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

by Suzanna Clarke

  I had never been in such a vibrant, vitally alive place.

  WHEN SANDY AND I returned to Fez at the beginning of the following May his excitement was palpable. Mine was more subdued. I was apprehensive about what might have happened in our absence. What if the carpenter had removed the decoration on the big doors to the salons? Or messed with the wonderful massreiya ceiling?

  We arrived to find the inevitable dust, along with workmen’s tools and boxes of garbage strewn about, but it was still good to be back. The courtyard was filled with sunlight, there were oranges hanging out of reach on one of the trees, and a couple of baby sparrows were hopping around. Someone had put a grubby teddy bear on the fountain spout, adding a surreal touch.

  The carpenter had done part of his job. The salon doors had been repaired, decoration intact, as had a couple of others, and upstairs there was a new set of shutters and two new doors. But some of the work looked slapdash. The bathroom door frame, which needed a section of rotting wood replaced, had had a blob of cement slapped onto it. There was a new window in the kitchen that I hadn’t asked for, while the three I had listed remained undone. The smell of fresh cedar permeated the air, but it looked as if Sarah hadn’t been here in weeks. There was off milk in the fridge, and the mattresses were stacked against the upstairs walls. When I got round to ringing Sarah later she said that the carpentry work had forced her to move out.

  We’d barely deposited our luggage when there was a bang on the door. It was a young girl from across the alley with welcoming cups of tea. She pointed out her door as the one I knew as Khadija’s. I had never seen the girl before and asked where Khadija was, but couldn’t make myself understood. No matter, I thought, Khadija would be over the minute she heard I’d returned. In the meantime we busied ourselves with making the riad habitable.

  Twenty-four hours after we arrived, there was still no sign of Khadija. I missed seeing cute little Ayoub playing in the street, and having Khadija pop her head out the door whenever I went out. Even though at times I found her exasperating, she had been part of the fabric of my life here and I’d been looking forward to seeing her. I’d bought her a new set of sheets, a painting set for Ayoub, and printed up a photo of them both. Eventually I asked another neighbour, who told me that Khadija and her family had moved to a small town in the countryside. I was surprised by how disappointed I felt on hearing this, and not only because she’d helped me so much.

  Sandy and I were to be in Fez for seven months on this trip, and there was much to be done. We arranged to meet Hamza to discuss the next stage. As only half of the carpentry work had been completed, and that of variable quality, we were apprehensive about him overseeing the rest of the work.

  He arrived late, well into the afternoon, with his Irish accountant in tow, and was his usual charismatic self, exuding a bonhomie and confidence that were belied by the endless cigarettes he smoked. He had fallen out with the carpenter who had given the original quote, he told us, and the replacement was more expensive. Hamza would return with the new carpenter to address the shoddily done work, and assess what more he could do for the money we had paid. Fair enough, I thought.

  With the accountant he then had another look around the riad, muttering about the huge amount of work to be done. There were a couple of ‘pregnant bellies’, as Hamza put it, where moisture had entered the ceiling beams, forcing pressure downwards and making the walls bulge – what the engineer had called the flambement. We were a bit shocked when he said that the beautiful old zellij in the courtyard needed ripping up and relaying, as it was uneven. We thought the uneven patches, caused by tree roots, was part of its appeal.

  We moved on to the issue of money. Hamza wanted forty per cent of the cost of the work up front, with each stage paid for in advance. It made sense from his point of view; he had been left holding the baby on one job and ended up bankrolling it out of his own pocket.

  But forty per cent up front was a commitment we didn’t feel comfortable making. What if a few weeks down the track the arrangement wasn’t working? But our choice was limited – there were few people in Fez capable of supervising the work – and we parted saying we would get back to him in a couple of days.

  Regardless of who oversaw the restoration, we wanted to get started as soon as possible. As there would be strangers working all through the house, we needed a place to store our valuables, so in time-honoured fashion we decided to buy a wooden chest. We found one we liked in an antique shop near the tanneries. It was embossed with brass shields and had a lock with a moveable pin mechanism that dropped in and out of place as the key was turned. Similar locks have been in found in Egyptian tombs dating back four thousand years, and are the forerunner of modern pin tumbler locks.

  ‘It was made by the Tuarag people from the Sahara,’ the shopkeeper said, oozing sincerity. But the price tag was far beyond what we’d planned on spending.

  ‘I make you a special deal,’ he whispered, as if afraid his regular tourist clientele would overhear, and more than halved the price. But it was still way above what we thought it was worth.

  ‘Two thousand dirhams is what we can afford to spend,’ I said. We stuck to that, and miraculously ended up buying it. A porter appeared and threw the heavy chest onto his back as though it were made of balsawood. He moved so fast through the crowded streets we were forced to trot to keep up with him. Jogging along in his wake, I noticed that the finish of the wood was uneven and there was a small chip showing blond wood beneath. The chest had probably been knocked up in Fez the previous week. I felt stupid for being diddled in the dimness of the shop. I did like the chest, but it was certainly only worth as much as we’d paid, if that. Expert traders, the Fassis had had hundreds of years of honing their skills on gullible foreigners like us.

