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

Authors: Suzanna Clarke

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #House & Home, #Travel, #Essays & Travelogues

A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (24 page)

BOOK: A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco
3.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Mustapha was ecstatic about the beams. ‘These are like gold,’ he said. He stroked them, examined them, and even identified which parts of the roof they had come from, according to the nail holes.

There was significant progress elsewhere in the house a couple of days later, with Noureddine completing the restoration of the ceiling in the front entrance, whose planks had been partially eaten
away
with woodworm. He had installed
gayzers
before replacing the planks, and when the decapo women saw the results of their paint-stripping work in place, there were tears in their eyes. Three coats of paint – white, green and brown – had been stripped off to reveal dark-grained cedar that seemed to glow from within. This small section of ceiling looked suddenly elegant and refined, but made the rest of the house look even shoddier.

Working down my to-do list I went hunting for kitchen items, and had a sobering reminder of the reality of most Moroccans’ lives. Si Mohamed and I went up and down Rue Cuny in the Ville Nouvelle trying to find a kitchen sink that was more than six inches deep. When I did find one of European depth, they wanted the equivalent of six hundred dollars for it.

I made the mistake of voicing my thoughts aloud to Si Mohamed. ‘In Australia I could buy that much more cheaply. And I’d have a choice of all sorts of designs.’

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised what I must have sounded like. I loathe it when people play the comparison game, dissatisfied with where they are at present. Yet here I was doing exactly that.

Si Mohamed bluntly put me in my place. ‘But we are not in Australia. People here have simple kitchens.’

I castigated myself. I remembered having dinner in a fancy restaurant on our first trip to Fez. Going out to the toilet past the kitchen, I glimpsed two women huddled over a single gas-burner on the ground, from which they had produced six amazing courses.

I eventually found a simple ceramic sink that was marginally deeper, and bought it. Next, I needed stone to make bench tops. Moroccan stone comes in beautiful subtle colours – patterned beiges, mottled yellows, creams, pinks, black and green. I really liked a cream-coloured one that looked as though it had translucent grains of fossilised wheat in it. The drawback was that the stone wasn’t very hard and scratched easily. The other choice was Italian marble, but I’d seen so many laminex bench tops trying to emulate it that when I saw the real thing it looked somehow fake. I took away a couple of samples of local stone and caught a taxi back to the Medina, dropping Si Mohamed off on the way.

Getting out at R’Cif, I found a large crowd blocking the footpath on either side of the road. Curiously there was no talking or pushing or shouting; everyone was standing still and silent, as though waiting for something. The only sound was a whistle, like that at a basketball game. Peering between people, I saw what had their attention. Lying motionless on the ground was a boy of about five or six, his legs covered in blood. His eyes were wide with shock but he did not whimper or cry out. As I watched he moved his legs.

The astonishing thing was that no one was with the boy, holding his hand or his head, comforting him. He lay apart in his own island of pain. Cars continued to drive around him. There were no hysterical relatives, no one rushing forward to administer first aid. The crowd was simply waiting and watching. I thought about pushing through and going to him, but I felt the force of the crowd like a barrier. I found excuses not to intervene. This was not my drama. What could I do? I couldn’t speak his
language
. I had no medical skills. There was a policeman there, and presumably an ambulance was on its way.

Walking home, I felt ashamed of what I felt to be my complicity in the crowd’s passivity. Maybe, I thought, this was due to the belief that events unfolded as Allah willed – you could not do anything to avoid your fate. I was constantly amazed that there weren’t more accidents in Fez, given the way people wandered all over the road amid traffic. Today was the first evidence I’d seen that they didn’t always do so with impunity.

A few weeks later, I was walking down an alley and was thrilled to spot the same young boy, his leg in a grubby plaster cast, sitting in a doorway. He looked bored and frustrated, but at least he was alive.

Although the electrical work was now finished, the electricity account still hadn’t been changed into our names. I went with Si Mohamed back to the utilities office at R’Cif, where for some reason the clerk wanted to see my
roqsa
. We trudged home to fetch it and returned.

‘No, not this permit,’ he said. ‘The other one.’

‘Which one? I don’t have another.’

‘You must have,’ he insisted. ‘I want to see the one for operating commercial premises.’

‘But I’m not operating anything commercial.’

‘Then why do you want four lines into your premises instead of the usual two?’

I had no idea why he was asking this when I only wanted to change the name of the account. ‘Because that’s what the electrician said we needed for the lights, washing machine, fridge, oven and heaters. Two lines won’t do if we need to run everything at once.’

The man stared at me as though it had never occurred to him that anyone would contemplate such a thing. He said, ‘Then you need a permit saying you are not going to operate commercial premises.’

Somewhere else I would have thought he was making a Kaf kaesque jest. But he was serious, and so we headed to the
baladiya
. Thankfully the nice chap was there.

‘No,’ he told me, ‘you don’t need another permit.’

‘Well, why won’t they just put my power on how I want it?’

