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

by Suzanna Clarke

  Further along, above another stall, hung a tiny cage, the floor of which was crawling with baby tortoises. Clinging to the bars were two grey and miserable-looking chameleons. I had only ever seen photographs of them before, and stopped to look. Their swivel eyes were desperately trying to project past the cage, as if willing themselves out of its confines. One of them was so skinny that I doubted it was going to last much longer in such conditions. Finding live insects for food didn’t seem to be a high priority for the young stallholder.

  I had seen young boys in southern Morocco hunting and capturing lizards to sell to just this kind of stall. These chameleons would have been happily minding their own business in their native habitat before being whisked away by small probing fingers, whose owners were eager for a few dirhams. I couldn’t bear to see these reptiles in such horrible circumstances and wanted to buy them. But what was I going to do with a couple of chameleons? We couldn’t have more pets if we were going to shuttle back and forth between Morocco and Australia. We already had responsibility for three cats on different sides of the planet, including temporary custody of Tigger, Peter and Karen’s cat.

  I thought of the abundance of kittens on the rubbish heap at the end of our alley. Every day I’d see one or two huddled together among the detritus. Often they’d be gone by the next day and I wondered what became of them.

  One morning, I passed a tiny tabby that was mewing pitifully. It had one eye gummed shut and looked incredibly pathetic. I was in an agony of wanting to rescue it, but knew that any help I gave could only be temporary. If I took it home and fed it I couldn’t then put it back on the street, it would be too cruel. There was one animal protection society in Fez, but they mostly dealt with donkeys and wouldn’t take cats, so what to do?

  I’d kept walking, and when I returned that way the tabby was being fed cream cheese by an elderly man kneeling down beside it in the dirt. Then the lovely old baker from the bakery at the end of our alley came along and poured water for it out of a bottle.

  Another man stopped and said to me, ‘It’s the man along that street who’s the problem. He lets his cats go on having kittens then puts them on the rubbish pile. It is not right. It says in the Koran that there is a place reserved for cats in Paradise.’

  I smiled in agreement. But one cat in the riad was plenty. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if Peter and Karen didn’t return in time to reclaim Tigger; I couldn’t put her back on the street either. As it was I needed to get her fixed before she got pregnant and our cat problem multiplied. Peter had left me some money for the operation, and when I’d rung around the local vets I found the cost ranged from six hundred to fifteen hundred dirhams, which seemed wildly disproportionate to the two hundred dirhams we’d paid for one of our workers to visit the doctor. No wonder there were so many stray cats in Fez if it took more than two weeks of the average wage to have them neutered.

  So why should I adopt chameleons over cats? Apart from a childhood fascination with their ability to magically change colour, perhaps because they were an endangered species. They were tugging at me to buy them, but how would I look after them? I didn’t want to replace their prison in the shop for yet another cage at the riad.

  I toyed with the possibility of finding a good tree in the countryside to put them in, but where? And if I was followed, which would be likely, another set of boys would find them and they’d end up back in the market. I could put them on our citrus trees, where they might find enough insects to survive, but how would they live through the cold winter? And in buying them, wouldn’t I simply be encouraging a trade I despised?

  Trying to harden my heart by being rational, I walked away, leaving the chameleons to their fate. But the image of them clinging to their bars pursued me all the way home. I told Sandy about them.

  ‘There are thousands of chameleons in cages all over Morocco,’ he said. ‘You can’t rescue them all.’

  I felt like Tessa in John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, who says to her husband, ‘But these are ones I can rescue.’ In her case it was African people. Chameleons may not rate as high on the nobleness scale, but I figured you helped who and what you could, to the best of your ability.

  Later I told Si Mohamed about them, who relayed the story to the workers, who no doubt thought I was soft in the head. But it was what they said next that decided us. According to Mustapha, whereas tortoises were usually bred in captivity, kept as pets and fed lettuce leaves, chameleons were more likely to find themselves thrown live into a fire as part of ritual magic. There was a belief that their skin and bones contained a substance that made errant husbands return to their wives, and a woman who suspected her husband of having an affair would lace his food with bits of powdered chameleon.