  The day before, I had gone to the souk to buy herbs. ‘How much?’ I asked an old man holding up two bunches of oregano.

  ‘Ten dirhams.’

  Huge bunches of mint, parsley or coriander were usually sold for a half a dirham, but I was too tired to argue. I took half of what he held out and gave him five dirhams. As I walked away he said something to the men nearby and they burst out laughing. I was sure it concerned my ignorance, but how could I blame him for trying to get the maximum from someone who could obviously afford it?

  Despite such experiences, I tried to rid myself of the attitude that all Moroccans were out to cheat us. David had told us of an English woman who was buying a house in Fez, using a Fassi friend of his as a facilitator. She spent a lot of money engaging a London solicitor to organise power of attorney for him, and then discovered that this could only be done through the Moroccan consulate. David’s friend should have known that, she maintained in a long letter of complaint to him. Moroccans needed to understand the standards Westerners expect, she had written, threatening to cancel her cheques and call the whole deal off.

  If she was this upset at such an early stage in the process, we wondered how she’d go when she ran into real problems. She and Fez were clearly not meant for one another, Sandy observed.

  We heard other stories about property-buying foreigners from David, and he introduced us to an Englishman who’d flown to Fez on a four-day visit. Although it was his first trip to Morocco, he’d bought a house that morning and was talking about quitting his job as maître d’ in a trendy London bistro and moving to Fez full time. I wondered if he had any conception of what life would be like here. He might think he needed a break from the pubs and clubs of London, but living in the alcohol-free Medina, with few options for eating out, surrounded by conservative and curious Moroccans, might rapidly lose its lustre if he didn’t have a genuine interest in the culture. We got the impression that at this stage it was all just colour and movement to him.

  The Englishman told us that programs about buying houses in other countries were a national obsession in Britain. ‘It’s the British way of recolonising the world,’ he said.

  How true, I thought. Many houses in the Marrakesh Medina are
now foreign-owned. A lot of the fly-in, fly-out expats limit their interaction with Moroccans to servants and shopkeepers – a replication of the colonial experience, and hardly the way to maintain a vibrant and cohesive community. Sandy and I were determined that, despite the cultural and linguistic barriers, we would not isolate ourselves within the expat community.

  Right now that community was troubled by the fact that local authorities were cracking down on illegal guesthouses. The criteria for obtaining a licence were so strict – stipulating rooms of a certain size, ensuite bathrooms, televisions and refrigerators, air-conditioning, a salon and a minimum of five rentable rooms – that without purpose-built facilities it was difficult to fulfil them.

  A number of foreigners had bought property in the Medina with the intention of staying and making a living letting rooms to tourists. Now, having done up their houses, they were jumping through hoops trying to meet the regulatory requirements. One woman had a beautifully restored house with five bedrooms, but because it was considered too small and the bathrooms were not ensuites she was refused a licence.

  Dozens of illegal guesthouses had recently been closed down in Marrakesh. The introduction of cheap flights to that city had led to an explosion in the number of foreigners renting out rooms. Not all travellers were looking for a five-star hotel with equivalent prices, and because guesthouse regulations were so strict, some people ignored them and let rooms anyway. This meant they did not pay tax and their profits were sent out of the country. As cheap flights to Fez were about to start, the authorities here were determined not to let the same problem develop.

  Frida and Hamza had been trying for months to get a licence for their magnificent dar, which had taken twenty people two years to restore. It seemed that there were three ways of getting any sort of authorisation in Morocco. You either conformed to the letter of the law, knew someone powerful, or gave ‘presents’ to officials. Out of desperation, with loans to service, Frida and Hamza had taken in a few paying guests regardless. The next thing they knew, the district official turned up in the company of their neighbour, who had made a complaint about them. They were handed a document ordering them to cease and desist, and had to arrange for their guests to go to hotels. Naturally they were very upset.

  Frida and Hamza’s neighbour was convinced that part of their courtyard belonged to him. Running through it was an easement allowing access to his carpet shop’s rear door, which hadn’t been opened for years. Now that Hamza and Frida had beautified the courtyard, he said he wanted to use the door again. Closing down the guesthouse appeared to be part of his strategy to make Frida and Hamza purchase his easement rights.

  Hamza’s response was to say that opening the door was a terrific idea: the neighbour’s carpet clients would be able to see what a lovely place their dar was to stay in, and in turn Frida and Hamza could direct their clients to his shop. The down side of this proposal was that when the neighbour’s back door was open, it revealed a scenic view of his toilets.

  We finally received the deed to our house. Sandy and I met the scribe in a café, where he handed over a single sheet of paper in Arabic, to be joined to the two-metre scroll already in our possession. The only words we could discern on the scroll were our names, but with the help of someone who read Arabic I learnt that the scroll dated back to the beginning of the French protectorate in 1912, when a new system for property registration had come in. The house had been sold in 1932 by a group of people whose names took an entire page – probably an extended family who’d inherited it.

  Since then, the riad had changed hands half a dozen times, with the longest period of ownership being the thirty years to 1977, when it was purchased by the couple from whom we’d bought it. The long list of names was a reminder that the concept of owning an ancient house is an illusion – we were all just passing through.