‘The trouble is you’ve requested four lines. For such a request you need to fill out the appropriate form, pay four thousand dirhams and supply the architect’s plans. Then a committee will come and inspect your property to see if it’s suitable for commercial purposes.’

‘But I don’t want to run a commercial operation. It’s a private residence – it’s simply a big house and I have several appliances and lots of lights.’

‘Then you’ll need to get the committee to confirm this.’

My brain was dizzy from going round in circles, but suddenly I saw a way out. ‘What if I only ask for two lines?’

The nice chap smiled. ‘Then you don’t need any forms.’

It was a win, but at a cost. I had planned on giving the gas
stove
I’d bought the year before to Si Mohamed’s mother, who didn’t have one, and installing an electric oven and a gas stovetop. But now I wouldn’t be able to run an electric oven, and probably not a washing machine either. When it grew colder a few months later, we blew the entire electrical system by turning on a single radiator.

In the Medina, people are used to living with just a couple of lights and a single gas burner, so what else would you need modern Western lighting and appliances for, if not to run a guesthouse or a factory? What I wanted to know was, if I was paying for it what difference did it make to the electricity company?

I never discovered the answer to that.

IT WAS NOW
the end of July and the heat beat down into the courtyard in the middle of the day, making the dust stick to sweaty bodies and the work seem much harder. Outside the thick walls of the Medina, it was even hotter. The seasons in Morocco can be extreme. August regularly has days exceeding forty degrees, yet during the past two winters it had been cold enough to snow in Fez itself, something which hadn’t been heard of in more than a decade.

One Saturday morning, while David was making his tour of inspection, Mustapha’s recurring nightmare worsened. This time David was joined by Rachid and Zina. Things were fine until they saw the wall in the downstairs salon that had been partially removed to reveal the ancient mezzanine.

‘But what weight was it carrying?’ David asked, leading the delegation upstairs to inspect.

‘Monsieur David is always looking for a disaster,’ muttered Mustapha, following after him. He might have thought David was overreacting, but a nasty crack in the wall above had grown worse in the past few days and now stretched to the corner of the room.

Rachid and Zina were alarmed, and insisted we shift our bed from its position right next to the wall, where there appeared to be nothing much to prevent the entire floor from caving in and taking us with it. With a thick layer of dirt between the floor and the ceiling below, the weight was substantial and a collapse at one end could lead to a domino effect along the whole length.

Back in the downstairs salon, Mustapha, on instructions from Rachid, removed a
gayza
to reveal a badly rotting supporting beam, and there were calls for immediate scaffolding. A debate was then carried out in Darija, French and English about the whys and wherefores of using metal beams in place of wooden ones to take the weight. Being a purist, David was vehemently against metal.

As I’d managed to buy some magnificent wooden beams just days before, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. We would use one of them. Plaster was put on a small section of the crack in the upstairs salon, so we could see whether it was still growing.

Checking the strength of the outside wall along the top alley, Rachid discovered a massive old lintel hidden in a cavity over the stairs to the terrace. The door it had once protected was now walled up and invisible under plaster, but he said it was likely to have been the main entrance off the street for that wing of the house.

We paid another visit to the woman in the adjoining house, who was shortly moving out. Rachid gave cries of delight on
seeing
the ancient wooden
masharabbia
screens that formed the balustrade. It was in such original condition, nothing messed with, that he found it jaw-dropping.

‘I am just pleased I saw this before I died,’ said Rachid quietly, snapping a few photos.

All the experts were of the opinion, as we’d thought, that the neighbour’s house had once been joined with ours. The area where our riad now stood was likely to have been their garden. The bricked-in window we’d found in our kitchen suggested there’d once been a view onto the garden from their place.

There were additional clues. Halfway up our downstairs salon wall was another lintel, suggesting a door through from the neighbour’s salon. The most likely explanation for the building of our riad was that the generation who owned the neighbour’s house had died and the inheritance was split between several grown children, who needed to expand to accommodate their families.

The two sections of our riad had evidently started off as separate wings with their own entrances, as Rachid’s discovery of the lintel of the old door onto the top alley showed. When we started to fix the floor of the upstairs salon, we discovered the remains of a line of green tiles with an exterior finish: this salon, a later addition to the riad, had once been the neighbour’s roof terrace, at a time when the whole structure was only one storey high. The
massreiya
would also have been added later.

In contrast to their excitement over the prospective failure of the supporting beam in the salon, Rachid, David and Zina were non chalant about the chicken coop that intersected the
massreiya
wall
, saying the deep cracks were normal and not that difficult to fix, which was a relief.

BOOK: A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco
3.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Sweet Agony by Charlotte Stein
The Flame in the Maze by Caitlin Sweet
The apostate's tale by Margaret Frazer
DJ's Mission by McCullough, A. E.
The Romance Novel Book Club by Desconhecido(a)
At Home with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly
Soul Chance by Nichelle Gregory