Free Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood Page B

red flowers, smooth fat leaves bulging with sap, brightly coloured birds with huge beaks and yellow eyes, and St. Anthony is black. The demons are noticeably paler, and most of them are female. St. Anthony is on his knees in an attitude of prayer, his eyes turned up and away from the scaly thighs, the breasts and pointed scarlet tongues of the demons. He isn’t wearing one of those bedspreads she remembers from the Griswold Sunday school handouts but an ordinary shirt, white and open at the throat, and brown pants. His feet are bare. The figures are flat, as if they’ve been cut from paper, and they cast no shadows.
    There are postcards of the painting on the table, and Rennie buys three. She has her notebook with her but she doesn’t write anything in it. Then she sits down in the back pew. What part of herself would she pin on the skirt of the black Virgin now, if she had the chance?
    Jake went to Mexico with her. It was their first trip together. He didn’t like the churches much: churches didn’t do a whole lot for him, they reminded him of Christians. Christians have funny eyes, he said. Clean-minded. They’re always thinking about how you’d look as a bar of soap.
    I’m one, said Rennie, to tease him.
    No, you’re not, said Jake. Christians don’t have cunts. You’re only a
shiksa
. That’s different.
    Want to hear me sing “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb”? said Rennie.
    Don’t be perverted, said Jake. You’re turning me on.
    Turning? said Rennie. I thought you were on all the time.
    It was a whole week. They were euphoric, they held hands on the street, they made love in the afternoons, the wooden louvres of the old windows closed against the sun, they got flea bites, there was nothing that didn’t amuse them, they bought dubious cakes and strange fried objects from roadside stands, they ate them recklessly, why not? They found a sign in a little park that read,
Those found sitting improperly in the park will be punished by the authorities
. It can’t mean that, said Rennie. We must’ve translated it wrong. What is
sitting improperly?
They walked through the crowded streets at night, curious, fearless. Once there was a fiesta, and a man ran past them with a wickerwork cage balanced on his head, shooting off rockets and Catherine wheels. It’s you, Rennie said. Mr. General Electric.
    She loved Jake, she loved everything. She felt she was walking inside a charmed circle: nothing could touch her, nothing could touch them. Nevertheless, even then, she could feel the circle diminishing. In Griswold they believed that everything evened out in the end: if you had too much good luck one day, you’d have bad the next. Good luck was unlucky.
    Still, Rennie refused to feel guilty about anything, not even the beggars, the women wrapped in filthy
rebozos
, with the fallen-in cheeks of those who have lost teeth, suckling inert babies, not even brushing the flies away from their heads, their hands held out, for hours on end it seemed, in one position as if carved. She remembered stories she’d heard about people who mutilated themselves and even their children to make tourists feel sorry for them; or was that in India?
    At the end of the week Jake got a case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Rennie bought a bottle of sweet pink emulsion for him at the corner
farmacia
, running the gauntlet of sucking mouths, and he allowed himself to be dosed. But he wouldn’t lie down. He didn’t want her to go anywhere without him, he didn’t want to miss anything. He sat in a chair, clutching his belly and limping to the bathroom at intervals, while Rennie consulted him about her piece. “Mexico City On Less Than You’d Think.”
    I’m supposed to be doing this other piece too, she said, for
Pandora
. It’s on male pain. How about it? What’s the difference?
    Male what? Jake said, grinning. You know men don’t feel pain. Only when they cut themselves shaving.
    It’s just been discovered that they do, she said. Tests have