Well, I did try again, later, to get into some skin other than my own; right here in North Africa where the problem is not, essentially, color. Back in those days when Tanja was really Tanja, long before you ever came here, I was, in a way, “initiated” as you have been but much less successfully than you, of course. Perhaps because of my whiteness, I always stuck out like a cop. However, do let me tell you briefly who we really are and how we got onto your trail and saw your light rising like that of a Mahdi long before you ever turned up: the man whose name is not Hassan, yourself. When I tell you the story, you’ll see why I feel it was “written,” of course.
* * *
At the time I am speaking of, Mya and I were just jetting around Africa getting to know people. This African trip grew out of my therapy for Mya’s very first husband; Peter Paul Strangeblood, the Richest Kid on Earth. Poor PP, he was only twenty-one but he’d had it: there wasn’t really much anyone could really do for him except take all that money away from him and he knew this. It made him as nasty as hell. Mya had done all she could since she first picked him up but by the time she called me in professionally — I’m a Doctor of Grammatology as well as Hereditary Bishop in the First Farout Church — poor PP was already pretty well beyond help. We did our best to get him to respond to Africa but he merely shambled along after Mya and me until that day in the hotel in Bukavu when the big cardboard box caught up with us, dropped in by parachute: we were under siege in a terrible poured-concrete hotel at the time. Mya and I started ripping the box open like two kids at Christmas, hoping it was food. I’d been giving Strangleblood various occult exercises for his “havingness” and one exercise we’d almost forgotten about had been making him send to his bank for one million dollars U.S. in cash. When PP saw all that money spread out on the bed, he turned as green as the bills: he was all choked up. I felt very sorry for him because I suffer from asthma myself. He had to be flown out by the Swiss Red Cross, eventually; they called it an “évacuation sanitaire.” Somehow, Mya and I lost sight of him until the divorce.
Eventually, Mya and I landed here in Tanja together but not as lovers; not yet. Mya wasn’t ready for me: a great many things had to happen to both of us, first. I merrily went my own mad mystical way, which has led us at long last to you, as you see. For a time, Mya went quite another way. Mya is no Lady Bluebeard, no matter what the papers may say. When she first flew in to consult me in New York, Mya still had a lot of the original starry-eyed cowgirl from Medicine Hat or some such awful place which I have never had to visit, being a native South Sea Islander myself, but I know all about it from Mya. Mya is part Indian on both sides of her family and she comes of an awe-inspiring matriarchy of potent old squaws who, for seven generations in one single century, have taken mates upon themselves as they pleased. These mates were French-Canuck trappers and rugged Scots Hudson Bay Company factors or, like Mya’s own father, fifteen-year-old Tom Bear Foot, simply the hottest moccasin cousin at the time and the place. Mya was born with the aurora borealis dancing around her birch-bark crib and she is the Great Queen of the Crees in her own right. Mya can take on the whole white and the whole yellow race.
In Tanja, as I say, we went our own ways and, here in Tanja, Mya first tangled with Dr. Pio Labesse. Pio was what people used to call “a bad hat.” They told me Mya was singeing her wings but I knew she was only burning the pin-feathers off her pinions to grow her own eagle spread. I let her have her head, naturally, and she got a lot, eventually, from even Labesse. They had their ups and downs, of course. At one time, Mya claimed Pio was poisoning her with pills and he did have that sort of reputation but she found a way to poison him back so they made it up. She’s terribly clever at all that. Then, she decided to sue Strangleblood for divorce in Switzerland, in Basel where she’d first picked up her lawyer Rolf Ritterolf; he’s Swiss. She separated PP, legally, from so much of that loot that he began to feel a lot better right away, and left for Tibet. Mya, at loose ends and alone in Europe for a moment, absentmindedly married a prince. In First-Class on an airliner to Brussels, of all places, where she was going to pick up her new Lear jet, she was set upon by this dazzlingly handsome Himalayan, who was so persistent that Mya felt she owed it to herself to be swept away, just this once. Before she knew quite what was happening to her, she found herself marrying him in his embassy. In the air over Afghanistan, he explained the marriage customs of his country.
“Polyandry,” he told her.
Mya was only nineteen at the time. She said: “I’ve had my Salk.”
“No,” he explained, “you are now married also to all my brothers who are Khans like me — you can translate that as prince.”
She looked at the fuel gauge and she looked back at him. “How many brothers have you got?”
It turned out they were four and that wasn’t so bad but they all had other wives, too. When she was left alone for a minute with the women, they all flew at her like harpies, beat her and stripped her of her money and her clothes. When they poisoned her, she got hold of some of the stuff they were using and smuggled it out to be analyzed back in Basel. Mya will tell you herself about her deep and abiding interest in pharmaceutical folklore. It was quite an adventure but, all in all, it took Mya less than a week, flying both ways in her own jet, of course. Back in Basel, Rolf was still so hot from the Strangleblood case that he got her divorces from the four princes through — I was going to say; in a trice. Divorcing four princes in one swell foop was quite a feat, don’t you think? One permanent scar: Mya insists on being a princess ever since. With me, she’s a white-Ranee, if she wants to be, but she made Labesse, her fifth husband, build the base of an African empire for her and she wouldn’t marry him until he managed to have himself made a pontifical prince.
Poor Prince Pio, the day he got a crown he lost his head. He began acting like the caliph of Cairo soon after he rammed through the deal, with the Spaniards who claimed it in those days, for Mya to buy up two million bare acres of sand in the Sahara, including Cape Noon and the ruin of the Portuguese fort they found on it. Out of that pile of rubble, Mya made “Malamut,” which she built, as they say, in her own image and likeness and Mya thinks big. It was a draw, for a while; who could think bigger, she or Labesse. “Malamut” was meant to cost six million dollars but, so far, it’s cost nearly twenty times that and it’s not finished, yet. Can you imagine something between Mont Saint Michel and Gibraltar but set out on the blazing Atlantic coast of the Sahara right on the Tropic of Cancer, the one and only rock bigger than a pebble in thousands of miles of unmapped blue lagoons? Inland from “Malamut” is absolute desert, whose hard surface is stamped with giant moving dunes of amber-pink sand and each dune is carved by the wind into a perfect crescent with horns running due south. “Malamut” means megalomania to people like Pio and in that palace Prince Pio became a real prick.
But I’m running ahead of my own story because, all the time “Malamut” was a-building, I was down below the Socco Chico in Tanja, deeply involved with the Brotherhood of the Hamadchas, only coming up as far as the European Boulevard now and then for air. My encounter with the head-chopping Brotherhood was ordained by the fact that, from the first moment Mya and I drew breath in Tanja, we were under a spell. We were so sick of those poured-concrete shells they call hotels all over modern Africa that we asked for an old-fashioned place and they took us to the Hotel Africanus, hanging over the port on the edge of the old Arab quarter. Amos Africanus, whose grandfather built it around the turn of the century, said the old man had designed the hotel to accommodate the pig-sticking trade from Gibraltar. It seems that Her Majesty’s Lancers, lacking a good gallop on the Rock, used to sail over for long weekends in International Tanja to hunt wild boar from horseback with spears in the Diplomatic Forest. If you’ve ever been in the place, you’ve seen their ghosts still lingering in the long lawn curtains of the old mirrored dining room and the leather-lined bar. If you’ve ever stayed there you know how enchanted we were with our vast suites of rooms with every last Edwardian tassel still hanging, the big brass beds with their mosquito-net canopies and the long shuttered windows down to the floor.