The Process

6

The next thing I knew was the telephone ringing outside the door of my room in the old run-down Hotel Duende, where I was staying: down in the Socco Chico, sure enough. As I woke and reached out automatically for my keef and my pipe, my ear caught the insistent flicking of a dry end of Thay’s tape still whisking around and around on the UHER beside my bed. I rolled over to switch it off and checked on the battery. It hadn’t run down too far so I couldn’t have been out all that long. I pulled out the bedside lamp and plugged the UHER in to recharge. My watch had stopped but I could tell more or less what time it must be by the roar of voices coming up through my shutters from the little closed square of the Socco below. The telephone went on ringing out in the hall. In the Duende, they usually let it ring on like that until it rings off by itself. I was surprised to hear somebody answering it: “Halloo Yass Halloo!” It sounded oddly like Hamid and, when I peered out, so it was: Hamid in an elegant new white on white striped-silk jellaba; short because he is short, the jellaba swung on the ground. “Yass, the Merikani,” he was saying as he handed me over the phone. I was wondering where he’d got that very expensive jellaba from as, over his shoulder, I saluted a little group of his cousins the Master Musicians in the dimly lit hotel hall. They had shucked off their bright yellow leather slippers and hunkered down against the cold tiled wall with their white woolen hoods up over their heads. They gave me quite a shock, looking so countrified.

“Hello,” I said into the receiver, automatically imitating Hamid: “Yes, hello.”

Hamid was hopping up and down in front of me making mad monkey-faces; wild gestures apparently meant to intimate something about the caller, I couldn’t tell what.

“Yes! Hello, Hassan,” said the voice on the phone, so deep I thought for a flash it was a man’s: “You are very quick!”

“Glugh!” was all I could answer to that.

“Good, Hassan! Quite right! Now go back to your keef-pipe until twelve o’clock midnight but don’t overdo it. I just phoned to say that Thay won’t be able to make it, tonight, but our plan for the picnic still holds good. I’ll pick you up in my car in the Socco at twelve on the dot.”

“Picnic lady!” Hamid was hissing at me as she rang off. Hamid was kissing my shoulder, hugging my arm as he jumped up and down: “Picnic lady very good. Very big. Very rich!”

Being the sort of hotel it is, we all went back into my room to blow some more keef. Master Musicians smoke all the time: they’ve always got either a flute or a sebsi of keef in their mouths. We all beamed and embraced each other like brothers going through all the salaams and salutations like we hadn’t seen each other for a week of Moslem Fridays. Then, they all settled themselves comfortably on the floor while I climbed back into my sagging brass bed with Hamid hopping up alongside me holding a big bag of grass. A pair of pipes shuttled back and forth between us as we went through the ceremonies: I needed some time to get all my buttons done up and work on this plot. Now, that crazy white cat called Thay: him washing out like that right away! That was no good for openers: what did he mean: “Rub out the word”? His tale was done, I could see that and I was glad I had it on tape. And that other voice: that was Milady Mya, was it? Well, that wasn’t the first time I’d heard that transatlantic tone. But: “What’s all this pack of pied pipers of yours doing down off their mountain?” I asked Hamid point-blank. At the same time, it ran through my head that this grimy group could well be my bodyguard; safety in numbers. And: “Hamid! How the hell do you hook up with the Himmers? Tell me that!”

One of the Master Musicians produced a special holiday pipe out of his wicker picnic hamper; a primitive clay waterpipe smoked, as a rule, only during the holy month of Ramadan and at night. Time out for distraction: this particular Master was thrown into paroxysms of gurgling delight at being able to fill his water-pipe from my tap. The mere idea of water leaking out of a wall like that instead of being caught spilling out of rocks or having to be drawn from a well tickled him all to hell. The Masters had all come tumbling down from their village to see me in town and, besides, the big city is full of thrilling adventure, as everyone knows. While Hamid was herding them through the Grand Socco market this afternoon, a lady stepped out of a very big car and hired them to play their Pan pipes at a picnic, tonight, in a cave up the coast. It seemed not at all far-fetched to them that this was a picnic being given for me. “Well, Hamid,” I said between pipes, “and what does she look like?”

Hamid rolled his eyes around in his head, making a globular gesture like: “Big!” High praise in Africa and, besides, Hamid’s not huge. A lady of leisure about Tanja was once heard to say that Hamid would have been a much taller man if so much of him hadn’t been turned up in cock — his famous big brush. Just as I was going to ask him if he’d ever heard of Imsak, he bounced off the bed and shot over to the window; having heard, as we all had, a roar like a riot in the Socco Chico below. As Hamid threw back the shutters, the breath of the beast in the crowd came in like a blast of hot air. My first thought was a lynching but I left that lay in Louisiana and, translating myself into Present Time, I said, getting up out of bed: “What is it, Hamid: the Whale?”

