A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco

by Suzanna Clarke

  But Mustapha’s attempts at explanation didn’t seem to be working. His hand gestures became more and more emphatic and I could see the whole thing was in danger of deteriorating. It was at that point Jon’s presence became crucial. He turned out to be exceptionally practised at apologising in Darija. We were sorry to be disturbing her family. We were sorry about the plaster. Yes, we would fix it. We were sorry for existing …

  Somewhat placated, the woman led us around her dar, which had ancient masharabbia screens around the balustrade. There was a sense of entering a time warp, with the clock fixed at 1650. Everything was in ‘original’ condition – old, worn and filthy. Cockroaches were making themselves at home everywhere.

  But the house was also charming in its own peculiar way. Climbing level by winding level to the roof terrace, we tried to work out which of our rooms was sited above theirs. As the houses were built on the slope of the hill, their first floor was level with our ground floor. Eventually we identified the back section of our massreiya wall, the one that was cracked and bulging dangerously. The cause of the problem was immediately apparent. A chicken coop had been built on the neighbours’ roof, and to support it a beam had been plugged into the middle of our wall. Whenever they cleaned the coop, the water drained straight into our wall.

  As we were about to leave, Mustapha learned that the house had recently been sold to a Spanish woman, who was taking possession at the end of the month. This was good news – hopefully she would be interested in contributing to a bit of structural work from her side of the wall.

  I still had the unfinished business with Hamza and his carpenter to tidy up. They arrived at three one afternoon and did a tour of inspection, Sandy and I following and pointing out places where the workmanship was poor – doors that didn’t shut, ill-fitting carved sections, pieces not sanded or finished. The bottoms of several doors had been covered with metal to mask areas that should have been repaired. I could slide my fingers underneath and feel the rotten wood.

  I knew the work was of poor quality and suspected that the carpenter, who had a good reputation, had let his apprentice loose on the job. The list of things not done, or done unsatisfactorily, ran to a page and a half.

  I doubted that Hamza would have accepted such work in his own house, but we didn’t want to fall out with him. The Medina was too small to have enemies, and Sandy and I were prepared to make extraordinary concessions to avoid a dispute.

  After the inspection, Hamza went into a huddle with the carpenter, his normally relaxed and friendly demeanour now businesslike. Then he strode across the courtyard.

  ‘The work that’s been done is worth fifteen thousand dirhams, so you have five thousand credit,’ Hamza said.

  Sandy and I looked at each other and gulped. Less than half the work on our list had been done, but by this stage we just wanted the whole sorry saga to be over and agreed to cut our losses. We knew we were being overcharged, but decided to wear it if we could get the three windows made that had been on the list.

  Hamza was all smiles and goodwill, conceding that the carpenter could do these windows with the credit we had. We explained where we wanted them, two in the courtyard and one in the kitchen. We shook hands, relieved that things had gone well. Then Hamza said that the carpenter needed another thousand dirhams for wood for the lintels. Still in a jovial mood, we agreed and handed over the cash.

  As he was about to walk out the door, Hamza hit us with a bombshell. ‘Now you will pay me my twenty per cent commission.’

  I was dumbstruck. As he hadn’t mentioned it before now, I’d presumed it was included in the total price he’d just given us. From my point of view, we were now being asked to pay an additional four thousand dirhams for work that was shoddy and unfinished, when we’d forgone at least half the work originally agreed to. I was furious, and for once my calm deserted me.

  ‘You’ve already asked me to pay double the amount for substandard work,’ I yelled. ‘I am not paying you any more money. You decide – either give us our remaining money back or do the three windows.’

  At which point Hamza walked out, leaving me with an expensively learned lesson. My grandmother was right about those who paid in advance. I thought of the old Fassi saying, ‘Do not let a rat or a carpenter in your front door’, and sighed. Now we had no choice but to look for another carpenter.

