Brion Gysin - The Process

“To the hammam to wash,” I lamely replied as I kissed her.

“My brother goes with you!” she snapped. “Here, let me see that.”

I gave up and gave her the works. When the last round was emptied, she threw me out on my ear. I went shambling slowly away down her alley, singing out at the top of my voice, so all the neighbors could hear:

Love is like a snake

That glides between your thighs

Before you feel it strike

It has put out both your eyes!

I was ruined and I knew I was ruined so I wandered along to the Street of the Women. That’s gone, now too, like the little old train and all. Even the big iron door they used to have to keep the women inside doesn’t hang any more in the arch of the gate. There, I saw a man with a ladder and pails, so I hailed him to say I was an expert whitewasher and painter out of a job. He and I walked together into the very first house on the right where we talked the Madrona into a price to get her whole place done up spick and span, inside and out. When they gave me the money for whitewash, I came back with bright red, yellow, blue, brown and black to paint out a story of mine. Back in Tanja, I painted the walls of my house with girls in a jungle full of monkeys, devils and men, evil spirits and lions and birds but these walls in Rabat were big! I told the man I wanted no wages if he’d let me do all the work. I want what I want so, when he looked suspicious, I told the Madrona to spill him a beer, as I tickled her tired old tits.

When I laid my equipment out on a table, all the girls in the house came fluttering down like a covey of quail to see what I got. What I got is a lot, so I gave them all a peck on the cheek and a pinch on the ass as I pulled out and showed them my big magic brush. There were just seven girls in that house, I remember, so it took me a whole week to paint my way through. I could brush only one girl a night because they all thought it was such a treat to be in my picture that they wanted to take it in turns to be brushed by me. Before I got finished that first house of girls, there was talk of my brushwork all over the quarter and the girls in the very next house were yammering and lullilooing to get theirs done, too. They just couldn’t wait for me to come over and do the whole house. In the end, I did the whole quarter. I got my big brush in there solid and got down to work but, first, I had to jerk my equipment away from the Madrona who’d seen what a job I’d done on her girls and wanted hers, too, right there behind the cash-box. I would sooner have stuck my fist in the till than her box but she gave me the gold ring I drew off her finger by force. I gave that ring, later, to a girl in a house at the far end of the street and, would you believe it, that almost started a war. Those girls fight! Any one of those girls could lay a man flat on the floor from one bang on the head with her bracelets. When one house of girls got into a war with another house, they slashed each other with switchblades or bottles and glasses they broke on the bar. When I hear them breaking the glasses, I run! In one of those houses, a girl once cut off a guy’s root at the root!

I was there a long time, painting houses and girls. Let me see: a girl a night times seven nights in a week is seven girls, isn’t it? That’s a week and the weeks in a month are four with some little scraps left over now and then, so I’ve got little scraps of girls to add up but that’s hard. Like the fat Mina Smina I had on the steps when the Madrona screamed out that old song:

Oh, you pay on the landing and not on the stairs!

excepting she said: “You paint on the landing,” because she saw I had my brush out. So, that makes about thirty a month. It is more? And how many months would there be in a year? Only twelve? Oh, there were a lot more houses than that in Rabat, in those days. I painted a lot. It was all one great big picture, you see. It began as soon as you walked in the door and there was the music and dancing and drinking and girls and my pictures under the light. There were thousands of soldiers and men swarming through there every night in the week, not to speak of the tradesmen, musicians, gamblers and pimps who lived in the place, which was like a small town. Now, it’s gone. Now, it’s all torn down or people are living in there who don’t even know or could guess some of the things that went on in their rooms. Here and there, maybe, there might be a trace of my picture left in some dark corner under the stairs but, little by little, ever since Independa, they whitewashed it over until there isn’t a trace of my brush in Rabat. I’ve heard French people saying that painting is French.

The old train that used to run back to Kebir has gone, as the Customs have gone; as the houses and the paintings and girls have gone, now, forever. At the Customs, they said:“Why, we heard you wuz dead! Ayesha bought a taxi with your capital and her brother can drive it. What you gonna do, now?” When they saw I had no more capital to start in the business again, they turned wicked and kicked me off the train in Kebir, where I went to the house of my mother: as a matter of fact, that house is mine, in my name. You’ve seen it often enough: you know how it is. It wasn’t such a ruin, in those days.

That house was Grampa’s house and he had only one boy, my Pa, to inherit his orchards and farms and a quarry of clay and the kilns to make bricks, besides all the other houses and gardens he owned. All of his wives had given him only daughters but the last wife of all gave him a son. All those other women were mad because my Pa would inherit it all, so they cursed him. When he grew up, he had no use for women at all. He spent all his money in cafés with musicians or in the barbershops and steam baths with boys. He promised a boy he would take him to Mecca on the pilgrimage to make him a Hadj. When Grampa heard this, he called in the lawyers to draw up the papers saying my Pa could not inherit one dirham until he had married and had a son and that firstborn son would be the owner of the house so my Pa could never gamble it or give it away, but you’ll see, later, how he got around that.

Kebir is a town and the maidservants in our houses are girls who come down from the hill villages barefoot, looking for food. In our house, we had such a one who always was saying: “In my village this and in my village that,” until you were sick of it. “In my village, Jajouka, we have a girl who’s a pearl like no other. What a girl! No man who sees her wants to live one more minute without her! She’s so lively and gay: she’s so sharp and so bright. She’s witty and clean: she can dance: she can sing: she can weave: she can spin. She’s so sweet that she’s sour. She can laugh but she weeps. She’s tart like an apple, with a tongue like a thorn. She’s all honey and amber and a wonderful cook. She’s so quick and so light she never touches the ground. She married my cousin Mohand, the chief of the Master Musicians, up in Jajouka, and she’s got him half-dead and half-alive. He can’t live with her and he can’t live without her. They’re divorced and remarried two times, already, and if he does it again and still wants to remarry, he’ll have to go to Tetuan to get the permission from the big judge, the Cadi-in-chief.”

That girl could get up to her village and back in a day. So, one evening at nightfall, she comes dashing back into our house, crying: “Here she is! She’s here, she’s here!” She got hold of my Pa and told him some sense: he should marry this girl. Why, even then, her first husband was toiling over the mountains to Tetuan to get the permission, mad to remarry her. Here was this pearl: what could he be waiting for? I suppose he went out and took a look at her; I don’t know; I wasn’t there, yet. That pearl was my Ma: you knew her well.