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

by Suzanna Clarke

  In 1812, Napoleon’s troops attempted to blow up the Alhambra while decamping. The fact that the palace still exists today is due to a soldier who made sure the explosives didn’t detonate. Only a wall was destroyed, but the site was then left to fall into decay. Nineteenth-century drawings show the wonderful Court of the Lions with holes in the paving, and weeds growing through the marble. Ironically it was the Alhambra’s increasing popularity with tourists that saved it. I wondered how much similar, little-known and neglected architecture existed in Fez.

  There is further irony in the fact that the Spanish Christians, having spent eight hundred years trying to kick the Moors out of the country, now make so much income from their legacy. Granada is such a Moorish space that it seems strange never to hear the call to prayer.

  RETURNED TO FEZ feeling as if I’d been away for months. I’d had pangs of homesickness, despite relishing the comforts and wonders around me. And even though the prospect of private space was one of the reasons I’d looked forward to leaving the riad, I missed the workers too. I had grown more used to their company than I thought.

  Mustapha and the crew seemed genuinely delighted to see me back, filling me in on what they’d been up to. They’d had a paid holiday and all gone to the public swimming pool together, where Mustapha managed to lose his false teeth underwater. I was hardly surprised, as he rarely stopped talking. He had to get the lifeguard to don his goggles and dive to the bottom to retrieve them, causing untold hilarity among the others.

  On the down side, though, not a lot had been done on the house while we were away. A major beam had been put into place in the ceiling of the downstairs salon, and the walls had been stripped and coated with haarsh in preparation for plastering; some lintels and a couple of windows had been installed in the bathroom, and more gayzas had been purchased. But the catwalk, which I had expected to be half finished by now, hadn’t been started.

  Nor had any headway been made with the plumbing: the shower, two handbasins and another toilet still had to be put in. Jon and Jenny had rung repeatedly to see why the fundamentalist plumber wasn’t showing up to work, and heard a mountain of excuses: he hadn’t been able to get the right pipes, he had been sick, some relative or other had passed away. By the time I got home, Jenny estimated that four of his close relatives were now dead.

  We got Si Mohamed to ring and say we were about to take the job away from him if he didn’t get on with it. Good plumbers being harder to find than carpenters, this was a bluff, and he knew it. He turned up for half an hour, walked around with his hands behind his back, then left saying he’d return next morning. He didn’t, so we rang and were told he’d arrive within half an hour. Two hours later, after we’d rung once more, he finally put in an appearance. Some pipes actually went into holes and we began to feel hopeful.

  But he failed to show the following morning and Si Mohamed was told that yet another relative had died. Really, the plumber was a most unfortunate fellow. His family were dropping like flies.

  A couple of days after returning, I had a fully-fledged panic attack, brought on by going to the bank and discovering that expenses while we were away had been higher than anticipated and there was only sixteen thousand dirhams left in the account. Sixteen thousand of anything sounds like a lot, but in reality it was a couple of thousand dollars, with which we had to finish the entire house. We needed closer to twenty thousand dollars, and were forced to apply for extensions on our credit-card limits. They say that owning a boat is like standing under a cold shower and ripping up hundred-dollar notes – restoring a house in Fez is the same, except that our shower was still a bucket.

  Sandy and I had a discussion that stretched into the night, focusing on all the things we hadn’t done, or should have done differently. We decided we’d been far too nice, and hadn’t pushed some people enough. Noureddine, for example, had managed to make repairing an old door stretch out to five days, when there were far more important things that needed doing, such as the kitchen windows. I’d asked him a couple of times when he was going to get onto them; he’d assured me he was just about to and then not done it. It was my fault for not having been more insistent.

  While Sandy eventually fell asleep I lay awake worrying until the small hours, feeling an increasing sense of desperation. We had to finish what we’d started, although it would mean racking up the credit cards. To complicate matters, we had Sandy’s daughter and grandchildren arriving in a few weeks – not nearly enough time to complete everything, especially when trying to get the plumber to do anything was so damn difficult. After three months of solid work, we still didn’t have a shower, kitchen, or a dust-free space in which to sleep. We’d anticipated having time to enjoy the house a little before returning to Brisbane. Now it looked like we’d be working right up until our departure, and even then it might not be finished.

  I woke up feeling wrung out, while Sandy seemed a lot chirpier. Downstairs, I skolled the coffee he made me and began ordering people about, trying to convey the sense of urgency I felt. I told Noureddine that if he did the windows well and quickly, then I would retain him to do the cupboards. Otherwise I’d find another carpenter to do them. I had a long talk with Mustapha. He was eminently practical and said he was quite capable of installing the major pipes through the courtyard and making the catch pits they fed into. But we still needed the plumber to connect the other toilet and taps in the main bathroom.

  After several more pleading phone calls, the plumber agreed to come the next morning. He was only half an hour late, which was a good start, but after wandering around looking at things for a while, he said he needed to go home to change his clothes. Three hours later, he still hadn’t returned.

  To make matters worse, the Maqadim turned up again, rapping on the door and muttering darkly about being told we were using modern bricks, firing them ourselves. He said this with absolute authority, despite having just walked past a stack of handmade traditional bricks in the entrance corridor. Not only that, he insisted we were using steel beams instead of wooden ones.

  Unable to locate a single modern brick or steel beam on the premises, he looked around for something else to harass us about. In the kitchen, he looked up at the ceiling and almost wet himself with excitement.

  ‘Why is the halka there?’ he demanded. ‘It was not on the plan.’

  ‘What plan?’ I countered. ‘As we’re not opening a guesthouse, we’ve never been asked to submit one.’

  He took Mustapha aside and heavied him. Mustapha said he had no idea what it was all about, he wasn’t the boss. When the Maqadim turned his attention to the increasingly uncomfortable Si Mohamed, I piped up and said that the roqsa committee had already inspected the halka and didn’t have a problem with it.

  ‘You have a new roqsa?’ the Maqadim asked, clearly disappointed.

  With a flash of insight, I realised his appearance now wasn’t a coincidence. This was the week the old roqsa had been due to run out. If there was a prospect of it not being renewed, perhaps we might have been amenable to greasing his palm.

  I gave him a copy of the engineer’s report and promised him a copy of the roqsa later in the week. This didn’t satisfy him; he said he’d be making further enquiries and would need to discuss it with us at another time.

  The following Friday, our workers’ day off, we heard the familiar officious rap on the door. We sat quietly inside, declining to answer it.

  A week later, he turned up with two members of the roqsa committee in tow. Clearly unimpressed at being dragged back to the same property twice, they had a cursory glance around before departing. The Maqadim went off looking for other people to hassle, and we didn’t hear from him for a while.

  In the midst of these woes, something wonderful happened. Sandy had got one of the men to chip away the remaining bulge in the bathroom wall, convinced it was caused not by earth movement but by something more interesting. The old bricks and mortar were removed to reveal a tall urn without a base, inset into the wall. It w
as the site of a natural mineral-water spring, something houses in this area had also had before the water table dropped at the beginning of the 1970s. We were as excited as Howard Carter must have been uncovering Tutankhamen’s tomb.

  ‘Maybe you will find treasure, which you must share with all of us,’ called Fatima, who was stripping paint off the ceiling nearby.

  Si Mohamed explained that people used to hide their worldly wealth in such places, but as far as we were concerned, the remains of the ancient spring itself was the treasure. Since it no longer functioned, we decided to put a copper bowl on top of the urn, install a tap at the back, and use it as a hand basin, leaving it otherwise untouched apart from a few repairs. This was a much neater solution than a having a hand basin taking up floor space in the narrow bathroom. It was days like these that made working on the house pure joy.

  And the workers still seemed to be happy. Mustapha would break out singing on occasion in a deep rich baritone that made us all smile. The men laughed and joked, teased one another, made animal noises. One of them could do a dog howling that made Tigger head for the terrace. Another did a mean rooster. Someone else a cow. The cacophony transformed our riad into an hysterical Animal Farm.

  Animal noises aside, with our hodge-podge of languages and gestures we communicated remarkably well, even when Si Mohamed wasn’t present.

  ‘I really like you,’ Fatima told me one day, apropos of nothing at all. ‘You are my sister.’

  Perhaps it was a pre-emptive move, the cynical part of me speculated, as the decapo ladies’ work was coming to a close. They did not want to leave and their pace had slowed considerably, even though we’d promised to find them other work. Sandy and I didn’t really want them to go either; we enjoyed having them around and did not push them to work faster. No wonder our budget was shot to pieces.

  Not long afterwards, Fatima and Halima had some kind of argument. This was unusual for them; they were related by marriage and spent a great deal of time with each other, arriving at work together and chattering away happily. Their quarrel changed the atmosphere in the house, and Sandy and I didn’t like it one bit.

  One morning, they turned up separately, still not speaking to each other, and Fatima refused to work with Halima. I took them aside, and with Si Mohamed translating gave them a pep talk. I began by saying we were very happy with their work, but that to Sandy and me, a home wasn’t just about the bricks and mortar, it was about the feeling in the house. At which Fatima interrupted to say it was the same for her, she was working from her heart. I went on to say how unusual it was to find women in the construction industry, and it really helped that they had the support of each other. I knew there was a problem between them but they needed to put aside their differences and work together. Perhaps when they were feeling calmer and less emotional they could talk about whatever it was.

  By the time Si Mohamed had finished translating, they had tears in their eyes. Halima embraced Fatima; I gave each of them a kiss and went away, leaving them to it. When I came back I heard the rise and fall of their normal chatter. I never learnt the cause of their argument, which apparently remained unresolved, but at least they were civil to one another and ate lunch together, although they continued to arrive and leave separately.

  Another morning, Fatima had a stand-up fight with Noureddine, who’d been teasing her about something too close to the bone. Fatima was screaming and crying and both of them had to be held back from doing one another physical damage. But as with most arguments I’d witnessed in Morocco, it was all over in five minutes. They retreated to their separate corners and sulked. Later, Noureddine apologised by bringing Fatima a cup of tea and some cake, and an uneasy truce reigned.

  The last time I’d seen Ayisha she’d been on a high, but she was looking more serious when I ran into her in the street one day. She stunned me by saying in hushed tones that she’d just been to visit a witch. Was this the same woman who rejected all the old superstitions as ‘nonsense’? (Before, it must be said, going on to reveal she had once seen a djinn.)

  ‘So what did the witch say?’ I quizzed her.

  ‘Nothing. She was no use at all.’ Ayisha threw her hands up in disgust. ‘I went to ask her what should I do about the two men in my life and she couldn’t tell me much. Just general stuff.’

  ‘Did you tell her specifically about the two men?’

  ‘Of course not. It is her job to tell me.’

  As Ayisha’s mother was waiting for her on the corner, she promised to come around and tell me more in an hour or so.

  It transpired that her mother had convinced her to see the witch, since Ayisha was confused about the direction of her life. Show me a 23-year-old who isn’t, I thought.

  The witch had begun by asking Ayisha if she had any metal in her pockets, metal apparently being a no-no when you’re trying to hone in on someone’s psyche. She held Ayisha’s hand over an incense burner that was wafting out clouds of smoke.

  ‘No one wishes you any ill will,’ the witch had told Ayisha. ‘Your energy is clear. However, I sense something else. Something more ominous. You are beautiful and a djinn has become jealous of you and is possessing you. There are two men who love you, but you will not marry either of them, or anyone else, because the djinn will not let you.’

  Ayisha was laughing as she told me this. ‘I went home and told my mother and she was horrified.’

  I understood why. For a Moroccan girl not to marry was considered a tragedy of immense proportions, as it meant she could not have children, and in traditional Moroccan society this was seen as a woman’s primary purpose in life.

  ‘I don’t believe in all that magic rubbish,’ declared Ayisha, and in the next breath was offering to come and burn incense and perform a ritual in our house when the building was finished.

  While we’d been talking we’d been preparing dinner together. Ayisha was very precise about the way things should be done. The tomato cut like so, the cucumber like this. At the end of it all we had a feast. Disaster was narrowly averted just before serving when Ayisha, taking a can from the fridge, was about to spoon tuna cat food over the salad. I stopped her just in time, realising later that she would be quite unused to the concept of buying a special can of food to feed a cat.

  Sandy and I wanted to ask the plumber to join us. He had just overcharged us for something or other, which he’d turned up to do only after repeated phone calls, but it was seven at night and we couldn’t eat while he was watching on hungrily. Ayisha said we were mad.

  ‘Either he gets your money or your food, but not both,’ she declared.

  I told her that one of the things I liked about Moroccan culture was the way people shared food. Whenever I was travelling by train, people would offer me some of theirs.

  ‘Then they are stupid and are going to starve,’ Ayisha said.

  ‘So you include us in that?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not you, I am talking about them.’

  Sandy and I got our way and the plumber ate with us. He and Ayisha had an animated conversation about how people used to fast during the harvest month leading up to Ramadan, as well as during Ramadan itself. Now adherence to religious principles was becoming less strict and many no longer did this. The plumber still fasted for the additional month, as did Ayisha’s mother, although Ayisha and the rest of her family did not.

  Ramadan would be upon us in a couple of weeks. As I found it a hardship going without food for more than four waking hours, the prospect of a month-long daytime fast, let alone two months, was inconceivable.

  There was excitement in the air in the lead-up to Ramadan. People got their best clothes ready and stockpiled special foods. Apart from not eating in daylight hours, Muslims are not permitted to smoke or have sex during Ramadan. Pregnant or menstruating women are exempt from the dietary restrictions, as are the sick and elderly. All the Moroccans we knew took this commitment to God very seriously, as a form of spiritual purification. So seriously, in fact, that it proved to be a bit o
f a worry when Ramadan came round.

  One day, a week or so into Ramadan, I found the plasterer’s assistant rolling around on the floor and groaning from severe stomach cramps. Playing my usual Florence Nightingale role, I produced a couple of Imodium tablets. No, I was told by half a dozen workers, the assistant could not let anything pass his lips. Why not? I wanted to know. After all, the sick are exempt from Ramadan.

  ‘He can only take medicine if he is dying,’ Mustapha said.

  Listening to the groans of the agonised young man for the next few hours, it certainly sounded like he was.

  The zellijis – tile craftsmen – had started with a bang, completing their work in the bathroom in just two days. This was no mean feat, since there were four hundred handmade tiles to the square metre. We were thrilled, and thought the completion of all our tile work was imminent, but the next day they didn’t turn up. When we rang the chief zelliji we were told, very sorry, but they had other work.

  It seemed that contractors the world over had developed a technique to ensure the maximum amount of work for them and an equivalent amount of frustration for those employing them. Their credo seemed to be, start a job and get the clients committed, then nick off to start another job, until you have several on the go at once and everyone screaming to get theirs finished. Whoever screams the loudest or pays the most wins.

  I threatened and cajoled, saying we were on a deadline and they were holding up the plasterer, and the chief zelliji promised they’d work Friday, the usual day off. They did indeed come on Friday – for two whole hours, before discovering there wasn’t enough white tiles to finish. So they went home for couscous with Mama instead.

  It had always been intriguing to see who of our contractors would show up each morning, although our usual team was reliable and hardworking. But one day, our big gentle worker from the Sahara didn’t arrive, and I was astounded to be told he was on strike and wanted a pay rise. He figured he worked harder than anyone else and he wanted more money to compensate. Anxious to avoid a wages breakout, I said we’d find someone else, but Mustapha claimed he was such a good worker he was worth the extra money. I relented and got Si Mohamed to call him and agree to an increase, provided he kept it confidential. He returned to work within half an hour, smug satisfaction all over his face.