The man first saw the bandaged woman as he began to unsee his wife. The Spanish apartment they moved into looked out over the Bay of Biscay, and also the balcony below, where the bandaged woman would sunbake. The man would peer over the edge of their small balcony and watch as the woman would remove layers of clothing, to expose a body wrapped entirely in white bandages, except for a one-inch strip for her eyes, and two little holes for her nose. There were no holes for the mouth.
‘It can’t be burns,’ his wife snapped at him, like he was an idiot, ‘They would heat up in the sun and become inflamed.’
His wife knew many things: the amount of time they could afford to rent the apartment before their money ran out (19 weeks), the number of grey hairs on his head (now in excess of 50), and a passable grasp of the Spanish language. She did not know how the bandaged woman ate.
One day the bandaged woman’s eyes caught the man staring down at her. She waved a bandaged limb, and he scampered back inside. He felt a flush that could not be explained by the morning sun.
His wife had drawn a timetable of activities: to walk to and swim at Playa Xago in the mountains, a dolphin spotting cruise, a scuba diving lesson, and a pottery course taught by a local artist she had once seen in an art magazine she subscribed to. The man understood the activities to be mandatory. He would try, but he held little hope that even the potter could re-sculpt the crumbled ruins of their marriage.
#
They passed the bandaged woman in the hallway as the man lugged two misshapen clay pots up the stairs to their apartment. The bandaged woman struggled with her shopping bags, their weight cutting into the creases of her elbows, forming a small crevasse in the bandages.
‘Help her!’ his wife said.
He placed the pots on the floor and rushed over to the woman. Unlike his wife, he had yet to conquer the Spanish language, and had to mime carrying the bags himself. The woman said nothing, but the man could have sworn he detected a smile underneath the bandages as she let him take the bags. Up close, there was a sweetness to her scent, like fresh baked cinnamon scrolls.
‘Why do you think she can’t speak?’ the man asked his wife in bed that night.
His wife snorted, a sound he used to find adorable. ‘Why do you assume she has anything to say to you?’
He rolled over, admiring the clay pot on his bedside table. He would paint it red, he decided.
#
The following morning, the man woke to muffled conversation drifting into the apartment. He opened the sliding door to the balcony and peered over the railing. His wife sat across from the bandaged woman, a plate of fresh pastries between them. Snippets of the one-side conversation drifted up to him.
‘…our marriage counsellor suggested this…’
‘…he’ll never understand, you know?’
When she returned to their apartment, she carried a plate with two small pastries left amongst a smattering of crumbs.
‘Why didn’t you talk to her in Spanish?’ he asked her.
‘What makes you think she’s Spanish?’
‘Well, she lives in Spain.’
‘So do we. We’re not Spanish.’
He let out a sigh, and blew out the fuse of an argument he didn’t have the energy to fight.
#
The next few weeks the man overheard all the reasons their marriage staggered towards collapse. His wife spent her mornings chewing the ear off the bandaged woman over pastries and coffee, and he spent his mornings peering down at them and wondering what lay beneath the bandages. He couldn’t tell if she meant for him to listen in. His wife would return full of good spirit and Pestiños, but as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, her smile would fall away into a frown, and she would chastise him for never listening.
Whatever they had hoped to achieve by moving to Spain felt beyond the man’s reach. He felt grateful they had no children, no one to explain this mess too, no awkward family gatherings where he would have to fake civility and friendship with a woman who had stolen the best years of his life. No strings attached, just the frayed edges of what could have been. Perhaps if he had spoken up earlier, the wounds that grew and festered between them may have had a chance to heal, but it was too late now.
He prepared two jugs of Sangria for their midday lunch, and awaited her arrival home.
#
‘There’s another woman, isn’t there?’ his wife said after they had finished the first jug and he had told her.
‘What? No. There’s no one,’ the man said. There’s not even us, he thought.
‘I’ve seen the way you look at her, undressing her with your eyes. I bet you’d love to unwrap those bandages and check out what’s underneath, wouldn’t you?’
The man shook his head and rubbed his palms across his eyes. He wouldn’t tell her about the dreams he’d been having. He dreamt of the bandaged woman standing on the edge of a volcano, and the heat searing out of the crater began to set her bandages alight. He shouted at her to come down from the edge, where he could douse her flames, but she remained a burning statue against a soot-filled sky. He cried and screamed, but could do little but watch as the fire engulfed her. Still she stood, even as the embers petered out and turned to ashes. A cool breeze sprang from behind him and began to blow the ashes off the woman. He waited to glimpse what lay beneath, but he woke before the reveal.
