And so I pack what I can from the hanging clothes. Late in the afternoon we drive to Rome and spend the night at the airport hotel. Our flight to Casablanca leaves early tomorrow.
We are let out of the taxi at Bab Boujeloud, an entrance into the Fez medina. Hafid El Amrani, the young manager of the house where we are staying, has rescued us in Meknes, an hour away. The car we hired to drive us from the Casablanca airport to Fez finally died outside Meknes, after sputtering and overheating for seven hours. Normally the trip takes three to four hours. The thirty-year-old Mercedes slowed on every slight hill, and when the gauge hit the top of the dial, the driver pulled over and waited for someone to stop and pour a bottle of water into the radiator. Twice the stops involved him scrambling down into a gully to fill a bottle with muddy water. We were in the backseat, temperature outside 104 degrees. The driver was an optimist; each time the radiator was filled, he thought the problem was solved. “Thermostat,” Ed said repeatedly. When the car finally refused to go on, we reached a place with enough telephone signal to call Hafid in Fez. Then we had only a couple of hours to wait before he pulled up in an ancient taxi. Is this trip jinxed?
Now he loads our bags into a handcart pushed by a boy. Immediately I see that when we walk through this Blue Gate, we will enter a different world. Laden donkeys with muzzles made from plastic water bottles stand passively under loads of barrels and stuffed sacks. The acrid odor of live wool burns the air. A few red “petite taxis” dart in and out of the square in random patterns, weaving among men in djellabas and pointy open-backed yellow shoes. In Tuscany donkeys are gone. I used to see one occasionally fifteen years ago. By now they’ve been replaced by the charming three-wheel miniature pickups called Ape, bees. Here the donkey reigns.
Hafid is handsome, with large eyes straight from a Roman mosaic, eyes the same true black as his hair. He’s dressed in jeans, moving agilely through the gate and into the jammed lanes of the medina. Cars would be impossible. Not only are the streets narrow, but the minute kiosk-shops have goods piled outside their doors. People crouch along the edges selling CDs, socks, potatoes, lighters, and tissues. Ed points out that among the things for sale are squares of chocolate from a candy bar, single disposable diapers, and single cigarettes. Every few feet in the cobbled street holes deeper than graves impede progress. Men with picks chop around ancient water pipes in search of a leak or blockage. Odors dating back to the Romans rise from the depths. They look like an illustration for an engraving entitled “A Sisyphean Task.” Dirt mounds around the holes must be climbed over. No one seems to have the concept of waiting to pass; everyone plunges onward from both directions—a chaotic traffic jam of people and donkeys, a melting pot with everyone melting. Somehow no one falls in. Hafid and the boy carry the handcart over their heads. Every few minutes someone calls out “Balak,” which I quickly learn to translate: donkey about to thunder by.
We would need Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth to find our way out of the medina. Hafid darts and branches down dozens of streets, often, it seems, doubling back. I would like to see a topographical map. “The streets are like those rubber insides of golf balls,” I say to Ed.
“More like the intestinal tract of Muhammad. It’s visceral.”
“Time made a detour around Fez.”
“Yes, cross through that gate, and you’ve stepped into the twilight zone.”
Balak, balak.
We arrive at a scruffy door and climb dark, cramped stairs, stumble at a landing where six small children are hovering outside their own door. Hafid opens the door of the masseria, the restored guesthouse we’ll call home for a few days.
After the squalor of the streets, the threadbare, sad donkeys, the odors of their manure, the heaped garbage, the mess, we step into a serene and poetic small house with intricately carved four-hundred-year-old plaster walls, delicately colored, with bands of Kufic calligraphy, an arranged marriage of art and geometry. High windows, far above our heads, let in panels of blond light. A few Berber rugs, a shower with seats and copper pails for washing in the style of the hammam, a tiled fountain, and low banquette sofas covered in rough hand-woven cloth—everything feels seamless. The roof terrace overlooks the entire medina, a vast warren of sand-colored cubes, all crowned with satellite dishes. The buildings are rough as barnacles. I’m unprepared for the size of the Fez medina. The medina is old Fez. The other two areas of the city are completely separated, three distinct towns. In the distance Hafid points out castles and a tomb on the hill, all the same earth color. Inside, peace seems to emanate from the walls. We are in a secret house in the heart of a mysterious medieval enclave.
