistercian monastery.

And in spite of that (or maybe precisely because of it), I fell in love as soon as I saw her in front of me in the queue at Carrefour’s checkout number 4 in El Alisal. I remember the number because when I looked at the sign I realised that was exactly the number of months that had passed since, in an uncharacteristic fit of bravery, I chucked Raquel out. We’d been together for almost seven months, three and a half of which had been total hell. She was so damned insecure! Behind every look that someone gave her, there was criticism; behind every gesture, a lie; behind every silence at the dinner table, an infidelity. With her, it was bound to be stormy. At the end we were falling out on a daily basis, so one day I told her I loved her but we each had to follow our own destinies. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life, and never had I felt more pride or guilt about anything.

Compared to Raquel, the woman who preceded me in the supermarket queue seemed a nun just out of the convent. She was dressed in a brown skirt that fell a few centimetres below the knee, flat shoes, and a beige jacket over which her hair flowed, revealing the smooth curve of her neck once in a while. There wasn’t a great deal in her basket: a lettuce, two tomatoes, and half a dozen apples. It wasn’t necessary to look at her ring finger to work out that she was single.

The conveyor belt carried her shopping into the hands of the checkout assistant. Irene (back then, of course, I didn’t know her name) paid with a brand-new twenty-euro note, and carrying the bag, walked out with short nervous steps. I remained there, resigned to watching how she moved away while the checkout girl scanned the bar code of my new razor blades and said to me in a professional voice, “Four sixty, sir.” I paid, thanked her; she answered, “And thank you,” and got on with her own thing.

When I received my change I saw that Irene, oblivious to the stream of people who were coming and going through the mall, had stopped in front of the window of a shoe shop. I wanted to savour her proximity once more, so I decided to pass next to her before leaving. However, just when I was behind her, she turned around, ran into me, and our bags flew into the air.

“Oh, goodness me,” she exclaimed, blushing. “Sorry. How clumsy I am!”

I smiled while I helped her pick up the apples, which had scattered all around us.

“It was my fault.”

“No, it was me.”

And suddenly we burst out laughing: a man and a woman in their thirties laughing like teenagers in front of the window of a shoe shop in a mall. I know that it’s difficult to believe, but sometimes things happen like that, as if it were written somewhere, in one of those Norma Seller romantic novels.

Anyway, the thing is, we sat down in a cafe, introduced ourselves, and exchanged telephone numbers. We had a long conversation. She kept tucking a rebellious lock of hair behind her ear while fixing her sparkling little eyes on mine. I reeled off the worst jokes in my repertoire one after the other, and she laughed at each and every one of them. An hour and a half later we said goodbye with two kisses on the cheek that left me keen on a third, and promised to phone each other.

On my way to the car, the fresh air of the parking lot made me think again. I didn’t need anybody, thank you very much. After leaving Raquel I had also stopped serving drinks in 7 SINS to concentrate on preparing for the Santander Council entrance exams, as well as on the novel I had been dreaming of since I was seventeen. This was the time when my Casanova lifestyle was to take a U-turn; the last thing I needed was to get embroiled in a relationship. What had occurred in that shopping mall was beautiful and sweet, but superficial, the type of event that tends to get boring when repeated, like a song by Bryan Adams.

With these ideas in mind, I was about to erase Irene’s number from the address book of the mobile when, suddenly, I caught myself writing her a text. No sooner had I sent it than the phone vibrated in my hand and the words “You have 1 message” shone on the screen. My heart thumped in my chest. Our messages had crossed in midair. I opened it, answered, she answered me, and we called each other and laughed like two idiots without really knowing what to say, until we finally agreed to see each other the next day.

During the following months we ate lunch together every day, had dinner almost always, and occasionally made love, slowly and without showing off. She gave night classes in a high school and I didn’t have any schedule, so we used to spend the mornings and the evenings together, walking through the city.

