Brion Gysin - The Process

I had the dreamlike impression that the fortress-style house had turned on a pivot to greet us rather than that we had gone around it to get in. There was all the usual lengthy Arab palaver about getting into a house; the knockings, the callings back and forth and the delays and even the mutterings as we crossed a fierce-browed old man with a white beard and turban who glared balefully down at my shoes. I looked down, too, to find myself dressed in a European suit and a pair of brown suede shoes which I felt sure I had never owned. We went through a dog-leg entrance into a big dimly-lit square patio with marble pillars looming up on all sides. A bright light blazed out from the far side as two tall doors swung back to let all the women of the house troop out and disappear grumbling into the dark again, vacating the principal salon for us men. A quick clatter of wooden clogs on marble paving, the crackling cackle of catty laughter, a derisive snort in the darkness and the women were gone again, trailing the scorched smell of resentment through the hot summer air. The desirable drawing-room was the usual Arab affair; long and narrow, lined with divans on both sides like a subway car in the Bagdad of the Arabian nights. My new friends were a self-conscious lot; stiff in their slick city clothes, sitting facing each other with their shoes on in order to be thoroughly “modern.” As I stared at them in fixed fascination, something gradually went wrong with the focus of my eyes. Boyish faces shriveled and faded slowly away into starving old men pinned to the walls. I made signs I would suffocate unless I got to the only tiny window at the far end of the room where I clung to the grating, gasping not only for air but for a view of the dancing down below.

I learned later from Mya that this was the window through which she caught her first distant glimpse of our dance. There was a forged-iron grill across the casement in order to keep everyday robbers out but the curly calligraphic design included a magic inscription from the Koran to keep demons out as well and, in this particular case anyway, also to keep them in. Gritting my teeth and crossing my fingers in a way I know how, I plunged through the screen and plummeted directly down into the candlelit court of the shrine where thousands of packed people were wallowing in a conglomerate puddle of trance. The beautiful stuff really was running like a river. It swept me in and swirled me seven times around the shrine before the little low door opened for me in the wall behind the tomb. My cell-brothers were already in there, stooped under the low vaulted ceiling as they strained to flatten themselves back against the curved walls. They were stripped to their skivvies and I noted that one wore homemade drawers from a flour sack still stenciled with Gift of the American People . I wanted to laugh and reject the whole thing but, Hassan, I really was scared.

“Later” was Now. The Brothers were all pinned to the walls by long kebab skewers thrust right through the gut and hammered on into the wall. With my hands at my back, I felt for the door but there was only smooth wall behind me waiting for my nail. I caught the sharp smell of fear from my own armpits and crotch. Under the eye of Initiator burning at me over a candle flame, I dropped off my bloody rags and stood there in my boxer shorts, hiding my rising erection. As Initiator put down the candle and stepped over it to thrust a long icy-cold finger into my abdomen, finding the place, everything went black and I woke up in a clinic on the outskirts of Tanja.

What had happened was that Amos told Mya that I’d gone off to the mountains to sink an ax in my head with the Hamadcha and she’d asked Labesse if he thought it was serious. They’d just bought a new Bentley with bread from the cardboard box and, besides, the car had to be broken in anyway so they decided to drive it about thirty-five miles an hour around Morocco, stopping in to see the feast at Sidi Hassan on the way. It was pretty late when they got there and they fell in with a group of young Moroccan students who invited them to a big house on the hill overlooking the saint’s tomb. There, they had been overwhelmed by Moroccan hospitality, lots of sweet mint tea and sticky cakes, but no mention at all of the frantic festival going on right below. They could catch, now and then, the wild ecstatic music as it came swirling up from the ravine but it was effectively drowned out by not one but two transistor radios blasting and battering them with two simultaneous cacophonous programs of plastic Egyptian music from Radio Cairo. Mya insisted on being allowed to sit at the far end of the room where, through a small grilled window, she could catch a glimpse of what was going on below. Labesse had brought along a new pair of very fine night-glasses, which he had bought for the new yacht they were getting. Through the glasses, Mya caught sight of me as I disappeared, all bloody, swallowed up by the shrine. She simply raised hell until their hosts went down and rescued me. Pio went with them and, on the way down, he ruined a new pair of fine suede shoes.

I came to, days later, in a run-down clinic on the outskirts of Tanja, out beyond the foundering bullring which hasn’t been used since Independa when most of the Spaniards left. The clinic was in a collapsing villa belonging to Dr. Estoque, a colleague of Pio Labesse. Dr. Manuel Estoque y San Roque was a bullfight doctor and, therefore, just the sort of man I needed for my peculiar wound but Estoque was inclined to let himself go like an espontáneo , wild with excitement to throw himself into the ring. He would enter my room whirling a bright saffron-yellow bullfighter’s cape lined with magenta. Whipping out his scalpel, he would make a pass over my bed as he spun around, his steely black eyes glittering as he launched into staccato Spanish of which I caught only the general drift. He dressed all in black, with no shirt over his hairy belly and chest but candy-pink silk socks and bullfighter’s ballet slippers on his feet. Tossing his flat Córdoban hat on my bed, he would launch into a lengthy account of every move in some bullfight which had brought him a client, always taking the side of the bull. A few words of English would spurt out of him as he lunged at my bed: “ Cornada , right up his rectum!” he’d scream. Then he’d grab up one of those wickerwork bull’s heads they use for practice and he’d ram it down over his ears as he charged up and down around my bed, snorting like a bull. Every time he passed me, Dr. Estoque would toss up his horns at my bedclothes and me like a fresh bull sniffs at the mattress padding alongside the picador’s horse. As he swept over the night-table with a clatter of broken glass, I reached over and cracked him across the horns with my board. When I saw him laid out on the floor, I knew I was getting better but the noise brought in the night watchman.

The night watchman turned out to be my Initiator down from the mountain. He put his fingers to his lips and, with the aid of the Moroccan male nurse, carried the doctor away for good. He wasn’t much loss, for the only thing Dr. Estoque knew how to do was to give people shots of morphine with hairy fat fingers wearing gold rings. He was an old professional sidekick of Pio’s but I must say one thing for Pio: he did come around to check up on me. Mya, herself, was terribly busy those days, out getting together the things for their first trip south together to the Spanish Sahara — still a difficult place to get to and almost impossible in those days. “Mya wants to buy a sort of headquarters,” Labesse told me: “A big place for all of us!” Labesse seemed to think Estoque’s exit quite normal and told me I’d be all right with the night watchman to look after me. He’d spoken to him at the gate, he said. I’ve always wondered about that. Did he know who the watchman was? Pio was a deep one: I never found out.