A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (31 page)

The city of Granada has a population of some quarter of a million. It is a mixture of glorious Spanish baroque architecture and ghastly, late-twentieth-century blocks of flats. The effect is jarring, like a mouth of perfect teeth spoiled by a few badly fitting ones. Along the backstreets, though, some old buildings are being refurbished rather than knocked down.

On the top of Sabika Hill in the centre of the city sits the Alhambra, spread over some 142 000 square metres. A mélange of buildings from different periods, it creates an unlikely but harmonious whole that dominates the skyline. Once inside the site,
it
’s a long walk to the Nasrid palaces, the main attraction. These palaces were built to display the power that Muslim rulers still enjoyed after being forced to retreat to Granada, their last stronghold. The antechamber, the Mexuar, is a gentle introduction to a series of elaborately decorated salons and courtyards, each more magnificent than the last.

Following the principles of Islamic design, in the centre of each courtyard is either a fountain or a channel of water, creating a unifying element. The intricacy of the plasterwork and
zellij
decorating the rooms surrounding the courtyards is breathtaking.

In the private quarters, the Court of the Lions, colonnades of carved plaster enclose a central fountain supported by twelve leonine statues. A large room to one side of the court has a gigantic star-shaped design in the ceiling, the delicacy of which defies belief; it looks like a multitude of miraculously arranged mini-stalactites, carved out of plaster. This was the room where the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Boabdil, is supposed to have invited to dinner a family with which he’d fallen out, then had them killed.

Most of the palaces were built over a period of thirty years. I pictured the workers living together, sharing meals, having feuds and money problems, speculating on palace intrigues and wars, all the while working on their few centimetres a day. Did they have some sense that what they were doing would extend so far beyond the bounds of their lives? They could hardly have envisaged that five hundred years later, people of diverse cultures, faiths and religions would come from all over the planet to see their work.

Boabdil surrendered to the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, after which the fate of the Alhambra was shaky for a few centuries. Subsequent generations of Christian rulers put their stamp on it, demolishing sections and rebuilding them in styles they preferred. Ferdinand and Isabella are variously remembered for winning Granada back from the Moors after an exhausting ten-year war, despatching Christopher Columbus to the New World, and starting the Spanish Inquisition.

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 was 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.