Brion Gysin - The Process

But the boy kept slipping away to the girl on the Gran Via, who by this time really was a whore even if she hadn’t been in the beginning. Lindissima got so nervous that she had Doctor Labesse in day and night. Labesse apparently gave her something to keep the young man at home. To keep up appearances that he was really living in his own wing of the big house on the Castellana and not with the girl, the boy showed up for very grand candlelit dinners served by butlers and footmen in white gloves. Almost right away he began to suspect that they were putting something in his food so, in a sort of slow-motion yawning scene, he began to denounce them as poisoners at the dinner table. Then, he dragged himself slowly out of the house like a snail, leaving a trail of vomit behind him. They let him go, because in front of the servants they were afraid to stop him and anyway as Labesse guessed correctly, the boy went not to the police but to the girl. There they had him arrested in her bed for proxenetism, pimping, living off the immoral earnings of, etc.; throwing the book at him. The thing was already much too public, someone had to hear his squeals from inside even one of those Spanish jails. Labesse was arrested and held in Barcelona where he’d been foolish enough to flee but it may not have been as foolish as all that because inside ten months he was out again scot-free and the whole thing forgotten. The boy’s still in jail, of course, and while I’ve never met him, I send him some money now and then — concessions money, I suppose — because Mya plucked the Reuther concessions off Lindissima one by one during the following years — Labesse aiding, of course.

Lindissima and Pio had come down to Tanja to get near some fresh capital, not guessing, poor innocents, that there hasn’t been any fresh capital in Tanya for eons! When the Mingih manager mumbled that Madame Strangleblood needed a doctor, you can imagine how they both jumped. You see, I got to know this crowd when I managed to crawl up from the Medina, leaving the Hamadcha still jumping down in my Arab house with Amos Africanus standing by to keep an uneasy eye on his neighbors. Living between two worlds, as I did, I got provoked by Mya into doing the one thing one should never do — introduce one world to the other. That’s how this famous party of mine happened. Before I knew it, the whole crowd from the Hotel Mingih bar on the Boulevard were suddenly standing out there in the open sewer of my Medina street in their minks and their diamonds, being pelted with fish heads by the Arab urchins. I simply had to let them in to the house to save their lives. Actually, I’d absolutely forgotten that I’d invited them because I’d been dancing that evening with a big black sailor’s belt someone had given me.

I’d begun by giving myself a few little slaps with my new belt as I danced to the music and it felt so tingling good, like a shot in the arm to my dancing, that I gave myself quite a few more belts when I found that I liked it. “ Belt! Belt! Belt! ” the drums kept belting out, so I gave myself quite a belting until the blood came before all the guests arrived. I just pulled somebody’s shirt on so as not to catch cold when I went to the front door to greet them. Their entry stopped all the music dead in its tracks , of course, but when I turned around to get the musicians to play again as if nothing had happened, a couple of Mingih barflies began to shriek at the sight of the blood oozing out of my shirt in the back, it seems. I was quite unaware of it. Dr. Labesse, like an officious medical fool, insisted on putting a dressing on my back right then and there so I was made to feel an idiot; badly humiliated, they put me to bed. Mya insisted on staying to nurse me but when I explained to her that I needed quite a big sum of money for my initiation in the mountains which the Hamadcha had promised me, I caught her exchanging such a look with Labesse over my prostrate body that I knew right away that Mya was going to be stuffy about money from now on out. I was so furious I never mentioned the word “money” again until the day we got married, years later this spring. Then, I made over all of my money to Mya and that’s the way it still stands, today. I don’t want to have anything to do with money any more than PP did. Just counting One Two Three used to make him nervous. I began by shutting up about money and my next move is going to be shut up about everything else.

But back to the Brotherhood! You may know that in those days their political situation was so unstable that they had to draw in their horns a bit and be careful about public demonstrations. All that was of interest mainly to Muslims and I found that I’d gotten in deep with the Hamadcha before it really dawned on me that all my new Moroccan friends took it for granted that I was a Muslim or was about to become one. As I once said to Amos Africanus, the Himmers always were pantheists — it made no difference to me. When someone intoned slowly for me to repeat after him: “ There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is His Prophet ,” I said it, why not? One great-aunt of mine actually became the abbess of a Shinto convent in Japan after the war. My next goal was Moulay Youniss, the holy city where no Christian or Jew had ever slept until I did. The millennial ban was lifted by the late king I believe, but the town has no hotel and none of the inhabitants would think of socializing enough with non-Muslims to invite them into their houses to spend the night. I’d stopped drinking alcohol entirely and gotten quite handy at Moroccan manners and ways but as I didn’t speak Arabic and still don’t, really, I didn’t say much. My feet were killing me but my asthma didn’t come back even when I traveled along with the Brothers on foot through Morocco in harvesttime. We were climbing up to Moulay Youniss to spend the night before going on to the Hamadcha feast at Sidi Hassan on the other side of the mountain.

It was one of those celestial African days in June when you could look back down the steep ravines full of spiky cactus candelabra shooting up as high as telephone poles from the acid-green aloes. The ruined marble columns of Roman Volubilis stood higher still on the tremendous sweep of the green-golden plain far below. The whitewashed cube-houses of Moulay Youniss hung over us, capping the hilltop. Quite apart from the celestial beauty of the spot there was the thrill of climbing up into a forbidden city on foot. We were quite a woolly-looking little group with only one pack-donkey for twenty or thirty of us as we scrambled along, but when we caught our breath, our drummer picked up and our wild wailing music skirled out under the big green silk banners of the Hamadcha flying in the crystal clear air. We stormed into town hopping and howling in a pack with me in the middle, quite unnoticed. I was looking as wild as any poor postulant could be expected to look, barefoot, with my head shaved, bonethin and hollow-eyed from our practices, hung about with some picturesque Arab rags I’d bought very dear from a Brother. The townsmen received us with honor, leading us off to one of the most imposing houses in town, which the late Cadi had built to hang out over the chasm so that he could see from his deep-set windows everything that was going on in the town. The Brothers, with me last as a postulant, filed into the big cool square room which had been the Cadi’s judgment hall and sat down quietly all around the floor against the walls. It was very like being inside a giant lantern into which the fierce Moroccan light bounced back up from the white terraces of the surrounding houses where the volubilis-purple morning-glories cascaded over the trellises of cane. While the Brothers muttered their long litanies, I leaned back exhausted, gazing up at the marquetry-maze of the inlaid rafters which fitted together like a giant wheeling Indian mandala overhead, holding up the high hollow pyramid of the roof.