A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (4 page)

The second house was a riad, centrally located off the main tourist thoroughfare, the Tala’a Sghira, at the end of the narrowest alley I’d ever seen – only slightly wider than my shoulders. I wondered how they managed to get furniture into the house. Through the front door, I followed a long passageway and emerged via another doorway into a small but attractive courtyard with two trees – a straggly loquat and a lemon – and a beautiful wall fountain. Upstairs, above the ground-floor salon, was an enormous room the size of a European apartment, with stained-glass windows and reasonable
zellij
. There were several other small rooms on
the
same level, and from the roof a view over the Medina. Not a spectacular view, but taken as a whole the property was the best I had seen, and it was in our price bracket. It didn’t scream to me, ‘I’m the one, buy me,’ but my week was up and it was either this house or wait another year.

Back in Brisbane, I showed Sandy the photographs and described the riad. He was much more enthusiastic than I, but maybe I was housed-out. We decided to go ahead and buy it, but there was one major problem – the vendors spoke only Darija. As Australia wasn’t exactly flush with Darija-speakers, it was necessary to get someone in Morocco to place our offer, and the most obvious choice was David. I was reluctant to impose further on his goodwill, since he’d been so generous with his help already and had an extremely busy job, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative. I emailed to ask if he would act as our agent, with us paying him for his services. He said yes, but did not wish to charge anything.

Over the next several months, as negotiations became increasingly complex, I wondered if David ever regretted his generosity. There was a bit of argy-bargy about the price, but as usual both sides compromised and we ended up somewhere in the middle. There was an engineer’s report to organise, and paying the deposit turned into a major drama when the money disappeared between banks, only to turn up weeks later, just as we were getting desperate. No doubt a bank employee somewhere had been making the most of the currency markets.

In preparation for life in Morocco, Sandy and I took up French lessons with a young Belgian living in Brisbane, who
obligingly
doubled as a translator when we needed to ring the notary in Fez. With a growing sense of excitement we arranged for settlement the following January, when we planned to return. That was eight months away, but seemed more than adequate even for the most convoluted of bureaucracies.

But as the months dragged on, it turned out that the vendor was missing a vital piece of documentation – the signed transfer from the previous owner – without which he was legally unable to sell the riad. Since that owner was now dead, the vendor was going to try to get the man’s numerous relatives to sign a new version of the document, and he claimed everything would be sorted out by the time we arrived,
inshallah
.

Now,
inshallah
, meaning ‘God willing’, is a wonderfully useful expression. It means that things will happen in their own time, if God wills it. If I say to you I will do something,
inshallah
, it means that I have every intention of doing so, and if I’m prevented it’s not my fault but is Allah’s will. In Morocco, it’s no use getting impatient and frustrated by delays, or blaming people. Things simply are. So it was with the transfer document. It would appear, we kept being told, by the settlement date,
inshallah
.

Obviously Allah didn’t will it, because when January came the document still hadn’t materialised. Sandy had gone to Morocco a week ahead of me, and one night he phoned to tell me the deal was off. There were about ten relatives involved, all of whom had been traced except one, and he hadn’t been heard of in years. The only alternative was taking the matter through the courts, and there was no way of knowing how long that might drag on. So we were
not
going to be able to live in our riad after all. I was bitterly disappointed, and even more dismayed at the thought of having to begin the search all over again.

But Sandy was his usual optimistic self. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I have a plan B.’ He had already found another house.

WHEN I FIRST
saw Sandy’s plan B it was in the company of some half a dozen people, including David, Larbi, Nabil, and Sandy’s daughter Yvonne, who had just arrived from Ireland with her husband and two small children. Sandy had made an offer to the owners, contingent on my agreement, and everyone was waiting anxiously for my reaction. Sandy followed me around, pointing things out and saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ while I tried to make an objective decision.

The new house was indeed a proper riad, situated at the end of an alley in one of the oldest parts of the Medina. You entered a carved wooden door, ascended some stairs in a corridor, and arrived in a lovely courtyard of about a hundred square metres, complete with an orange and a lemon tree and an attractive fountain in the centre. At one end of the courtyard was the kitchen, at the other a large salon, and on the right-hand side were doorways
leading
to two separate bathrooms and to a staircase to the floor above.

On the fourth side of the courtyard was a large and unusual feature wall, the central five metres of which was recessed by a metre. A buttress descended on the left-hand side of this recess, ending in a scallop shape, in the middle of which was a small spy window. We later discovered it had unique acoustic properties, allowing anyone sitting behind it to hear even the slightest whisper in the courtyard.

Two tiled columns stood in front of the downstairs salon, which had a set of massive decorated cedar doors. To either side of the doors were tall windows, framed with exquisite, hand-carved plaster. On the floor above this salon was another room of similar proportions, with its own set of beautiful doors.

Above the kitchen were two rooms large enough to be a self-contained
massreiya
apartment with its own entrance. The tops of these walls had a band of intricately carved plasterwork inset with rare and expensive coloured glass, known locally as Iraqi glass. And the first of these rooms contained the architectural treasure of the house – a huge ceiling with a spectacular radial design of carved and painted cedar.

‘Museum quality,’ David informed me. ‘Truly wonderful.’

The house was indeed gorgeous, but I seemed alone in noticing that the beautiful ceiling was sagging on one side and the end section of the
massreiya
appeared to be in danger of falling down. There were a multitude of other repairs needed besides.

