Brion Gysin - The Process

I hung about easy down in the steep street below, under the arches and deep in the shadows, well out of sight. I slouched in an alley or I prowled in a lane, watching who toiled up the steep street of stairs or who drifted down to see Aissha the Whore in her neat little cupboard under the steps. A sailor crawled out on all fours with his buttons undone and his guide, who was waiting outside, collected commission from Aissha, who brazenly jangled all her gold bracelets right up to her shoulder to pay him his cut. Jimmy the Guide steered the sailor down the steps by the mosque and away out of sight. Then, the Barber Drunk with God, who used to have his barber chair in the middle of his one little room right under your house, where he dyed his own beard bright henna-red, shaved his own head and the heads of his customers, and rolled fancy turbans for his patrons on Fridays, strolled out of the mosque chanting night-prayers. He sang a long holy verse on one quavering tone as he slowly moved up from one broad step to the next of your street until, standing right under your window, he suddenly stopped, climbed into his little shop and he slept. That fat Soussi neighborhood grocer, who stayed open all night, slumped over his counter asleep on his vegetables with his head lolling out in the street. For an hour or so a chorus of cocks crowed on the flat roofs of all the houses in town but nobody passed. Then, at last, your new next-door neighbor and my old friend from the train, Si Mohamed, came staggering down from where a pirate-taxi had dropped him in Amrah, dead with sleep because it was the middle of the night, and he was carrying a big roll of straw-matting to go all around the inside walls of his little house.

“Have you become a snail or are you some new kind of turtle, Si Mohamed?” I asked him politely as I bent down low under his load to look into his eyes. I knew he must have been smoking a lot. People who smoke are always out doing crazy things like that in the middle of night.

“Oh, so it’s you!” grunted Si Mohamed. “Here, take the key to my house and open the door for me will you, Hamid, there’s a good lad!”

Mektoub! It was written! Inside that one minute, I was inside the house next to yours, like a bee in the very next cell. Already, I knew exactly how I was going to get into your house. Si Mohamed set down his load and starting making the tea. I passed him a pipe of our great grass from the Little Hills and we passed an hour or so before pink summer dawn, talking about the people we both knew in smuggling who worked the train. Si Mohamed used to run chickens and contraband meat over the border from Kebir into Tanja, so we had all the same friends. I told him the tale of how I had just lost all of my smuggling capital down in Rabat. He could see I had been really cleaned out: he knew the girl. While he was pouring a fresh pot of tea, I said: “Nice little place you got here. Who’s next door?”

Si Mohamed spat on the floor: “A Black Christian! Didja ever hear the likes before in your life! Why, I spoke to the man in the street, the day he moved in on a Friday. Just to look at the man, I thought him a Muslim, of course. I asked if he’d been to the baths, expecting to walk down the steps to the mosque with him, as the muezzin was calling the prayer and, d’you know what he says: I’m a Christian! he says. Annah Nazrani! And him Black, think of that! Says he wants to learn Arabic, too! Then, why can’t he be a Muslim like everyone else in the world, tell me that? You can hear him moving around in there sometimes and I don’t care if he hears me! ”

I calmed down Si Mohamed and got him back onto the subject of matting, until he made me a fairly good price to fix it up on the wall with wood-stripping screwed into pegs in the plaster. I had two days to do it in, while he made his run to Kebir for his chickens and meat. Not one dirham in advance would he give me, and I half thought of selling his matting to eat when, all of a sudden, a much better idea popped into my head. Si Mohamed went out to borrow the tools because that was part of our contract. He was to get the plaster, wood-stripping and pegs and the screws and, above all, a big heavy hammer to knock holes in the walls for the pegs to hold up the mats. I just sat there and smoked while I thought out my plan.

About seven o’clock in the morning the pounding began, you remember? I knew it was waking you up. Si Mohamed hung around for a while, until he was almost late for the train, just to see me put in my first pegs in the thin wall with fresh plaster and, then, he went away satisfied I knew my job. I did and I do. I took that big old hammer in my two hands and, saying: Bismillah! I spat on its head before Si Mohamed was well down the steps. I wet both my hands with more spit that I slicked on its slippery shaft. Hard as that wall was, my hammer was harder! One two three and the wall came tumbling down! There you were like a hole in my picture. Were you really astonished when I came through the wall, right into your room? Really, really? Were you, really? What a scandale!

That same afternoon, we discovered together that cave on the beach all alone. Do you remember that day? The grapes! Do you remember the grapes we hung up for the little djenoun? What a day! Ah, but, of course, that was way back then!

The very next day, you turned purple and green when I wanted to borrow a suit. You Christians are all alike, every last one of you, white or Black. You’re all always screaming: “ Don’t take that! That’s mine! I want it right back! ” Every last thing you lay your hands on is My this and My that! as if anything really belongs to you, here in this world, or really is real. I never could get into my head the way you all feel about things like a suit or a shirt or a life. I can feel that way for a moment, if a woman is mine, but you in American say: “Here’s the keys to the car. Why don’t you take out the wife?” That old yellow suit was the suit you had bought for a wedding, you screamed, and I screamed right back: “That’s right! It’s a wedding I’m going to!” So, I took it and went. Did you think that a wedding of ours is over and done in a couple of hours? Why, up in my village, Jajouka, a wedding lasts eight nights and eight days, a whole week!

Inside three days, I was back and I knocked on your door. When you came down the steps, you took one long look at me and you snapped: “You’ve been sick on my suit!” Somebody had, it was true. You know how it is nowadays at these modern weddings in town, some of the boys bring in a bottle or two that goes around as quiet as sin and as quick. Someone has got to be sick. You made me so mad, I bit blood in my lip as I turned away from your door, blazing with sorrow for you in my heart. I brought water into my eyes just to think how bad you must feel to be talking to me like that for so little. At that moment, I could have given you up. I raced back to the fondouk where the smugglers stable their donkeys. In the room of a friend, I shucked off that suit and I put on my rags. I rolled that old suit in one bundle I took straight to Casa Luxy the Cleaners, on the far side of the Grand Market near the Cinema Rex — now called the Cinema Rif because it belongs to a big stiff from the Rif I used to know on the train. He never lost his capital and so much the better for him. Luxy wanted so much money to clean that suit that I took the ticket and sold it for a few francs more and bought an old seersucker suit out of the grab bag of rags the Americans used to send us to dress ourselves in. With my new clothes in my hand, I went to the hammam where who should I run into but my old friend from the train, Si Mohamed. Before he could say a word about the wall which I had fixed and repainted on your side but not his, I slapped him on the bare buttocks saying: “How’s your Black Nazarene neighbor, these days?”