When we emerge after quick showers, dark has invaded the medina. Donkeys have been herded inside stables or have headed home to the hills. Although the streets are still crowded, I at least don’t fear being shoved into the fetid ditches. I lose count of the turns we make. If we dropped stones or bread to find our way back, we’d never spot them again. Hafid guides us to a small restaurant with dining on a roof terrace and leaves us. Little plates of roasted peppers, carrots seasoned with cumin and vinegar, a version of eggplant caponata, and olives with preserved lemons precede a traditional couscous with seven vegetables. I have loved Moroccan food ever since I went to a cooking demonstration by Paula Wolfert thirty years ago, then cooked my way through her Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. I always keep jars of preserved lemons in my fridge. “How can carrots taste so good?” Ed reaches again for the tomato and cucumber salad, a twin to the California salsa we make at home. Couscous offers the same opportunities that pasta and tortillas offer Italians and Mexicans. You can improvise. Unlike the instant couscous I often resort to when I’m in a hurry, freshly prepared couscous is fluffy and tender, never glumpy. Tonight the seven vegetables are eggplant, kidney beans, tomatoes, onions, carrots, pumpkin, and cabbage—who would imagine the combination? These are added to the steamed couscous, along with potatoes and khlii, a beef confit that is a staple in every kitchen.
“The guidebook said not to eat unpeeled vegetables,” I remember. We overlook the Blue Gate where we entered earlier, and without the commerce the scene has turned to slow motion—strollers and beggars, and shop people heading back to the new town. In the medina restaurants do not serve wine because of the many mosques, so cup after cup of mint tea arrives after a meal. Hafid returns for us. Like children, we’re led home.
When mysterious gifts come your way, they must be accepted and understood. As we planned this trip, I looked on the Internet for a place to rent. Rather than making quick stops in several towns, I decided to concentrate on one city. Fez is quintessential Morocco, “the most complete Islamic medieval city in the world,” according to my Cadogan guidebook. I’d read so much about Marrakech that Fez seemed more of an adventure. I wanted to see Fez from the inside, not from the vantage of a hotel. Searching for a house, I located a site with an appealing description. The photographs showed the kinds of details that made me smile—a section of ceiling, a doorway. I could tell this was a loving restoration of an authentic old house. I filled in the availability questionnaire and sent an e-mail.
The next morning a long letter awaited me. Lori, the owner of the Fez house, told me that she once met Ed briefly when he was judging a poetry contest that she was administering. He’d shown her and the other poet some photographs of Bramasole as a ruin, just as we embarked on the restoration. The letter said that Ed’s photographs and description galvanized her to quit her job and go to Fez to study Arabic. Remembering Bramasole, she bought the medina house. Along the way, she’d read my books, which also, she said, bolstered her project. She married Hafid’s best friend. Her life completely changed. And so, she wrote, she wanted us to stay as her guests. As I read her e-mail, I felt the looping of long strands and read it over and over, marveling at how the motions of give and take remain mysterious, how one never can grasp causality. We accepted. We began a flurry of correspondence. We invited her and her husband to Bramasole.
Now I lie in her bed, happy to hear that birds sing in the medina. That ivory silk djellaba hanging on an iron rack belongs to the life Lori made for herself here.
Hafid appears with breakfast. Dense semolina cakes, a fried crepe, coffee made in a Moka pot, and fresh orange juice. We have slept away the obstacle course we traversed to get to this roof open to the white sky.
