Free Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood Page A

any, and in particular she’s not supposed to ask for a discount.
    The hotel is on the second floor of an old building. Rennie goes down the outside stone staircase, the steps worn concave in the centres, to an inner courtyard that smells of piss and gasoline, then under an archway into the street. Sunlight hits her like a wind, and she rummages in her purse for sunglasses. She realizes she’s stepped over a pair of legs, trousers with bare feet at the ends, but she doesn’t look down. If you look they want something. She walks along beside the wall of the hotel, patchy stucco that was once white. At the corner she crosses the main street, which is pocked with holes; thick brown sludge moves in the gutters. There aren’t many cars. On the other side of the street is an overhang supported by columns, a colonnade, like the ones bordering the
zócalos
in Mexican towns. It’s hard to tell how old things are, she’ll have to find out. The tourist brochure says the Spaniards were through here, once, along with everyone else. “Leaving a charming touch of Old Spain” is how they put it.
    She walks in the shade, looking for a drugstore. Nobody bothers her or even looks at her much, except for a small boy who tries to sell her some spotty bananas. This is a relief. In Mexico, whenever she left Jake at the hotel and ventured out by herself, she was followed by men who made sucking noises at her with their mouths. She buys a straw hat, overpriced, in a shop that sells batiks and shell-work necklaces made from the vertebrae of fish. It also sells bags, and because of that it’s called Bagatelle. Not bad, thinks Rennie. There are familiar signs: The Bank of Nova Scotia, The CanadianImperial Bank of Commerce. The bank buildings are new, the buildings surrounding them are old.
    In the Bank of Nova Scotia she cashes a traveller’s cheque. A couple of doors down there’s a drugstore, also new-looking, and she goes into it and asks for some suntan lotion.
    “We have Quaaludes,” the man says as she’s paying for the lotion.
    “Pardon?” says Rennie.
    “Any amount,” the man says. He’s a short man with a gambler’s moustache, balding, his pink sleeves rolled to the elbows. “You need no prescription. Take it back to the States,” he says, looking at her slyly. “Make you a little money.”
    Well, it’s a drugstore, Rennie thinks. It sells drugs. Why be surprised? “No thank you,” she says. “Not today.”
    “You want the hard stuff?” the man asks.
    Rennie buys some insect repellent, which he rings up half-heartedly on the cash register. Already he’s lost interest in her.

    Rennie walks uphill, to the Church of St. Antoine. It’s the oldest one left, says the tourist brochure. There’s a graveyard surrounding it, the plots enclosed by wrought-iron fences, the gravestones tipping and overgrown with vines. On the lawn there’s a family planning poster: KEEP YOUR FAMILY THE RIGHT SIZE . No hints about what that might be. Beside it is another poster: ELLIS IS KING . There’s a picture of a fattish man, smiling like a Buddha. It’s been defaced with red paint.
    Inside, the church is completely empty. It feels Catholic, though there are no squat guttering red candles. Rennie thinks of the Virgins in Mexico, several of them in each church, dressed in red or white or blue or black; you chose one and prayed to it according to yourneeds. Black was for loss. The skirts of the Virgins had been studded with little tin images, tin arms, tin legs, tin children, tin sheep and cows, even tin pigs, in thanks for what had been restored, or perhaps only in hope that it might be. She’d found the idea quaint, then.
    There’s an altar at the front, a table at the back with a slotted box where you can buy postcards, and a large picture on the west wall, “by an early unknown local artist,” says the brochure. It’s St. Anthony, being tempted in the desert; only the desert is bursting with tropical vegetation, vivid succulent