Brion Gysin - The Process

The day I was born, my Pa started spending the money. He made the pilgrimage twice from Kebir to Mecca and back, taking a friend with him, all expenses paid, both ways, each time. The first Hadj he set up in the wool market of Kebir where he sits to this day in his cupboard-sized shop stocked high with hand-woven bolts of fine wool: he’s still a good-looking man. My Pa’s second friend demanded at least the same thing and he got it. He has an identical shop on the other side of the Souk. So, my Pa ate up all his orchards and farms and his quarry and kiln and one house after the other, buying Swiss watches and French racing-bicycles for good-looking boys. He divided our house with a wall through the middle of the courtyard and rented our rooms to get more money for keef and, later, for wine.

Pa rented out the little shop we call the biblioteca , which is built into the outside wall of our house, and a funny thing happened: it turned out he had rented it to a Soussi magician who had come looking for a treasure and the gold was hidden inside our own house . The Soussi had an old, very secret book like a registry of all the treasures in our Moroccan soil, guarded as they are by the little, invisible djenoun of the gold. The man lied, of course, telling us he was taking the shop to get the Kebir agency for Bebsi-Cola, which we didn’t have, yet, in our zone of Morocco. He never did, of course, but he did start selling charcoal and kerosene to get friendly with the women who run out into the street for a penny-worth of this and a penny-worth of that, with only some kind of a rag to cover their shameless faces.

We found out he was really a magician because, one morning early, a poor little girl toddling down the gutter, too young almost to walk, asked him for water to drink. He was handing her down his earthenware mug, when the man from next door dashed out with a stick and he knocked the mug out of the little girl’s hands to smash on the ground. He had looked through a crack in his door and he had seen the Soussi each morning eating his very own shit. To be a magician, you have to make yourself truly impure every day in order to put yourself outside the rest of the community who follow the Law which guards them from magic. You may need a magician for practical things but you don’t have to drink out of his cup.

The Soussi magician made friends with a boy going blind. He’s a man now, still feeling his way about town as he goes up and down hawking lottery tickets pinned to the front of his brown woolen jellaba. In those long-ago days, he was a very good-looking lad who played a music so sweet on his flute that he nearly landed in jail as a seducer of women — all the women in town! As he walked through the streets of Kebir with his hood pulled down over his head and only the flute and his hands sticking out, all the women and girls, whom he’d never seen and who never saw him, all fell sick of love inside their windowless houses. Some people said they just lay on the floor, kicking their heels. They pined away in their interior patios sniffing up jasmine and burning the meals in the houses, day after day. When the men of Kebir got together, they all agreed things could not go on that way; so, they jumped on the blind boy and carried him off to the Cadi, our judge who sits outside of his house on Friday at noon, sending people to jail. The cadi said: “Let me hear his flute!” To tell you the truth, we have no one in Jajouka who plays any better than this blind boy did then. The cadi lay back on his divan of justice to listen in rapture for hours. “Stop,” he cried weakly, lifting his hand. “That’s enough. You can’t play this stuff any more in Kebir. Here, take these lottery tickets to sell and give me the flute.” Turning aside to the men of the town, the cadi went on: “You have to extirpate this sort of thing by the root.” What did he mean? Why, he took the boy’s flute in both hands and he broke it over his knee. You see, that music was far too sweet to be heard in the streets of Kebir where the boy, now a man, is still selling lottery tickets up and down the alleys of town.

That boy, in those days, used to stop by the shop of the Soussi, who once dropped a hint that they had in the Soussi a magic for curing the eyes. It might be some use. He could send for it but it was expensive, of course, and it might take a long time to come. The boy stopped by every day, wanting and waiting to see, but the Soussi always would say that the magic pomade would be soon on its way. Then, one day, he said it had come. By that time, the boy was his slave and a slave is what the man needed. You see, his old Book of Treasures had told him there was a pot of gold which none of us knew about hidden in one of our rooms, and he wanted to get in there to snatch it while we were away. For this he needed a good blind assistant and he needed to get us all out of the house. That was easier when Pa went out of town. The magician bought us all tickets for a good Moroccan movie called Charlie Chan . Ma, scared stiff of what Pa would say, and knowing the neighbors didn’t think it nice for a woman to go out in the street, tied our big iron house key around her neck with a rope and us kids led her off to see the movie through twice. What we found when we got home was not very nice. The Soussi had knocked a hole right through the back wall of his shop into our house and, in Grampa’s room, there lay the blind boy like a dead man, alone. The Soussi was gone but his clothes and some money were still in his shop and the shop was still locked from inside. The blind boy almost died when we beat him some more but that way we got the whole story out of him.

The magician had twisted his head with the promise to bring back his eyes. Magicians are doctors of lies but everything about money is always a little funny in Morocco. Here, the mice eat your money because it is sinful to put it in banks. When you look for the bundle of greasy bills you hid in the rafters last fall, all you find is some mouse-must, some colored confetti and shavings made out of what once was your savings! When you’re rich, you buy gold and you bury it. Then, you call in a magician and pay him to weave you a spell to make your gold pieces look like a bag of old buttons until the day comes when you want your money back. Grampa had probably hidden his sack of gold in his room because he had so many wives he couldn’t trust any of them. The magician who wove Grampa his spell had written down in a book the secret directions on how to find it, so this other Soussi knew where to look and he knew all the words of the spells but he needed the blind boy to help him unbind them.

He had made a big ball of magical gum — axle grease and incense from Mecca — to burn while he said the words to open the ground, but he needed someone around to hold it, burning and smoking, during all the time he went down in the crack in the ground to talk in a thundering voice to the spirits who guard the gold, while he took it back from them; dangerous work. When all us kids and our Ma passed by his shop on our way to the movies to thank him, we saw the blind boy in there with him, smoking keef. We had not got down the street before they shut themselves in there and started to hammer the hole into our house. They went straight to the room where my Grampa had died, set down a lighted candle in a saucer of water and quickly laid out a circle of flour on the floor. The Soussi then brought in a pot of live charcoal and threw salt in it until the flames came dancing up orange and blue. He drove a short stake into his ball of gum, which he held over the fire to get it starting to smoke. He handed the stake to the boy, telling him this was no joke and to be sure to keep turning the stick and, no matter what happened, not to let go. When he said the words, there came a sound like the flapping of great wings in the room but the air did not stir although the wind could be heard, screaming by outside fast. The room rocked and trembled. The floor quivered and the tiles split open at their feet. “Hold onto that ball! Don’t let it drop or I’m lost. Do you hear me, Mohamed?” cried the magician as he stepped down into that hole. When we got home it was done. The boy was lying like dead. When he dropped the ball in the pit, he almost went out of his head. He nearly fell in the hole, himself, before it closed up again without leaving a clue. The Soussi was gone, too.