‘We’re not getting any younger, and we’re not getting any happier. We’re not what we were before…’ he trailed off, unable to speak of her (or him; it had been too early to tell).
‘Alright, prove it. Let’s go downstairs and take her bandages off, and you can tell me then that it’s not her.’
He drained his glass of Sangria and stood. ‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘I’m the ridiculous one? I sacrificed my job, said goodbye to my friends, my family, all to come her for you, for us. I know you still blame me; I can see it in your eyes.’
That blow knocked the wind out of him. The truth packed the strongest punch.
‘Fine, let’s go. If that’s what you want, then let’s go and see her.’
He turned and marched out of their apartment, his wife trailing behind. He paused outside the bandaged woman’s door, tried to steady himself with a few deep breaths. His wife reached passed him and knocked on the door like an angry parent.
Knock-knock-knock-knock.
The door opened a minute later, the woman’s eyes wide with surprise.
‘May we, come in?’ his wife said in a mixture of broken English and hand signals.
‘She still hasn’t spoken to you?’ the man asked his wife as they were led into the apartment.
‘No. How could she, with her mouth bandaged up so tight?’
The woman stood facing them, the pale afternoon sun streaming in through the balcony window cast her shadow her against the wall.
‘Can you…’ his wife said to the woman, miming unwrapping the bandages from the top of her head.
The woman shook her head, no. The shadow trembled.
The man felt his legs wobble, as if on the edge of a cliff—one step further and they may plummet into oblivion.
‘She doesn’t want to,’ he said.
His wife turned to him, stared into his eyes with an intensity he hadn’t seen since they made the decision, eight years, three months and fourteen days ago.
‘I need you to tell me this time; do you want to?’ she asked.
The man closed his eyes, he could still picture the bare white walls of the doctor’s office, a poster of the human body with all its bones and muscles and organs the only decoration. The doctor waited for an answer, his wife—eleven weeks pregnant—waited for an answer. They already knew what their decision would be, they made a pact before she fell pregnant not to bring a child with a serious disability into the world. They agreed to make the decision before the emotions of pregnancy messed with reason and logic. The question was: did they want to know the results of the test? Did they want to make that decision? He searched his wife’s face for a clue to guide his response, and came up empty.
Her voice snapped him back to the present. ‘Do. You. Want. To. Know?’
‘Yes.’
His wife approached the bandaged woman and drew her in for a hug. The embrace lasted long enough for the man to try and remember the last time he had held his wife that long. He couldn’t.
His wife drew back from the embrace and looked into the woman’s eyes. After a moment’s hesitation, the woman nodded. His wife’s hand found the end of the bandage tucked in behind the woman’s ear, and she began to unravel them.
The man could barely stand, the crashing of his heart against his chest all but knocked him off his feet.
The top of the woman’s head peeked out into open air, like a chick bursting through its shell. A shaven skull revealed itself first, but as the bandages fell away from the woman’s face, the man wondered if he was back in the dream. Her face was an angry red, as if consumed by fire, but when he looked closer, he saw it wasn’t burns, but mountainous eruptions of pustules and abscesses. He could smell cinnamon again, it wafted out from the ointment lathered over her skin. Tears streamed down the woman’s face, flowing over and through the ridges and craters of the old and the new. His wife—focused on her job, kept unwrapping the woman, exposing shoulders red and raw.
‘Stop!’ the man called out to his wife.
His wife stepped back, and let forth a sob as she caught sight of the woman’s body. The woman shook like a leaf in a storm.
The man moved in and drew her into his arms, his own tears fell from his chin, a small tributary to the river cascading down the woman’s face.
He had told the doctor yes, all those years ago. He thought that would please her. The doctor informed them it was more than a 90 percent chance the baby had Down Syndrome. They did what they had agreed upon, and she was no longer pregnant. They told themselves it would be fine, they were still young, they had plenty of time to try again. Now time was no longer on their side.
‘I’m sorry,’ his wife said.
The man pulled back from the bandaged woman and turned to look at his wife. He took her hand, and together they wrapped the bandages back around the woman.
‘She must be deaf,’ his wife said, ‘God. What were we thinking?’
‘I don’t know,’ the man answered.
‘Should we leave?’ she asked.
Before the man could reply, the bandaged woman reached out a hand and placed it on his wife’s arm.
He felt cool fingers grasp his own arm, and looked down; there was nothing but his own bare flesh and memories of a dream. As he stared back at his wife, he wondered how he had grown so far apart from the only woman he had ever loved.
‘I think we should stay a while.’
END
This story was highly commended in Michael Terence Publishing 2020 Summer short story competition and published in ‘All Those Things That You Never Thought Mattered‘ anthology.