  The thought of the poor creatures being burned alive was enough to win Sandy over, and Si Mohamed and I returned to the stall. For a mere thirty dirhams the chameleons were ours. They clung to one another as we put them into a plastic container. Carrying them down the street, Si Mohamed became a kind of Pied Piper. Small children immediately sensed there was something alive in the translucent box and followed him, wanting a look. One little boy shrieked at the top of his lungs when Si Mohamed took the top off the box to show him.

  Back at home, I took the box up to the catwalk and Sandy lifted the chameleons gingerly onto the upper branches of the orange tree, safe from the inquisitive Tigger. They were thoroughly entwined, not keen to let one another go. But the prospect of a branch was too enticing, and eventually they reached out and grabbed the outermost limb. As we watched, their colour changed, morphing from sickly grey to pale green. The fatter one, whom we decided to call Bodiecia, made an immediate break for freedom, disappearing among the leaves. We named the other one Genghis – not that he looked at all fearsome. He was so painfully skinny he resembled an anorexia victim, and I worried that he was too far gone to survive.

  Moments later, he almost fell off the branch, just catching himself with his tail. We watched in trepidation. It was a long fall to the courtyard, and the tiles would be unforgiving. But then a small flurry of wind lifted the leaves, and Genghis seemed to wake up to where he was. He swivelled his scaly head around, goggle eyes slowly taking in his surroundings. Perhaps being suddenly released seemed like a dream. He began to stalk delicately along the branch, his curious, prehensile feet wrapping themselves around it, heading for the uppermost leaves.

  Next morning, our new house guests were still high in the tree. Their colour had deepened and was now mottled with pink, to match the branches. Genghis’s tongue flicked out at lightning speed and landed a fly. His stomach had a gentle bulge; perhaps he’d caught several more insects. I gave a sigh of relief, and the prospect of dying chameleons thudding down around our heads in the courtyard receded.

  We ran a campaign on our weblog over the next few weeks and managed to convince several other riad owners to rescue chameleons and install them in their courtyard trees. Sadly, few of them survived the cats, birds and other dangers. Genghis too gave us frequent scares, seemingly mesmerising himself by staring at sunlit walls and then falling some eight metres to the ground. Somehow he always recovered.

  AT THE BEGINNING of August, a minor disaster struck. Mustapha called Sandy and me into the bathroom one morning to point out a trickle of water coming from a broken pipe on the other side of the wall he was repairing. This side of the house was some three metres beneath street level and as we watched, the flow of water grew, filling the room with the odious smell of sewage. In the Fez Medina, the waste-water and sewage pipes are one and the same.

  ‘The flow has increased because all the housewives have just started to prepare lunch for their family,’ Mustapha said. ‘You must tell the Caid.’

  But it being a Sunday, he wasn’t at his office. Fatima, one of the decapo ladies, knew where the Maqadim lived and she, Si Mohamed and I set out to find him while Sandy and the workers tried to staunch the flow with sand bags. Given how much grief the Maqadim had given us in the past, n
ot least the donkey hostage crisis, it felt good to be able to hassle him for a change.

  The Maqadim’s house was a few streets away, and he appeared at our knock wearing his best attire of white djellaba and babouches. Although he didn’t seem thrilled about being disturbed, he obligingly came back to the riad to inspect the situation and then rang the Caid at home, who in turn said he would ring the water company.

  Moments after the Maqadim had left, the temporary dam gave way. The trickle became a sudden rush, and a small waterfall of foul-smelling liquid poured in faster than our bathroom drain could take it away. The earth on the floor was quickly soaked through and water began to gush into the courtyard. This was at the precise time that Mustapha was upstairs doing his prayers and couldn’t be disturbed, so the rest of us, including Fatima and Halima, rushed to grab more bags of sand and create a channel to deflect the water into the drain next to the fountain.