  Sandy and I were still mulling over our decision about Hamza. From what we could gather, he was expensive and overcommitted. We knew an expat called Amanda whose restoration had been done by Hamza’s team. Her house had been gutted and rebuilt, and while she was pleased with the work, we were horrified to hear she had so far spent more than three times the purchase price. And her house was tiny compared with ours. There was no way we could afford that kind of expense. Amanda had had moments when she wished she could get out of the arrangement, but she was already past the point of no return.

  Warning lights were flashing in my head, but if we didn’t engage Hamza, who else was there? I did know of a building contractor, but he was subcontracted to Hamza.

  As luck would have it, we met a young English couple, Jon and Jenny, who had restored a dar in the Medina. It was medium-sized, of a much later period than our riad, but it was exquisite. There were multiple rooms with blue and white zellij, lots of detailed plasterwork, and the wooden shutters were in excellent condition. The work had been done on a reasonable budget by a team of workers they’d organised themselves.

  An idea started to form. Why couldn’t Sandy and I manage the restoration ourselves and hire the help we needed? We could engage Jon and Jenny to help us find tradespeople and for general advice. Although they’d only been in Fez a year, they had good contacts and spoke a smattering of Darija. True, they weren’t nearly as experienced as Hamza, but he appeared to be so thinly stretched we doubted we’d be getting the full benefit of his experience. Managing the project would be a lot more work than we’d planned on, but I had a clear idea about what should be done.

  The more we discussed it, the more possible it seemed. Sandy and I worked well as a team. Since I spoke the better French and had design skills, it made sense that I be the one to set each stage up and source the materials. Sandy, being empathetic, humorous, and possessed of vast reserves of patience, is an excellent people manager. His role would be to micro-manage the building work with the help of a translator. ‘You can dream the dream and I’ll manage the nightmare,’ Sandy said.

  And so it began. The first thing we had to do was get a building permit. This was called a roqsa, and as we discovered was the most important document we had to acquire. Without this three-month permit, nothing could happen. But getting a roqsa was no easy task and some people waited months to receive one.

  I headed off to the baladiya, or local council office, where I found four women sitting at desks piled high with files. One was cleaning her nails, another was asleep. It didn’t look as though the granting of permits was occupying their every waking moment. An obliging man who spoke English helped me fill out the necessary form in Arabic. I let him tick the boxes and then I signed it. I could have been agreeing to deed the house to him, for all I knew, but I trusted him. No doubt these have been famous last words on numerous sorry occasions, but he seemed like a nice chap.

  I hadn’t bought a photocopy of my passport with me and had to walk back to get one. When I returned I lined up at another window to have the form authorised. Half a dozen Fassis were jostling for various permits: there were schoolgirls wanting authorisation for some unknown activity, a middle-aged woman whose identity card listed her profession as embroiderer, a man in a djellaba who looked old enough to have lived through the French occupation and retreat. When it was my turn the woman behind the counter took a break from serving me to help several other people. At last it was done. I lodged the forms with the nice chap, who told me an inspector would arrive the following day.

  True to his word, there was a knock on the door after breakfast the next morning. A dapper man with a grey moustache introduced himself in excellent French as the chief inspector. I ushered him in and he proceeded to check out every room in great detail. When I showed him the massreiya he shook his head and tut-tutted about the state of the beams. Up on the terrace, he gazed out over the city, seeming to forget he was doing something as mundane as a house inspection.

  ‘This area is one of the oldest in Fez,’ he said. ‘The émigrés from Tunis settled here in the ninth century.’ Sensing my interest, he continued. ‘When the refuge
es came from Spain they settled on the opposite bank of the Oued Fez, over there.’ He swept his hand across the Andalusian quarter on the other side of R’Cif. ‘During the eight hundred years we held Al-Andalous, the Moorish artisans developed their building skills to a high degree. That is why we have so many marvellous buildings.’

  I’d heard this several times before. What I really wanted to know was why the artisans’ skills had become so highly developed. Later, I found out. When Berber and Arab forces had taken over the Iberian peninsula at the beginning of the eighth century, they kept going up the European continent until they were stopped at Tours. They then turned their attention to consolidating their rule in Al-Andalous.

  The Moors were unusual rulers in that they allowed the Christians and Jews to practise their own religions, which led to an increasingly complex society. Such tolerance was necessary, as there were several thousand Moors ruling over millions of Christians, and wholesale conversion to Islam would have been impossible. Instead the Moors imposed additional taxes and restrictions on non-Muslims, making it necessary to convert to Islam if you wanted to get ahead. By the eleventh century, Muslims outnumbered Christians in Al-Andalous.

  The Muslim rulers faced a problem common to conquerers throughout the ages. Taking over a country was the easy part. Staying in power and running the place was extremely hard. Over the centuries, Al-Andalous broke down into more than twenty principalities, whose rulers competed to be the richest and most architecturally and culturally impressive. Each fought to recruit the most skilled artisans, poets and scholars, leading to an extraordinary flourishing of the arts and sciences, which had a flow-on effect to a moribund mediaeval Europe. The most famous Moorish legacy is Granada’s beautiful Alhambra Palace.