My window in the Duende Hotel was like a loge in an old Venetian theatre from which I could look straight down onto the paved stage of the Socco Chico, where absurd theatre has been going on in dozens of languages, right around the clock every day since forever, perhaps. Visible tale-ends of old-fashioned Arab plots torn alive out of the Thousand Nights and One Night shuttle back and forth under your eyes like bright threads running through a gloomy loom of out-of-work cats slapped into uniform Levis. More up-to-date, highly colored plastic plots tend to pass through after midnight and the bell was tolling, now. There was standing room only down there where a thick throng of extras was boiling about a gigantic old Rolls Royce touring-car which had beached center stage. The crescendo of circus-noise died away like the tide rolling boulders out to sea as a very large lady I took to be the Queen of the Tuareg got out of her car. She stood on the running-board in a hell of a hairdo of beads braided onto her head, clanking her barbaric jewelry and flapping her long desert-blue robes. My first guess was: She’s selling something like a magical embrocation of ostrich eggs, for example; so I turned away, saying: “Don’t look at it, Hamid; it’s on television. Some new kinda 3-D TV!”

Then, I squealed like a stuck Christian pig when Hamid suddenly made a dive past me and scuttled across the room to unplug my UHER from the wall: he is strictly forbidden ever to touch a machine of mine. He pulled out the jack to the charger, checked to see the tape was properly threaded before he packed the UHER expertly into its traveling case, me still protesting, and, slinging the holster-strap around my neck like a halter, dragged me out of the room, trailed by the Master Musicians. One of them threw my black burnous from the Sanara over my shoulders while we slid down the stairs. As we hit the Socco, a general yelp went up from the crowd when the lady flung up her arms melodramatically, and all the men fell back one sudden step, heels hard on each other’s toes. A child wailed out: “Cinema!” as Hamid, my handler, hurried me forward like a punchy old prize-fighter being hustled against his better judgment into the ring. I had the impression the lights went up full and, because it seemed to be expected of me, I kissed the lady’s hand to a round of applause from the mob. She got back into her car and gave it the gun. Dogs and children ran yapping as old graybeards with turbans waved the young riffraff out of our way when we followed her into the car and drove off to the cheers of fools who knew no more than we did what it was all about.

Now that I remember it, all that she said was “Get in!”

I suppose I didn’t dare look at her: anyway, my eyes were glued to her neat square bare blue feet planted on the pedals of the Rolls. As we were spinning so silently up steep Siaghine Street, I ventured to break into the ticking of the clock with some mumbled remark about the car. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a Rolls I picked up cheap out of an old novel by Lawrence Durrell.” What the hell kinda talk is that? I thought to myself and shut up. Our big leather seats were set apart like two thrones in the front of the car but I could smell that the lady had drenched herself in a bottle of Bint El Sudan before leaving her tent. I remarked that all the little knobs on the fittings of the car had fat little closed crowns on them over the letter F. She laughed and confessed that she had bought the old bus at the King Farouk sale in Cairo, years ago now. “It’s all solid gold,” she admitted, “and the biggest one Rolls ever built. Even the Nizam of Hyderabad … you know, the rich one in India … never had the horsepower or the head-room that I’ve got.”

We barely skinned through a narrow alley and swirled out around the Grand Socco, nearly taking a strolling policeman with us as we went. We chopped like a great golden hatchet through the secondhand-clothes market where they sort out the bundles of rags from America. My Master Musicians were bunched up in the back of the car like five live white teddy-bears in their rough woolen jellabas. I leaned around to snuff up their good country smell: lanolin from lambs’ wool, wood-smoke, spicy Moroccan cooking and keef. I saw Hamid had found a handy little folding “jump seat” in front of the built-in bar and was helping himself to a mixture of drinks. Knowing only too well how he can be with alcohol in him, I reached around to stop him but he batted back my paw, proudly pointing to the crown on his glass, as if that gave him royal permission to drink. Then, he unbuckled his prizewinning chuckle as he gave the back of my hand a wet kiss, saying fondly: “Who is whose guru? Fuck off!” It sounded more like: Hooz hooz gooroo foo koff!”

“So,” said the lady, “you speak Arabic together.”