  When Mustapha reappeared he wanted to throw bags of sand into the drain further up the street to block it. But this would mean our neighbours’ houses being flooded instead, so we weren’t keen on the idea.

  Then there was a knock at the door, which we’d left open, and a couple of burly fellows from the water company sauntered in, complete with picks, shovels and various extendable poles for shoving down drains. We cheered and whistled like a crowd at a football match. Sandy and I were impressed, and doubted anyone would have turned up so quickly in Australia. To give the Maqadim his due, he had actually done something about the problem.

  The men from the water company trekked upstairs, out the back door, and took the cover off the manhole in the upper alley. One of them began shovelling out copious amounts of rubbish – old bottles, plastic bags, bricks, dirt, and lots of worms – which had been blocking the drain for years, forcing the water to find an alternative route by seeping underneath our house.

  A small crowd gathered for this piece of street theatre. While one man kept digging, the other pushed a rod down the drain to free up any remaining blockages. As the water started to make its way through the new hole they’d cleared, the flow into the house slowed, but it did not stop entirely. The men promised to return the next day to mend the pipe, and we helped their memories along by giving them a handful of dirhams as a thank you.

  The constant flow of tainted water made the house none too pleasant, so we resolved to eat out that night. But there might be a side benefit, we thought. If the number of flies increased in proportion to the stench, the chameleons would get a good feed.

  We received the yearly land tax bill for the riad, made out to a name we didn’t recognise. To date, transferring any official document into our names had been far from simple, so bracing for another round with the Moroccan bureaucracy, I took the bill to yet another government office at Batha, together with the house-transfer document as proof of ownership and a photocopy of my passport. I was shunted around to three different people, all of whom read my documents in painstaking detail before declaring they weren’t the person to help me. It turned out I wasn’t even in the right office and needed to go next door.

  There the same thing happened. The man behind the counter read every word of the two-page house-transfer document, then stared at the land tax bill as if he’d never seen one before. As this was clearly out of his league, I was taken to see the manager, who tried very hard to be helpful. He fetched a large book marked Commune de Fez and started to search for our house, running his thumb down the columns of names and moving his lips in concentration. When eventually he found our riad a frown flittered across his face.

  ‘Unfortunately, Madame, the name on the tax bill is different to that of the previous owner.’

  Evidently in the thirty years they’d lived there, the old couple had never got around to changing the name on the bill to theirs. I was beginning to understand why.

  Nor was this the only problem. Because we had two doors on two different streets, we were liable for two lots of tax, despite the fact that both doors led to the same house. The manager made some calculations on a sheet of paper and flashed me a figure of several thousand dirhams, the amount owing. The first portion of tax had been settled at the time of sale, but the second hadn’t been paid for at least eight years and was now horrendously large.

  ‘D’accord,’ I sighed, pulling out my cheque book. But no, it would not do just to pay the bill. His instructions about what I needed to do next became so incomprehensible that I told him I would return the following day with someone who spoke Darija.

  Next morning, the manager told Si Mohamed we needed to go to another office in the Ville Nouvelle, where the mess would be sorted out. I could then return to this office and pay the bill. It sounded straightforward enough.

  But of course it wasn’t. In the Ville Nouvelle, we traipsed upstairs and down, being directed to one office after another, where we would queue only to be told we weren’t at the right place. We ended up outside one office where people were flying back out the door so quickly I felt a surge of optimism about the efficiency of whoever was inside. Finally a charming gentleman told us that, because a new system was being implemented, his office was in such disarray it was beyond his ability to help us, or indeed anyone, and I should return the following week. In other words, it was all too hard and please just go away. So I did.

  Work on the riad continued to drag. People arrived later and later and the spirit of enthusiasm that had been there at the beginning was noticeably absent. Sandy decided it was time for a little Western-style management: a team meeting.

