Brion Gysin - The Process

Every day for more than a week, your suit hung high on a perch in a tree above the Grand Market while I sat smoking over my tea in my little café from where I could see you walk right underneath it, five or six times a day. Every time you threaded your way through the streets of the town, down from your house in the casbah, down the Street of the Christians out into the Socco Chico where the cafés line the plaza and on up the Street of the Jewelers, out the old gate past the money-changers in their booths and across the Grand Market, the way it used to be before they cut down the trees in the middle all hung with cages of bright singing birds and goldfish in bowls to be sold by the flower-sellers who banked up their blossoms around the white washed boles of the trees against which they leaned smoking their pipes and smiling at any who passed, up past the daily market for maids where the veiled girls hang around to be hired by the day or the hour or even less if they were pretty — well, if you had ever looked up, you’d have seen your old suit cleaned and hanging high in the air like a scarecrow of you. You really were sick. Your face was as yellow as that old mangy suit when you marched through the maids without even a glance and on up the street past the Jewish Community building, right to the end where the traffic cop stands, and not turning right to Dean’s Bar — he’s dead, too bad — climbing on past the Mingih Hotel with a slow turn to the left around the Cape of Good Hope for the hustling guides and a quick glance up and down the rank of tables and chairs on the terrace of the Café de Paris to see who’s new, rich and alive and, then, straight down the Boulevard to the British Post Office. Who else remembers, today, in which building it was? That’s where your check was supposed to come in and, according to you, it never did.

When I needed any money from you, it was always too soon or too late. Us Moors can eat misery for breakfast, dinner and supper and we get used to seeing a thick slice of it on our plates but Hamid is a hakim for money. I can say: presto! and make money come out of your nose. Who needs any more in this life? You were the one who always was asking me questions like: “How old are you, Hamid?” and: “When were you born?” How do I know! Was I there to ask them what time it was when my mother was giving me birth? You think I pop out of her belly to say: What day is this, please, I be born? Do I know? I know only one thing: I am a ruined man. I who was Hamid, King of the Train — I who played cards with the Customs, letting them win — I who could bring anything in, as big as the train, if I liked — can smuggle no more. How was I ruined? By a wicked woman, of course. How old was I then? Oh, maybe fifteen.

You never saw the old train the French made for us, here, hundreds of years ago, with open cars out on the back for us “natives”—Fourth-Class? That train brought me from Kebir to Tanja almost as soon as I could walk. My Pa had put me to school in Kebir in a room big enough for four donkeys or twenty small boys on the floor but the schoolmaster beat me over the head with my own wooden slate. When he found I drew pictures of him instead of my letters, he threw me out in the street. I was sitting in the middle of the road, drawing faces with my finger in the dust, when an old woman grabbed me by the arm. She said: “Little boy, help me carry my baskets to the station and I’ll give you this penny for candy.” What she smuggled to Tanja was mainly market-produce and our rations of sugar and oil which cost more down there. She brought back to Kebir things we really were needing, like bobby-socks, bubble gum, Lucky Strike cigarettes. When we got to the station, she tried to pull me up after her into the train so I struggled and cried but she promised the ride and one more penny in Tanja to carry her things from the station up to the Grand Socco Market — that’s where the smugglers’ traffic took place. Once I saw how that worked, I never had to ask anybody for a ride home.

I worked three years for that old woman and I learned how to smuggle and steal. Fourth-Class in the train carried nothing but smugglers, out in the open car on the back of the train. While we ran through our Little Hills between Kebir and the sea, we hid our merchandise all over the train, fighting each other for the best places and even crawling from one axle to the other underneath the cars. I knew every place. I knew every Customs man, too, and they all thought a lot of me because I gave them a tip every trip. Out of what I made stealing from the old woman and dealing, myself, I paid some to the Customs men and hid some away for my capital. It grew every trip.

One day the old woman came panting up to the station. “Carry me this and carry me that!” she cried. I told her: “Old woman, go carry yourself! I deal on my own from now on.” The first time I ever went with a woman I found in the train, it was nice but nothing much happened. I had to wait another six months for that, so I must have been twelve or thirteen. By the end of that year, I had two women I kept — one at each end of the line all set up in a house to be nice to my friends from the Customs. I did the cooking, though. I don’t trust the hand of any woman alive in the pot, not even my mother. Women put terrible things in your food, calling it love. Here in Tanja, any woman at all will use Borbor to turn a man into a donkey and do whatever she wills. In our Little Hills, all the Master Musicians cook their own food all their lives.

Inside three years, I was Hamid, King of the Train. I rode with the Customs, behind drawn blinds, playing Ronda with cards, pouring out wine which was mine. I kept all my merchandise in with me too, to be safe. The Customs men watched it for me while I checked out the train for them. I was rich for a boy of my age, so all the smuggler-women swarmed around me like flies. For them, I was a prize because they all had daughters to sell. I picked out a girl like an apple who was thirteen or twelve, still unveiled. When we fixed on her price with her father, I paid the down payment in front of the Cadi, our judge. Then, I took all my capital into my hand and set out for Rabat, where I’d never been before in my life, to buy all the things we were needing to make it a really grand wedding.

When I got to Rabat in the late afternoon, I saw just outside the station a boy I knew very well from the train and he was riding around on a brand-new bicycle, purple with trimmings of gold. One hundred francs in advance for every short ride from just here to the corner, that’s what he wanted from me but, because I was rich, I paid for ride after ride after ride. The streetlights turned on while I was learning to ride like a bat, swooping out further afield until the boy called me back because he had to go home, so I followed him there, as blind as a lover. I completely forgot he had a well-known wicked sister who worked the train with only the merchandise she carried between her legs. She already had ruined many a man. That bicycle blinded me or I’d never have walked right into her house with my pockets bulging with money. Before I sat down, she had sent out for five cases of beer and, then, five cases more and, then, we sent out for ten. By the end of the week, we had filled up two rooms of a vacant house next door with beer bottles up to the ceilings and pouring out of the windows and doors.

That woman never would leave me alone. When we went out for a ride, she always ordered a carriage with two horses and she sat there beside me as decently veiled as a wife but, “ Ho! ” she would cry to the coachman whenever we passed in front of a shop. That woman was all the time needing some things. “You just wait for me here!” she would say as she disappeared into that shop for an hour until she called me to come in and pay for everything that she and her brother and I and the coachman could carry out in both arms. I paid and I paid and I paid. I woke up one morning and saw her asleep on the pillow beside me, so I decided to slip on my pants while she slept. Crinkle-crinkle! Rustle-rustle! That crackling noise was my very last five thousand franc note in my pocket, whispering to me: “ Get out, get out! ” At that very moment a handful of coins fell out of my pocket to ring on the floor. “What!” she cried, bobbing up in the bed. “Where you going?”