Bodily Harm (10 page)

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 been done. Papers have been presented. They wince. Sometimes they flinch. If it’s really bad they knit their brows. Come on, be a nice guy, give me a few hints. Tell me about male pain. Where do you feel it the most?

In the ass, Jake said, during conversations like this. Enough with the instant insight.

It’s a living, she said, it keeps me off the streets. Where would I be without it? You wouldn’t feel so much pain in the ass if you’d take the poker out.

That’s not a poker, it’s a backbone, he said. I got it from pretending to be a
goy
. Girls can never tell the difference.

Only between the backbone and the front bone, she said. She sat down on his lap, one leg on either side of him, and began to lick his ear.

Have a heart, he said, I’m a sick man.

Beg for mercy, she said. Do boys cry? We have ways of making you talk. She licked his other ear. You’re never too sick, she said. She undid the buttons on his shirt and slid her hand inside it. Anyone as furry as you could never be too sick.

Enough with the voracious female animalistic desires, he said. You should all be locked in cages.

He put his arms around her and they rocked slowly back and forth, and outside the wooden shutters a bell rang somewhere.

Rennie walks back on the shadow side. After a few blocks she realizes she’s not entirely sure where she is. But she came up to get to the church, so now all she has to do is head down, towards the harbour. Already she’s coming to some shops.

Someone touches her on the shoulder, and she stops and turns. It’s a man who has once been taller than he is now. He’s wearing worn black pants, the fly coming undone, a shirt with no buttons, and one of the wool tea-cosy hats; he has no shoes on, the trouser legs look familiar. He stands in front of her and touches her arm, smiling. His jaw is stubbled with white hairs and most of his teeth are missing.

He makes his right hand into a fist, then points to her, still smiling. Rennie smiles back at him. She doesn’t understand what he wants. He repeats the gesture, he’s deaf and dumb or perhaps drunk. Rennie feels very suddenly as if she’s stepped across a line and found herself on Mars.

He runs the fingers of his right hand together, he’s getting impatient, he holds out his hand, and now she knows, it’s begging. She opens her purse and gropes for the change purse. It’s worth a few cents to be rid of him.

But he frowns, this isn’t what he wants. He repeats his series of gestures, faster now, and Rennie feels bewildered and threatened. She gets the absurd idea that he wants her passport, he wants to take it away from her. Without it she could never get back. She closes her purse and shakes her head, turning away and starting to
walk again. She’s being silly; in any case, her passport is in the safe back at the hotel.

Wherever that is. She can feel him behind her, following her. She quickens her pace; the slip-slop of his bare feet speeds up too. Now she’s almost running. There are more people on the street, more and more as she runs downhill, and they notice this little procession of two, this race, they even stop to watch, smiling and even laughing, but nobody does anything to help her. Rennie is close to panic, it’s too much like the kind of bad dream she wishes she could stop having, she doesn’t know why he’s following her. What has she done wrong?

There are crowds of people now, it looks like a market, there’s a widening that in Mexico would be a square but here is an amorphous shape, the edges packed with stalls, the centre clogged with people and a few trucks. Chickens in crates, fruit stacked into uneasy pyramids or spread out on cloths, plastic pails, cheap aluminum cookware. It’s noisy, dusty, suddenly ten degrees hotter; smells engulf her. Music blares from tiny shops crammed with gadgets, the spillover from Japan: cassette players, radios. Rennie dodges among the clumps of people, trying to lose him. But he’s right behind her, he’s not as decrepit as he looks, and that’s his hand on her arm.

“Slow down,” says Paul. And it is Paul, in the same shorts but a blue T-shirt, carrying a string bag full of lemons. The man is right behind him, smiling again with his gaping jack-o’-lantern mouth.

“It’s okay,” says Paul. Rennie’s breathing hard, her face is wet and must be red, she probably looks demented and certainly inept. “He just wants you to shake his hand, that’s all.”

“How do you know?” says Rennie, more angry now than frightened. “He was chasing me!”

“He chases women a lot,” says Paul. “Especially the white ones. He’s deaf and dumb, he’s harmless. He only wants to shake your hand, he thinks it’s good luck.”

Indeed the man is now holding out his hand, fingers spread.

“Why on earth?” says Rennie. She’s a little calmer now but no cooler. “I’m hardly good luck.”

“Not for him,” says Paul. “For you.”

Now Rennie feels both rude and uncharitable: he’s only been trying to give her something. Reluctantly she puts her hand into the outstretched hand of the old man. He clamps his fingers around hers and holds on for an instant. Then he lets her go, smiles at her again with his collapsing mouth, and turns away into the crowd.