There were aspects of her that I didn’t know about, of course, as well as parts of my life that I tried to avoid. In particular, I never mentioned Raquel or the entrance exams that I was beginning to suspect I would never get through, and she just mentioned Paco, her late husband, in passing until the dinner that I will talk about soon. Irene used to chat about her childhood in Quintanilla del Colmenar, a little village near Palencia that I supposed was made up of a cluster of small adobe houses around a little square with a fountain in the centre, in which the water would certainly freeze in winter. Whereas I spoke to her about the books I had read recently and about those that I was thinking of writing with her by my side. Thinking about it, both are excellent ways for two people to get to know each other.

Sure there were details about Irene that were a little shocking to me, but no one reaches thirty-something without acquiring some quirks. For example, it was strange the way that she tilted her head, as if she was trying to listen to a distant melody that only she could hear, or the way that she sometimes whispered, “What did you say?” when I had been silent. On the whole, though, I took those quirks of hers for little eccentricities, and never gave them a second thought.

Anyway, the months passed and we were still together. The matter seemed serious, so one day I stopped in front of the window of a jeweler and thought, Why not? I went in and bought her an engagement ring. With the ring in my pocket, I called her on the mobile and told her to make herself pretty, that I was taking her out to dinner. And I think with that I gave myself away, because when I went to pick her up, she came out of the high school with an impressive black dress adorned with a golden brooch in the shape of a fish.

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.

“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.

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.”

Sitting in the office of the chief inspector, a slim type with a sallow complexion and an embittered appearance, she confessed everything: how she dissolved the rat poison in her husband’s meal, how she found him dead after returning home. When she was going to tell him about the way she had chopped up her husband’s body, the policeman asked her to wait there a moment and left the office. From her chair, with her bag placed on her lap, she heard him shouting for “the damned voice recorder.” Five minutes later, he returned to the office with it in his hand. He closed the frosted-glass door and warned her that from then on, if she had no objections, everything she said would be recorded.

“It seemed fine to me, so I went on talking.”

Staring at the red light on one side of the voice recorder, Irene explained to the astonished chief inspector how she had chopped up her husband’s body, boiled the remains, and distributed the flesh in the park for the cats to eat, a little every day and always in places some distance apart so as not to raise suspicion.

“When I explained to him how I had ground the bones, I realised that total silence had fallen over the police station. I looked towards the door and saw that all the officers were listening on the other side of the glass,” said Irene, throwing her head back, laughing softly.

“And did it work?” I asked her. “Did you stop hearing the voice?”

“Oh yes! At first he protested quite a lot, and of course he didn’t stop shouting for a minute. But when I finished and the chief inspector asked me to record a statement to confirm that I had confessed of my own accord, without having been subjected to police brutality of any sort, and I agreed, the voice fell silent.”

“Then?”

“I never heard it again. That psychologist was right,” she concluded with a charming smile. “They tried me, found me guilty, and I served my sentence in Soto del Real. My lawyer insisted I shouldn’t mention the voice because, according to him, it would seem that I was making it up to plead temporary insanity and thus would appear guiltier in the judge’s eyes. They reduced my sentence because of work and good behaviour and, as I had finished my teaching degree in prison, they put me on a rehabilitation program. That’s how I ended up giving night classes. And that’s it, I suppose.”

I stared at her without knowing what to say. Irene was looking at me too. After a while, she went on, “Do you still love me?”

Did I love her? I searched deep down for a response and got it almost straightaway: Yes, I loved her. I suppose it had all happened so quickly, so abruptly, that I didn’t have time to reconsider my feelings towards her. Suddenly I remembered the reason why I had invited her to dinner that night. I put my hand in my pocket and took out the little box. I offered it to her, opening it slowly.

Irene opened her eyes wide; I would swear she was on the verge of tears.

“My God! Is it for me?”

I nodded, taking out the ring and placing it on her ring finger. My heart was beating in my chest like a little bird’s wings. Irene raised her hand in front of her face to admire the stone’s glow under a streetlight.

“It’s lovely!” she exclaimed. Huge tears ran down her cheeks. “It’s lovely.”