Anticipating my concern, Sandy had engaged the city engineer
to
inspect the house. What I managed to decipher of his report was amusing, but hardly encouraging.

Bending to the level of the floors of the room left lateral façade; detachment of the beams made of wood coupled supporting the catwalk; presence of beam of iron that encouraged the cracks of the wall and the lowering of the floor; presence of cracks deep to the level of the wall façade lateral internal left supporting the floor of the aforesaid room; rot of the tips floors of wood to the level of the hamman giving on the public way;
flambement
to the level of the base wall and presence of humidity exaggerated caused by infiltrations of the public way toward the wall in question; detachment of the beams of the parallel walls to the wall of the giving façade on the alley; the soil of occupation of the patio is stuck out because of the roots of the trees that treaty would be necessary so that it reached the walls carriers of the building there. The physical state of the building is a little graduated and necessity of the funding works has know, including repairing the coming down of the pluvial waters
.

The ‘
flambement
to the level of the base wall’ sounded like a real problem. I visualised the entire thing erupting in flames like a baked Alaska. It all sounded dangerous, and horribly expensive to flx. Nor was it clear to me how one made a treaty with the trees. Wall carriers were presumably the foundations, but ‘repairing the coming down of the pluvial waters’? I guessed that meant mystified plumbers shaking their heads and doubling their prices.

I felt hesitant. This house needed far more work than the one we had failed to buy. True, it was lovely, but I was reluctant to take on a project of such magnitude. Had I been by myself, I think
I
would have passed it up. Prior experience with renovations in Australia had taught me that whatever you think is needed is almost always an underestimation.

Sandy was hovering impatiently, waiting for my decision. I put him off, saying I would think about it. He was clearly disappointed, wanting me to share his enthusiasm, but my architect father had drummed into me from an early age the need to look carefully before committing.

The following morning, I went over the riad again with the engineer, deciphering his report, while Sandy stayed at the hotel nursing a bad case of the flu. The engineer, Salim, worked for the Agency for the Dedensification and Rehabilitation of the Fez Medina, but was more than happy to do a spot of well-paid moonlighting. He had a moustache that would have done George Harrison proud in his Sergeant Pepper days and he stroked it thoughtfully as he followed me from room to room.

‘What about this?’ I asked, pointing out the huge bow in the catwalk that joined the two upstairs wings, where two rotting beams were slowly parting company.

‘No problem,’ he replied breezily, and began drawing elaborate diagrams of how scaffolding could be placed to effect a repair. I tried to ignore the guillotine shape it seemed to resemble, although I did remember that a few months earlier a house had collapsed into a mosque, killing eleven people as they worshipped.

Salim’s optimism was as rampant as Sandy’s, and listening to either of them you would have thought that restoring a 300-and-something-year-old house was as easy as knocking up a garden
shed
. Still, compared to many of the houses in the Medina, this one was in prime condition. And it did have a terrace with one of the most spectacular views in Fez, all the way down the valley to the Atlas Mountains. The panorama was breathtaking: hills covered with cube-shaped houses to the left, sweeping down to Mount Zalagh. Here and there were the spires of minarets. In the far distance was a plume of black smoke from the potteries, which burned olive pits as fuel in the kilns. If you removed the satellite dishes, the view could have been straight out of the Old Testament.

When I returned to the hotel Sandy, through his sniffles, was still determined to be enthusiastic. ‘The house is wonderful,’ he said. ‘It’s a real find. Everything will be all right, you’ll see.’

I decamped and went for a coffee with David, who didn’t make things easier by pointing out that the riad was a significant piece of architecture and definitely worth saving. Eventually, bowing to the inevitable, I agreed to buy it, still harbouring considerable misgivings.

A couple of days later, we were ready to confirm the purchase. Sandy, rarely sick, had to struggle to get out of bed. He had an extremely high temperature and trouble standing. With the aid of medication, Nabil and I propped him upright long enough to get him into a taxi to the bank, to arrange our initial payment of fifty per cent of the price.

In Australia this would have taken all of ten minutes, but in Fez it was two complicated and frustrating hours before all the formalities were completed. The charming young bank executive
was
so helpful that every time a new person came through the door he would stop working on our account and switch his attention to them. It took him more than an hour to fill out our one-page form. This is how things are done in Morocco, I kept reminding myself, taking deep breaths. It was just as well my high-school French didn’t run to swear words.

Like many people in the Medina, the vendors of the house had no bank account. Our attempts to procure a bank draft which could be cashed over the counter failed when the bank told us it needed to be made out to a specific name. We rang Larbi, who said he had no idea what the vendors were actually called.

‘So what do we do?’ I asked, wondering why he was getting such a healthy commission when he didn’t even know this most basic of facts.

‘You should get the money in cash,’ he said.

After further delays, we were presented with a huge pile of money. We had nothing to put it in, and the bank couldn’t produce a single plastic bag, so the three of us stuffed our pockets with wads of notes and waddled out looking as though we’d done a heist.

Back at the house, the elderly vendors were waiting in the
massreiya
with the scribe and his assistant. The old man sat cross-legged on the floor, dressed in a dark brown djellaba, the milky disks of his sightless eyes reflecting the light from the window. The bearded scribe was shouting alarmingly into his ear and gesticulating with a roll of parchment that resembled one of the Dead Sea scrolls. The old man’s wife looked worried.

‘What are they saying?’ I fretted to Sandy. In the wee small hours I had gone over my doubts about the wisdom of the venture, but now I just wanted it to happen.