Rennie feels rescued. “You need to sit down,” says Paul. He still has his hand on her arm, and he steers her to a storefront café, a couple of rickety tables covered with oilcloth, and inserts her into a chair next to the wall.

“I’m all right,” says Rennie.

“It takes a while for your body to adjust to the heat,” says Paul. “You shouldn’t run at first.”

“Believe me,” says Rennie, “I wasn’t doing it on purpose.”

“Alien reaction paranoia,” says Paul. “Because you don’t know what’s dangerous and what isn’t, everything seems dangerous. We used to run into it all the time.”

He means in the Far East, he means in the war. Rennie feels he’s talking down to her. “Those for scurvy?” she says.

“What?” says Paul.

“On your pirate boats,” Rennie says. “The lemons.”

Paul smiles and says he’ll go inside and order them a drink.

It isn’t just a market. Across from the café they’ve set up a small platform: orange crates stacked two high, with boards across the top. A couple of kids, fifteen or sixteen at the oldest, are draping a bedsheet banner on two poles above it:
PRINCE OF PEACE
, it says in red. A religious cult of some kind, Rennie decides: Holy Rollers, Born Againers. So the woman in the airport with the Prince of Peace T-shirt wasn’t
a maniac, just a fanatic. She knows about those: Griswold had its lunatic fringe, women who thought it was a sin to wear lipstick. Then there was her mother, who thought it was a sin not to.

There’s a man sitting on the edge of the platform, directing the kids. He’s thin, with a riverboat moustache; he slouches forward, dangling his legs. Rennie notices his boots, riding boots, cowboy boots almost, with built-up heels. He’s the first man she’s seen here wearing boots. Why would anyone choose to? She thinks briefly of his feet, stifled in humid leather.

He sees her watching him. Rennie looks away immediately, but he gets up and comes towards her. He leans his hands on the table and stares down at her. Up close he looks South American.

Now what? thinks Rennie. She assumes he’s trying to pick her up, and she’s stuck here, wedged in between the table and the wall. She waits for the smile, the invitation, but neither comes, he just frowns at her as if he’s trying to read her mind or impress her, so finally she says, “I’m with someone.”

“You come in on the plane last night?” he says.

Rennie says yes.

“You the writer?”

Rennie wonders how he knows, but he does, because he doesn’t wait for her to answer. “We don’t need you here,” he says.

Rennie’s heard that the Caribbean is becoming hostile to tourists, but this is the most blatant sign she’s seen of it. She doesn’t know what to say.

“You stay around here, you just mess things up,” he says.

Paul is back, with two glasses full of something brown. “Government issue,” he says, putting them down on the table. “Something the matter?”

“I don’t know,” says Rennie. “Ask him.” But the man is already sauntering away, teetering a little on the uneven ground.

“What did he say to you?” says Paul.

Rennie tells him. “Maybe I’m offending someone’s religion,” she says.

“It’s not religion, it’s politics,” says Paul, “though around here it’s sometimes the same thing.”

“Prince of Peace?” says Rennie. “Politics? Come on.”

“Well, his name’s Prince, really, and the one you just met is Marsdon. He’s the campaign manager,” says Paul, who doesn’t seem to find any of this odd. “They’re the local excuse for communists, so they stuck the
Peace
on for good measure.”

Rennie tastes the brown drink. “What’s in it?” she says.

“Don’t ask me,” says Paul, “it’s all they had.” He leans back in his chair, watching not her but the space in front of them. “They’re having an election, the first since the British pulled out,” he says. “This afternoon they’ll make speeches, all three parties, one after the other. Prince, then Dr. Minnow, that’s his corner over there. After that the Minister of Justice. He’s standing in for Ellis, who never goes outside his house. Some say it’s because he’s always too drunk; others say he’s been dead for twenty years but no one’s noticed yet.”

“Dr. Minnow?” says Rennie, remembering the man on the plane. With a name like that there can’t be two of them.

“The fish,” says Paul, grinning. “They use pictures here, it gets around the illiteracy.”

The signs and banners are going up everywhere now.
ELLIS IS KING
.
THE FISH LIVES
. Everything looks homemade: it’s like college, like student elections.

“Will there be trouble?” says Rennie.

“You mean, will you get hurt?” says Paul. “Yes, there will be trouble. No, you won’t get hurt. You’re a tourist, you’re exempt.”