  The argument with Hamza left me shaken, but the rest of the work continued. As did the unexpected discoveries. Wiring up the downstairs salon, the electricians noticed that the top half of one wall appeared flimsy, and was made of modern bricks. Mustapha climbed a ladder, and wielding a hammer broke through the thin barrier with a resounding crash. He disappeared into the hole and there was a muffled shout.

  A moment later he reappeared. ‘There is lots of treasure,’ he called.

  He passed down what looked like a large stone mushroom cap, then another, to a delighted Sandy. They were ancient grinding stones that fitted together, with a hole in the centre for the grain. Next came an umbrella, a set of decorated bellows made of wood and leather, and a cracked plastic baby potty.

  ‘Shall I remove the false wall?’ Mustapha asked, hammer ready above his head. Sandy nodded, and within ten minutes the wall was in smithereens on the ground. Behind the false wall was one of ancient bricks, and Mustapha declared them much better quality than the new ones.

  So we had now restored the original, and useful, mezzanine at the end of the salon. I loved this organic way of building. No plan? No worries. It was hardly possible to have one when you never knew what lay beneath a plastered surface.

  Si Mohamed and I were on the hunt for old gayzas, the long thin cedar joists that straddled the ceilings, which were frequently three metres or longer. We needed to replace several rotten ones in the kitchen, and suspected that as we moved into other rooms we would need even more.

  We took a taxi to an area outside the Medina, where Si Mohamed suggested we might find the beams, and I found myself in a souk much more rundown and a great deal poorer than any I’d seen. It consisted of a group of concrete-block shacks perched on the edge of an almighty hole – a vast crater perhaps three-quarters of a kilometre across.

  ‘The Hole of Moulay Idriss,’ Si Mohamed announced.

  Although the crater appeared for all the world like something created by the impact of a giant meteor, it was in fact manmade. This was where the sand and stone had come from when Moulay Idriss II fulfilled his father’s vision to build Fez at the beginning of the ninth century. No doubt the hole had been a continuous source for centuries after that, but now it was being slowly refilled with Fez’s garbage and building rubble, a process I estimated would take many hundreds of years. Houses teetered on the opposite edge, making it look as though disaster had struck the centre of a city. At the base of the hole, far below the houses, was a series of caves.

  From the mounds of garbage rose plumes of smoke, and the scene resembled something from Dante’s Inferno. Then I saw movement and realised that the garbage was alive. Sheep and goats were picking over the piles, as were people. I watched a boy of about ten walk along a mound, inspecting, discarding, occasionally loading something onto a cart pulled by a broken-down nag.

  We headed back into the souk, where amid the shacks a reproduction Louis Quinze bedhead was propped against a wall. Nearby, children were ‘restoring’ carved wooden chair frames by rubbing them with pieces of broken glass. The gayza man Si Mohamed was looking for was nowhere to be found, but it didn’t matter as I was quickly distracted by piles of old doors. Although covered in the ubiquitous brown paint, there was a small one that looked promising. Beneath the layers of paint I was pretty sure it was cedar. It was a door that deserved saving, so I bought it – for a fraction of what I would have paid in the Medina.

  It took repeated trips to the smouldering Hole of Moulay Idriss before we finally managed to track down some old gayzas. They were beautiful joists, a better colour than new timber, and stronger. But they too were covered in severa
l layers of paint.

  When we introduced the decapo ladies to the pile of eighty or so gayzas, their faces fell. It was an enormous amount of work. Then Fatima’s face lit up. ‘Instead of decapo, we will use ammonia,’ she proclaimed. ‘It will be much quicker.’

  Although dubious, I decided to let them clean a sample joist, but the result was disappointing. Not only did it take just as long, but the beam ended up with a furry coat, like a Welsh mountain pony in winter. It was back to the paint stripper, which was more expensive and time-consuming but resulted in an even finish that showed the richness of the natural wood.

  As if I wasn’t busy enough, in July I decided to go back to school to improve my French. One sunny afternoon I joined hundreds of others in a high-school playground in the Ville Nouvelle, adults, teenagers and children lined up in pairs according to age. In the adults’ line were neatly dressed men in suits, men in their twenties wearing jeans, women in djellabas and headscarves, and younger women in tight pedal-pusher pants, clingy tops and crimped hair. The whole gamut of Moroccan society. I was the only foreigner.