We were shooting through “Suicide Village”; so called by all the rich foreign villa-dwellers on the Old Mountain, who sail through it all the time at top speed. This narrow paved alley swarms like a market all day and all night. We were cutting through traffic like a hot gold butter knife through butter, until that Diving Diana out there on what the English call the “bonnet” of the Rolls, stuck her golden nose right up a camel’s ass. Pandemonium broke loose in the street. Moors who know me and know Hamid were squashing their noses against the glass with their hands over their eyes, popping their eyes at me, the lady and the car. The lady gave a blast of her great golden hunting-horns and we swept on, scattering man and beast in our wake. We whipped around the Third Commissariat of Police at Jews’ River on two wheels and flashed on out past the Catholic cemetery at Boubana; then, turning sharp right, we flew up the New Mountain Road through the night on this slightly worn magic carpet of hers. There could be no doubt, either, that this was really her car; the way she drove that pile.

My musicians passed me up a slim pipe and, taking the regulation three drags, I spat out the live coal very neatly in a solid-gold ashtray set into what must be called the “instrument panel.”

“Do you have to smoke that stuff all the time?” the lady asked.

We whirled past the governor’s mansion and Caca Culo castle in the dark and other big estates with their private parks to the right and the left of the road until we came to a spot where she changed gear and we turned off the pavement into a trail down under the trees. I had always intended to explore these big wooded properties running down from the crest of Old Mountain Road to the high cliffs hanging over the Straits of Gibraltar, but I certainly hadn’t figured to do it at night. We were bumping down a water-worn lane under lacy acacia trees until the headlights picked up a dark grove of cedar, practically hanging over the cliff. “It’s no worse on the car, really,” the lady was saying as she ground the back axle over a rock, “than the road from Cairo to Alex.”

She flipped on her lights, blinking them twice, and an old crooked Arab fairy-tale crone, with a pointy straw hat like a cone on top of her red and white striped veils and long raggedy cloak, stepped out of a thicket with a lantern in hand, waving us on. “That’s Calypso, my caretaker,” the lady said. “When I took over this property, I found her already installed in my cave. As if I didn’t know the place was magic enough … some doddery old English don has been writing to tell me it is … actually and historically according to him … Calypso’s Cave. I thought calypso was a steel band from the Barbados until he sent me this book to curry my culture. I can’t think how he got my address … probably figures I’ll invite him out here to explore it but he’s got another think coming, I guess … Since we’ve found you, Hassan … and the dollar has … has gone … well, wobbly. … I’ve wiped out my Foundation. The Fundamental has been found. No! … let them carry the baskets, Hassan. Get out of the car … from here on you walk.”

The loony old woman with the lantern was leading us down a path around the face of the cliff while Hamid and five little musicians trailed us fearfully in the dark, toting their instruments and the wicker picnic hampers full of food and drink which had been packed in the “boot” of the Rolls. We stumbled around a big shoulder of rock and came into a nice little nook, looking bright Paris-green in the white light of our gasoline lamp. A spring of clear water, ringed with dwarf fern and moss, seeped out of the rock close by the entrance to a big dry cave in which a little fire was dancing away by itself. Below us and so far below that the distance looked dizzy, a highway metaled with moonlight ran twenty miles or more across water to the Rock of Gibraltar swimming away in veils of blue night. The old Arab witch gave a sharp cackle to her half-wild pack of flat-headed yellow dogs, from whom Hamid and the musicians cringed away, reaching for clubs. Madame Mya stood in the mouth of her cave with her back to the firelight, flapping her veils as if she were about to take off as she intoned:

“Ulysses of Ithaca, welcome back home!”

Then, in a voice so different it might have come out of another woman, she said:

“You know, Hassan … you and I must be the two most American Americans who ever stepped into this enchanted cave. After all … I’m Pocahontas and you’re Uncle Tom!”

Wow! Wait a minute, lady! Uncle Tom! That’s a hell of a thing to be tagged at this point in the game: where did she pick up on a story like that? But, then, I reflect on how very easy I am to research: Professor Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N.Y. So, after all, I shrug. There may be a little Tom in the best of us, may there not? And, in my own case, casting about in the darkest corner of my mind, I do recall some cousins in Canada, spell their name different, who admit — just admit, mind you — to descent from the runaway slave turned Black preacher Underground conductor and agricultural colonist in Canada with a side show at the Crystal Palace where he was presented to Queen Victoria and was lost. Poor man had nothing but troubles from then on in: trouble with John Brown at his congress before Harpers Ferry, trouble with the Abolitionist Boston bankers and preacher-trustees of his colony, trouble with the white folks down to the end. Poor Tom! How much can he owe to H. B. Stowe and how much does he owe to himself? He billed himself for half a lifetime as The Real Uncle Tom, because he gave her world rights to his not so exclusive story in exchange for a nice hot dinner under the kitchen sink. White folks! I was thinking as I turned on my UHER and started recording Mya while she pinched out some pennies for poor old Calypso, who slunk off after her dogs: