A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (17 page)

I made a mental note to look twice at any unsolicited plates of couscous that appeared on our doorstep in future. Such a supernatural method of revenge cast neighbourhood disputes in a whole new light.

Ayisha’s stories offered an insight into why women crowded around stalls in the souk that sold powders and potions, dried lizards, the skins of rare and endangered animals, live turtles and chameleons. They were seeking magical solutions to their problems
from
people they respected. Were they greatly dissimilar to those Westerners who bought endless self-help books, or tuned in to Dr Phil and Oprah for advice?

Just as Sandy and I were starting to feel completely despondent about our lack of a builder, fearing we were never going to get started, let alone finished, our luck turned. David rang to tell us about a wonderful builder who’d just become available; the project he was working on had stalled because of lack of money. Mustapha had worked on David’s dar for six months the previous year, and was careful with sensitive preservation work such as ours. But he could be slow, David warned.

When Mustapha came to the door of Riad Zany I liked him immediately. He had a round, jolly face that made you want to smile, was dressed in a djellaba and skullcap, and was the epitome of gracefully aging Muslim respectability. He greeted me by gripping my hand in both of his. He was intelligent, assured and upbeat, and we felt confident about him, the more so since he’d been recommended by David, who was extremely particular.

Mustapha was willing to work on a day rate and we asked how much he wanted. It was a bit more than we’d budgeted for, but I reminded myself that we were talking about the equivalent of a few extra dollars a day. I said we needed to have the work finished in five months, to which he responded, ‘That is a very short time,’ a huge contrast to Omar’s brash over-confidence. We happily engaged him to start at the end of May.

We had now hired the three people most important to the riad’s future: Rachid, Mustapha, and the engineer, a woman called Zina. When we called a meeting a few days later Zina arrived wearing tight white pants and a green top with a black linen surcoat. She had streaked hair, heavy eyeliner, and high wedge shoes with diamantes. Needless to say, she also had a forthright manner, and she and Mustapha hit it off immediately. They had never met but had grown up in the same part of the Medina, and had animated conversations about what had happened to old so-and-so.

‘I like this man,’ Rachid declared, slapping Mustapha on the back. He and Zina had decided that Mustapha knew what he was talking about when it came to repairing houses, so they could relax.

We were standing on the terrace discussing how best to fix the catwalk, which had a rotting supporting beam, when some women leant over from the neighbouring house and asked Rachid something in Darija. The next moment all three were off racing downstairs and into the street like beagles after a scent. I followed at a more leisurely pace and discovered that one of the women had a house for sale and wanted them to see it. It was a nice little dar but unfortunately had been severely messed with – there was lots of badly applied paint and cheap tiles.

‘This is just what I like,’ said Rachid, tongue in cheek. I had to remind them all that they were doing a job for me, and reluctantly they dragged themselves away. We needed to see another neighbour to discuss repairing a shared wall, and had a great deal of difficulty locating their front door. Fassi houses are interwoven
like
some intricate puzzle, in a Lego method of construction. Our kitchen is partially over someone else’s, and a neighbour’s bedroom protrudes along one side of our courtyard, with one of our bedrooms on top of theirs in turn.

This sharing of space rarely involves being able to see into other people’s homes, but it hints at the spiderweb of relationships that existed between the families who built and modified these houses over hundreds of years. Need a bit of quick cash? Flog off part of your house so the neighbour can build an extra room.

Our neighbour’s door turned out to be in a completely different alley. We knocked and were answered by a woman who was understandably wary of a crowd of strangers, even if three of them were Moroccan, and she wasn’t going to let us in for a moment. There was nothing wrong with her house, she said, she just wanted us to go away.

Mustapha asked to speak to her husband, but she told him he would only say the same thing. It was dispiriting, because we needed to see what was happening on the other side of our cracked wall. Since we were the ones paying to fix it, I’d have thought she’d be only too keen.

Zina had to leave for another appointment but Rachid stayed for a coffee, which gave me a chance to ask him why Fassi houses had developed the way they did.

‘The Medina has grown without an urban plan,’ he said. ‘It followed agriculture and irrigation. Water finds its own way, and the Medina developed in a pattern like the veins in a leaf. The first roads were built next to the river because this was
what
people walked beside. They went there to get water for cooking or for their animals or to grow tomatoes. As areas further out were irrigated, people moved there, and as the canals and the streets running alongside them became smaller, they became increasingly private.’

I liked the image of the Medina as a leaf, with the central vein being the main route, and this leading into smaller ones, which were the
derbs
, or the private spaces.

‘So why is the architecture here so different to the West?’ I asked.

‘Usually the shape of the parcel of land determines the architecture, but in the Medina they built houses from the inside, for symmetry, and what happened outside the building didn’t matter at all. In the Western model, the inside is full and it is empty all around.’

I thought of suburban houses in the West with their vast expanses of lawn, essentially empty space, with the house as the central feature. My architect father had told me that when you design a house you should read the lie of the land, the way it slopes and the aspects of the sun, and then design the house to suit. It was a principle that wasn’t always followed, and certainly not in the sprawling estates of poorly designed housing that were the bane of Western cities.

But why had this diametrically opposite approach developed in Arab countries?

‘The Arabs were desert people and they found the emptiness frightening,’ Rachid told me. ‘So they created a way to formally
control
the space. The French philosopher Pascal said that when he saw the night sky and the stars it made him anxious, so he believed in God. Man needs something to measure by. In Fassi houses, symmetry is used as a way of making the space intelligible, based around the square or rectangle.
Zellij
is like a metaphysical science, used to make space measurable.’

I looked at the countless tiny tiles ranged across the courtyard in front of us, dividing the space into neat squares, five centimetres by five. Now they all made sense.

Things continued to go our way. Jenny rang one morning to say she was on her way over with our new plumber. She warned me not to shake his hand and I gathered he was a fundamentalist. At least his scruples didn’t extend to not working for infidels. When they arrived he poked and prodded walls and had a go at dismantling the fountain, blowing through the nozzle to see if the channel was clear. We began to feel hopeful he might actually be able to fix it.

After the plumber had left, Jenny and I went to purchase building supplies, trailing some distance behind Si Mohamed. He was a neatly dressed, mosque-going fellow in his early twenties, tall and lanky with a ready smile and a helpful sincerity. His father had died when Si Mohamed was young and he was now the sole breadwinner for his mother and two sisters. Staying well behind him in the Medina was imperative because the previous year he had been arrested for trying to sell stuffed toy camels to foreigners and spent two months in prison.

Over the past couple of years, thousands of false guides had been imprisoned for months at a time. They were mostly young men who pursued tourists and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and they could ruin a pleasant stroll through the Medina. Frazzled tourists often paid a few dirhams to get rid of them, which only exacerbated the problem. Although imprisonment was an extreme solution, it had the desired effect, and now there were fewer prepared to risk it. The downside was that any Moroccan seen walking with a foreigner could be arrested, which made life difficult if you had Moroccan friends or employees.

The building-supply merchants were in Bab Guissa, a very old area of the Medina I had never visited before. Its narrow streets teemed with people. We went past a number of hole-in-the-wall shops until we came to a place the size of a garage, filled with bags of sand, lime, cement, and a pair of old-fashioned scales. To open an account there, I just needed to write down my address. No ID was required, no proof of address or passport. About ten or so donkeys were standing patiently by, ready to make deliveries. They would bring our initial order of lime and sand the following day.

We went on to a wood supplier, where long lengths of cedar reached up to a soaring ceiling, making the air smell like a forest. I bought four large sheets of masonite to protect the tiles in the courtyard. These were neatly rolled up and a small, wiry porter of about sixty lifted them deftly onto his head. Porters are often employed to carry awkwardly shaped objects, or those not considered large enough for a donkey.

Jenny and I had to run to keep up with him as he raced
off
downhill and through the tiny streets, cutting through the crowds like an escaped bull. We lost sight of him after a few twists and turns, but he was waiting at the riad’s front door when we arrived ten minutes later. These porters prided themselves on knowing every one of the Medina’s thousands of alleys.

At last everything was in place and we were ready to begin. Saturday, May 27 was a red-letter day – the first day of construction. Early that morning, I went to fetch some bread and found three men sitting on a step in our neighbourhood square.

‘
Salaam Aleikum
,’ I said, wondering what they were waiting for.

‘
Aleikum Salaam
,’ came the chorused reply.

They were still there when I returned, and moments after I got home there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find the same three men there – our builder and his two labourers. I hadn’t recognised Mustapha in his work clothes.

The three of them proceeded to empty the kitchen. Within minutes our stove, crockery and utensils were sitting in the courtyard. Then they began to rip the plaster off the walls. The speed of their work, along with the noise and the clouds of dust, had us dumbstruck. After so many weeks of frustrating delay, it all seemed to be happening at once, and Sandy and I didn’t know what had hit us. We quietly regretted not having had our coffee half an hour earlier.

By lunchtime, most of the plaster was off the walls, and the skeleton of the kitchen had begun to reveal itself. It was more than just intriguing ancient brickwork – there were outlines of several windows that had been filled in a long time ago, including one through to the neighbour’s house.

An insistent braying from the alleyway announced the arrival of a team of donkeys, making their first delivery of lime and sand. As one donkey was being unloaded it decided to make a break for it, clattering down the steps of the alley, panniers flapping. I would have felt like doing much the same thing under the circumstances. It was brought back and given a reprimand with a stick by its exasperated driver, who no doubt had a schedule to adhere to.

After lunch, Mustapha and his team lined a corner of the courtyard with masonite and then covered it with plastic. Onto this they shovelled huge quantities of lime and sand, piling it into the shape of a volcano. Then they ran a hose from the bathroom and started filling up the cone. This was the beginning of the traditional lime-and-sand mortar undercoat known as
haarsh
, which is used on interior walls.

Fassi building methods evolved to suit the natural conditions, but they take time, something many people do not want to spend these days.
Haarsh
used to be allowed to cure for three months or so. You made your
haarsh
and then went off on your
Hajj
– pilgrimage to Mecca – on your camel. By the time you returned, the mix was cured. Nowadays builders, even traditional ones, only cure it for a few days, before adding a small quantity of cement to get it to set.