  At the appointed time, we were marched into a grotty classroom and sat at worn wooden desks covered with years of graffiti. Although it was in French and Arabic, it didn’t appear to differ much from the ‘Si Mohamed was here’ variety. For thousands of years it has been thus – a desire to stamp one’s presence on an indifferent universe.

  A portly schoolteacher checked our enrolment cards and doled out test papers with rapid-fire instructions – in Darija. Oh no. I had presumed the language of instruction would be French.

  My French was far from flash but it had enabled me to get by to this point. Never one for rote learning, I had leapt in feet first and muddled along. But since arriving in Morocco, my ability had actually deteriorated. Back in Brisbane, our wine-fuelled, Saturday-lunch French conversations with the Belgian teacher had ranged across a variety of topics. Here in Fez, I conversed in only the most basic way, and I was longing for some free and easy communication with Moroccans. I wanted to be able to hold my own in complex and interesting conversations. To do this properly I really needed to speak Darija, but French was a start. All Moroccans learn French at school, and many I met spoke it well.

  Sandy had decided to bypass French, reasoning he could always rely on me, and was progressing with his Darija lessons from the workers. His attempts at pronunciation frequently caused them rollicking amusement, and I wondered if they were entertaining themselves with that time-honoured tradition of teaching the novice rude words.

  There are some English words that cause Moroccans to guffaw with embarrassment, including ‘twenty’ and ‘zucchini’, which evidently sound like Darija names for female genitalia. Conversely there are some Moroccan words I have trouble saying without grinning like a silly schoolkid. These included Arfuk, for ‘please’, and the much used kunt, the past tense of the verb ‘to be’.

  I’d learnt a few Darija words myself, of course, for things relating to the restoration. There were gayzas and the roqsa and also traab (rubble), zbel (household rubbish), hmar (donkey), shnou? (what?), schuuf (look), mezyan (good), mezyan bezzaf (very good), mumtaz (fantastic) and mumkin (maybe). Our most used expression was mushi mushkil – not a problem.

  As I stared down at the placement test, I felt overcome with panic. It was like one of those nightmares in which you find yourself resitting your high-school exams. I scanned the page, which offered multiple-choice questions, the first of which was Si allant au cinéma? Il y a une demande, un imperatif, un ordre ou une interrogation? Who the hell knew? Certainly not me. I cast a sideways glance at my neighbour, a man from further down the African continent, who appeared to be as stumped as I was.

  I took a stab that it was A, and from there on the questions got worse. At the end I had to write a page-long description of ‘my city’. Every tense I knew other than the present had flown from my head, and my piece read like the work of a retarded ten-year-old. My concentration wasn’t helped by people who had forgotten to turn off their mobiles, or by the constant interruptions of the teacher, who issued streams of incomprehensible instructions.

  I handed in my paper just before the hour was up, my only consolation being that I wasn’t the last to finish. I saw a younger woman just beginning her description. At least when I ended up in the class for dummies I wouldn’t be alone.

  But somehow I was put in the second-top class. Had I fluked the exam or was there a mistake? Whatever the reason, I was way out of my depth, and endured a terrifying class every weekday evening for a month. The bell rang at six-thirty p.m. and we all trooped into the classroom like a bunch of schoolkids. If you were late it was too bad, because they locked the gates. The other students in my class were in their twenties and keen to further their job prospects. I felt uncomfortable and out of place as the only foreigner and the only person over the age of thirty.

  The teacher was a dynamic and energetic Moroccan woman in her fifties. She had a Socratic teaching method, her intelligent gaze shifting constantly across the sea of faces. You never knew when she was going to launch a question at you like a guided missile. I sat there in pure dread, muttering, ‘Not me, please, not me.’ The rest of the class gabbled on fluently in French, discussing intricate points of grammar, while I was still coming to grips with what had been said. Although I was acquainted with the various verb forms, we were not yet on speaking terms. And I certainly couldn’t address the past and future versions by their first names. I was used to being treated with indulgence in French classes, and being able to clarify points in English, but here that was impossible – neither the teacher nor any of the other students spoke it.