  When everyone had assembled he gave a stirring speech, via Si Mohamed, about how much we appreciated their work, how important the project was to us, and how, if they did the right thing by us, we would do the right thing by them and help them to find other work once the house was finished.

  Sandy’s speech had a discernible effect and the pace picked up. It was as though, reminded of the bigger picture, the workers could see that they had a stake in completing the task.

  Now that the unexpected river in the main bathroom had been plugged, work there proceeded briskly. The brick wall was almost complete and Mustapha had eliminated the flambement. The room was now considerably wider without the protruding bulge and sported a new niche in the end wall, with a light in it.

  It wasn’t all plain sailing, though; there were a few injuries and illnesses. Fatima stabbed her finger on a sewing needle hidden in the wood of the salon window. It went in so deep she cried. I treated it with antiseptic and we gave her the rest of the day off. Then Halima developed severe tooth pain. A relatively young woman, she had nevertheless lost many of her bottom teeth and now one of the few remaining was in trouble. It seemed a pity to lose it for want of a dental visit, so I booked her in to a French dentist in the Ville Nouvelle. It was the first time she’d ever been to a dentist.

  Unfortunately the tooth was broken and had to be pulled out. At least it was done with anaesthetic, instead of being yanked out by some tooth wrangler in the souk, and Halima was back at work the next day, thanking me with a piece of hand-weaving her husband had done.

  It was some weeks since I’d seen Ayisha, but one day she arrived on my doorstep desperate and pleading. She had put off writing her final university assignment for so long, eventually rushing it, that she hadn’t had time to correct it. Out of kindness, her lecturer had given it back to her and said she had a couple of days to fix it, otherwise he would fail her.

  I took one look at it and could see why. She’d had someone type it who clearly didn’t speak English. It was as though they’d got bored, or not been able to understand her handwriting, and a lot of sentences petered out mid-phrase.

  Ayisha was an articulate, intelligent woman and she’d had months to do this assignment. ‘Didn’t you read it yourself before you handed it in?’ I asked. She tried, she told me, but found it too difficult. Huh?

  The essay was supposed to be a critique of what Fez offered in the way of cultural tourism and how it could be developed. T
here was a wealth of material on the subject, but Ayisha had said months ago that she didn’t know how to approach it. So Sandy and I had given her two sessions worth of help with the structure, and suggested relevant people to interview and research sites on the Internet. She hadn’t followed up on any of them. Instead she’d used a couple of basic guidebooks borrowed from us, a few interviews with people she’d met in a nightclub, and not much else. Had I been her lecturer, I would have failed her too.

  I couldn’t stand by and let her miss out on her degree, so I spent twelve hours rewriting the thing, putting in further references and adding footnotes. By the time I’d finished, it wasn’t brilliant but it was passable. I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing this. It was supposed to be Ayisha’s work, and if she failed it would be her own fault, but I knew she had no place to study at home, and getting a degree was her best chance of improving her situation. I was in a position to help her, so why not? And I was her friend, after all.

  A couple of weeks later, Ayisha came to tell me she’d passed her degree, expressing undying gratitude and throwing her arms around me in a long hug. I got the feeling I’d been played for a sucker, but at the same time couldn’t help admiring the skilful way she’d done it. When shortly afterwards I took a pair of trousers to be hemmed by her father his own gratitude proved stronger than the breach in his relationship with Ayisha. His workspace near their flat was minute, about four metres square. I had seen him there before, sewing at his machine late at night with Ayisha’s cat asleep on the counter. (The cat’s name, not surprisingly, was Romeo.) At the age of seventy, her father still worked every day to support three grown-up unemployed sons and a daughter who wanted to leave the country the minute she could.

  The trousers were delivered to my house by Ayisha in record time, beautifully stitched. She said her father was so grateful to me he would not let me pay. I was embarrassed about this, as I could easily afford to do so and he certainly needed the money, but I couldn’t dent his pride by refusing.