We had a long hug next to Puerto Chico. The halyards struck the masts like the erratic ticking of a clock. A road-sweeper’s van with its flashing light, very like that of an ambulance, brushed the whole of Castelar.

We went back with our arms around each other’s waists, in silence. The tide had begun to go out and you could hardly hear the sound of the water from the pier. In the Jardines de Pereda there were just a couple of prostitutes, looking for a treble. For them, the night had only just started.

We got in my car and went to her house. Irene shone, pure and clean, like a religious icon. We made love. When we finished, I heard sobbing on her side of the bed. I kissed her tears and asked her why she was crying.

“They’re tears of joy,” she responded. And we made love again.

There’s still one chapter left. One last chapter.

That same night, a few hours after we made love for the second time, I was awoken by a light whisper of sheets behind me. I thought Irene had changed her position, so, after seeing on the clock on the bedside table that it wasn’t yet five in the morning, I got ready to go back to sleep. But I couldn’t. I began to go over and over the maddening story that Irene had told me, recalling every one of her words, the taste of that kiss on the bench in front of Puerto Chico, the twinkle in her eyes when she saw the ring, the joy, and so on. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Irene was the love of my life. In my head it seemed as if I could hear bells, wedding bells. We would have children. We would grow old together. I realised my life was really just beginning that night, and I felt like crying as Irene had done hours earlier: crying out of pure happiness.

The room was dark and silent. The only light was the luminous digits on the clock bathing the chair with my clothes in a faint crimson glow, the chest of drawers at the back, the window with the blinds down. I stayed very still in that calm scene, lying on my side, smiling in the darkness while the smell of our sex pervaded the air I was inhaling. I may have gone back to sleep.

After a while, however, I heard another noise and this time I was wide awake. It was a sharp sound, the scraping of metal on Irene’s side of the bed. Metal scraping against metal in the darkness, slowly, very slowly. All my hair stood on end instantly, and I felt as if my testicles had turned into tiny ball bearings. Somehow, I managed to stay still.

I heard a whisper near my ear, the stifled voice of a woman.

“I don’t want to do it,” whimpered the voice. I shuddered. It was Irene.

The sound was extinguished, but the silence terrified me even more. If the sound had been produced by something being removed — something metallic — hidden between the mattress and the bedsprings, that silence meant it was already right out, in her hand. Suddenly, fleeting images of the pig slaughter filled my head. Knives. Enormous butcher’s knives.

“He’s sleeping. It’s time,” muttered a man’s voice behind me in the darkness. I recalled the way Irene had imitated Paco’s voice, and I felt my heart beat faster in my chest.

“I don’t want to.”

“Do it.”

“No.”

I heard that metallic screeching sound again. I thought about old swords being replaced in their scabbards.

“You’re right,” replied the man’s voice. “Perhaps it’s a little too soon...”

“It is.”

“Too soon,” insisted the voice.

The metallic sound was extinguished again, and only the darkness remained, the red chest of drawers, the clothes upon the chair, the silence. Whatever was there under the mattress had been put back. I stayed still. I heard the whisper of the sheets behind me, and I felt Irene’s breath, her hot breath, next to my ear. And afterwards she slipped her arm round me from behind, her head leaning on the pillow beside me, and her legs tucked into the gap next to mine. Sleeping by my side. Sleeping peacefully by my side.

Now I couldn’t get back to sleep. The clock on the bedside table had just gone seven-thirty. I got up and dressed without taking my eyes off the love of my life, who was still in bed. When she asked in a sleepy voice where I was going, I told her I was on my way out to buy something for breakfast. I quickly closed the door of the flat behind me. I flew down the stairs and went out into the cool street. I began running towards the car, parked a couple of streets away. But before reaching it, I slowed down. On the other side of the street, the smell of freshly baked bread was wafting out of a bakery.

I stopped for some five minutes. I don’t know what went through my head during that time, but what’s certain is that eventually I began walking, crossed the street, and went into the bakery.

I bought two croissants and, with them in a paper bag, returned to Irene’s place, still hearing deep down that sweet tolling of bells.

For Manuel de los Reyes