  It was a baptism of fire. At the end of a month, my vocabulary had increased significantly but my verbs were still hit-and-miss.

  Building rubble had begun to assume a huge role in our lives. It was something we generated in vast amounts as we dug out floors and walls, and disposing of it entailed shovelling it into sacks and having them carted away by teams of donkeys.

  One Sunday, we were in the process of interviewing a new carpenter when one of our regular donkey men came running into the house, shouting in Darija. Si Mohamed asked him what had happened, and the man gave a long, complicated explanation, the gist of which was that his donkeys had been taken.

  Evidently the man had been making a delivery of lime and sand, and was about to start loading the rubble when our least favourite official, the Maqadim, turned up. He announced that since we didn’t have a permit to put bags of rubble on the street, he was going to confiscate the animals until we paid a fine, and he had taken the six little donkeys off goodness knows where. It was the equivalent of having your car towed.

  This was the first we’d heard about needing a permit for rubble. We had a roqsa, a building permit, and it seemed self-evident that building would create rubble. Our riad was at the end of an alley and our bags of rubble weren’t blocking anyone’s access, so what was the problem?

  Regardless of logic, the situation was an emergency. Six donkeys had been kidnapped and the donkey man’s livelihood was threatened. This was a full-on donkey hostage crisis.

  As the donkey team had been subcontracted by our building merchant, it was his responsibility, and Mustapha decided to phone him, shouting down the handpiece as though he didn’t trust the telephone to convey the news all the way to Bab Guissa.

  ‘It will be all right,’ Mustapha reported at the end of the call. ‘The merchant is an important man and knows the Caid. He does a lot of work for him, removing the rubble when houses collapse. He will sort it out.’

  The Caid was one of the top officials in Fez and not a man to be messed with. It seemed a big ask that he would turn his attention from important matters to our donkey crisis, and we didn’t hold out much hope, but to our surprise, strings were pulled and a couple of heavies were sent to talk to the Maqadim. He caved in, and a few hours later we found the six donkeys standing outside our door.

  Not wanting to sh
ow his face, the Maqadim had released the donkeys at the bottom of the alley, given them a whack, and they had obediently trotted up to our place. A much relieved donkey man returned to work loading our rubble with a grin from ear to ear.

  But he could barely keep up with the rate at which rubble was produced, and to avoid being buried in it we hired a young man to do nothing but sweep, clean and fill bags of it. Our sweeper had a ready smile and an incredibly literal frame of mind, so that if you asked him to clean an area he would remove everything in his path, including the little marble drain covers that kept out rats, cockroaches and flies – and possibly djinns. My plastic slip-on shoes also disappeared in the clean-up.

  In order to protect the ancient zellij on the stairs to the first floor, Sandy asked the sweeper to cover them in plastic and top this with an inch of plaster, the idea being that we would pull up the whole lot, plastic, plaster and all, when work was completed. Si Mohamed relayed this instruction, and the next thing we knew, the sweeper had covered the stairs in plastic and upended two bags of dry plaster on them. When his error was pointed out he swept up every last speck and, as instructed, mixed in some water.

  ‘Your idea was not so good,’ he said a little while later.

  ‘Why not?’

  He pointed to three buckets. Each was filled to the brim with plaster – set hard as a rock.

  The electricians, having been at the riad for just a week, were almost finished. Overall, we’d been impressed with their speed and efficiency, particularly one bearded fellow with glasses whom we nicknamed the professor. He asked detailed questions about what we wanted and made intelligent suggestions. Around his neck he wore a silver chain depicting a figure carrying a ladder.

  ‘Charlie Chaplin,’ came the reply when I asked him who it was. ‘He is my hero.’

  This did make sense, given that The Tramp’s movies involved all kinds of gags with ladders, and reflected some of the slapstick situations the professor himself had experienced in his work.