Brion Gysin - The Process

Labesse had a genius for enraging Arabs which a former French governor general might have envied. The sneer, with Labesse, was a scimitar with which he whittled all Arabs down to what he considered their proper elevation, grass-high. He reserved the other side of his blade to shave Americans, all rich Americans: North, Central and South. I’ve made quite a study of Dr. Labesse: we’ve got a huge Labesse archive down in “Malamut” which I hope you’ll have a chance to consult when you get down to Cape Noon. It’s all in audio so you can have it played to you while you’re asleep, if you like: we have all the equipment. Amos, it turns out, is an electronic genius amongst other talents and he’s seen to the wiring of “Malamut” under Mya’s direction, although like most women she really hates sound unless she makes it herself. The house, as you’ll see when you see it, is meant to amplify her. Mya built it with Pio while I was away on my stumbling spiritual quest so you’ll hear the story of “Malamut” better from her lips.

Mya still thinks Labesse was a cross between Talleyrand and Machiavelli with a dash of the Borgias thrown in. It was that last dash she found irresistible. Her greatest childhood experience had been being poisoned by mushrooms out on the Canadian prairies, so when she got to college that took her into toxology and, eventually, genetic biochemistry before she married poor PP and got interested in money. As an Old Moroccan Hand, himself, the first story Labesse ever told her was about some mysterious substance which Moroccan women are said to give their husbands to make them complacent. You must have heard of it, of course; “ Borbor ,” it’s called. You see, when Mya and PP first moved from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Basel, it had been with the idea of studying with Professor Forbach: you know, the man who discovered the hallucinatory principle of all the new drugs.

Actually, in the end Forbach threw Mya out of his laboratory when he learned that she had launched a mutual fund scheme from Basel. You’ve heard of Fundamental Funds, haven’t you? Well that’s Mya’s baby or was in those days when Professor Forbach dismissed her because he could no longer consider her a “seriously dedicated scientist” if she insisted on making millions or hundreds of millions of dollars like that on the side. So she offered to buy him out from his pharmaceutical combine, which paid him only some annuity, but that was a mistake, waving her dollars around. Professor Forbach was furious, naturally! She called him a “kept chemist!” and swept out to the sounds of breaking glass test-tubes, slamming the door.

Mya was running a North African fever that first night with Labesse and it must have been wild, something like the mating of a basilisk and a gryphon. Afterward, she’s always sworn to me that it was by pure feminine intuition that she dug Pio for a poisoner but, of course, it had been in all the papers when it happened. She still swears she hadn’t read a thing about it and didn’t even know who he was when he got into bed with her. When I tried to tell her, she snapped at me: “That’s just the type of nasty tale people in Tanja are forever telling about each other and, besides, I never even heard of Lindissima Reuther either … until last night!” I’d been foolish enough to advise her to watch out because everyone including Amos Africanus lost no time in telling me how Dr. Labesse had spent ten months in jail in Barcelona, accused of poisoning or trying to poison Lindissima’s adopted son for her. One word out of me and Mya always does just as she pleases, naturally. As soon as they got the Pio thing settled between them, the ladies went into business together; mines in the Sahara — for the next couple of years. You can imagine how popular I was with everybody concerned! I simply made myself scarce for a very long while as I went on about my own business of spiritual progress: which includes learning how to button one’s lip, of course.

I guess the way Lindissima Reuther first figured it was, she could afford to spare Labesse as long as Mya would put up the cash to help her get her Saharan mines into operation. Both girls thought they knew all about mines, concessions and subsoils rights; things I know nothing about, heaven knows! Mya got this from her oil-well childhood in western Canada and Lindissima from her young if not tender years in South America, where she is said to have burned down two Latino presidents and their republics along with them. As I said, everyone in Tanja was only too ready to fill me in on the legendary aspects of Lindissima’s lurid past even before she’d married this Reuther, who was, as she always said, a clean old man, half-Swiss and half-Spanish, who’d spent years of his life wandering around the Sahara before anyone else got there in a helicopter. He’d lived like a nomad and became a Muslim, buying up subsoil rights from local desert sheiks under binding Coranic contracts which any Arab government would be bound to observe. Reuther got the Spanish government to ratify all this at a time when the really big boys in Madrid and Barcelona hadn’t even got the smell of oil and phosphates in their nostrils yet. Reuther passed for a very rich man during those years that cash was so hard to come by in Spain and, besides, he lived the life of the mysterious recluse who doesn’t like to spend it. He must have been over seventy when Lindissima hit Madrid hard, flying in from an overextended tour of the Middle East, where she had cleaned up quite a bit of loot, including some gorgeous jewels from grateful oil sheiks, which hid the fact she was slipping from everyone but herself. In Madrid she had herself quite a fling with some major movie star for a while and a couple of fairly expensive young bullfighters before Reuther met her and invited her down to the desert to show her his mining concessions by helicopter. Lindissima fell in love on first sight with the Sahara; so much so that she wanted to own it. She married Reuther and went into business with him, handing him over her stash, which amounted to almost one million dollars, at that time; all she had including the jewels. Her money set them up in one of the last big palaces on the Castellana, about a hundred yards from the Hilton, where she started entertaining the right people, whoever they may be in Madrid.

Anyhow, everything was going along fine when the old man died on her, plunging her into the usual hassle with lawyers and even that was working out not too badly when some idiot Spanish boy of nineteen was arrested for pimping on the Gran Via in the middle of Madrid. From jail, he started screaming that he was Reuther’s natural son who was being gypped out of his inheritance and the whole thing with this girl could be explained. He was innocent and even suggested that he had been framed. One of the newspapers, since suppressed by the censor, got hold of the story and printed it to the delight of whatever other interests hoped to pick up Reuther’s fortune. Lindissima went to see the boy in jail, managed to get him out of jail, moved him into the big house on the Castellana and, eventually, legally adopted him. She’d have done a lot better to marry him and be done with it, the hell with the thirty years’ age difference between them, but she didn’t. Her basic mistake was her vanity. She thought she could hold the boy as a lover and lord it over him as a mother at the same time. It turned the boy very nasty. When she caught him fiddling around with her medicines in her bathroom one day, she didn’t say a word but made the basic decision— snap! — just like that.

They were invited out in the country to some Spanish duke’s estate on a hunt with over a hundred guns and twice as many beaters, the old-fashioned kind of slaughter of birds piled up in the courtyard of the castle. Lindissima knew some desperate young captain whose debts she was ready to pick up if it worked out. But the boy, the adopted son and lover, was too quick for them or simply by accident he tripped at the right moment, throwing himself flat on his face on the ground. He got only a little lead in his backside but, duke or no duke, they had the police in and the captain began to talk. The first thing they did was to arrest the boy, naturally, in the hospital. A high police official visited Lindissima and found her most charming. Lindissima was still a striking-looking woman even when Labesse left her for Mya. Labesse was her doctor who certified she was far too nervous to answer any further questions except in bed. The result of all that was the boy came back to floods of tears on all sides; a typical Spanish denouement, I’m told. Lindissima persuaded everybody including herself that the stupid captain had done it for love of her fine eyes, as they say in Spanish, and, for a while, that was that.