Hafid takes us to see a five-hundred-year-old house that has been partially restored. Architecture speaks a clear language, translatable by all. This medina house says: privacy is paramount. Doors and windows face the inner courtyard, not the street. Inside the house you are not to be seen. The three-story interior lavishes ideas of coolness, tranquillity, and meditation on anyone who steps inside the one door. The intact carved plaster panels look like enormous lace handkerchiefs. The courtyard gives a view—look up—of the outside and lights the rooms, though you can always step back into an alcove of shadows. Desert people must always love shadows as much as the sound of running water. I would like to see the house when rain instead of sunlight falls to the blue-and-white-tile ground floor. Within the house, I feel a flow and a sense of connection. Back stairs and twisted passageways lead to catwalks around the courtyard. Off the catwalk are fiercely decorated rooms often opening to smaller tiled alcove rooms. I’m surprised to see the exact patterns and colors that I saw on floors and walls in Andalucía. Moors and Jews exiled from Spain settled in Fez, bringing back skills and crafts with them. Hafid says, “You should buy a house in Fez medina. Very cheap for Americans.”
“How much?” I ask, looking at the graceful arabesques of verses from the Koran carved above diamond-patterned tile.
“Twenty thousand, thirty thousand at most.”
“Then you must restore.”
“Yes,” he shrugs, “but I am here for that.”
His friend Rachid meets us. A man of about forty, Rachid was born in the medina and grew up here. He will be our guide. We drink mint tea on the roof and tell him we’d like to see all the important sites, but also the medina he knows. He would like to discuss William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. He has a degree in literature and loves the modern American writers. We set out on a walk. He has no set speeches, fortunately. We simply walk, taking in the scents and scenes. The crafts practiced are mostly for local use. One souk, or district devoted to a particular function, specializes in marriage thrones, enormous shiny metal-faced chairs of hammered designs for the bride and groom. They look like props from The Wizard of Oz. In the carpenter’s souk, they’re making all kinds of carved tables and also coffins. One is ready for a child. One worker displays washboards. I haven’t seen a washboard since I was a child in Georgia and my mother dropped off our laundry at Rosa’s in colored town, where she scrubbed our clothes on a washboard, then boiled them in a black iron pot.
We pause at carved cedar arches and doors with hinges shaped like the hand of Fatima to protect the house from the evil eye. Rachid takes us to several madrasahs, the elaborate medieval theology schools where students lived in cubicles above the courtyards and studied philosophy and astronomy downstairs. Someone must have studied advanced geometry because the mosaic and tile patterns, the layers of borders, and the tooled cedar ceilings inspire investigation into how such a panoply synchronizes into pleasing and harmonious spaces.
Months from now when I think of Fez, I will think of mint. I love seeing the mint sellers. They hold out big bouquets or special baskets packed with mint. Tables are heaped with mint. No little handfuls are available; mint is not a garnish, and mint tea is not served with a sprig, as in a mint julep or southern iced tea. Boiling green tea is poured into a glass stuffed with mint, and you take the hot glass to your mouth with your thumb and forefinger at the top and bottom. Everyone drinks mint tea constantly. Rachid takes us upstairs to a teahouse where men sit on rough stools talking. The owner’s equipment consists of a table holding a small hotplate for boiling water, a few metal teapots, a bucket for rinsing the glasses (uh-oh), and a mountain of mint. I am the only woman, and no one acknowledges us at all. Rachid says, “The mint from Meknes is the best in Morocco.” I don’t even like mint tea, but I am drinking it with pleasure. The quantity of mint gives the tea a robust dimension. It tastes curative, it tastes of summer in a desert tent, it tastes like time.
Rachid says, “There are nine thousand streets in the medina. One thousand have no exit.” For lunch he leads us into a mobbed small space presided over by a magical-looking man I wish I could understand. He’s fey and strange and light on his feet like a dancer. Rachid says he used to be a storyteller in Marrakech. He still weaves a spell. He grabs Ed and takes him through the kitchen, giving him spoonfuls of spicy ground meat, lamb tajines, cauliflower, and a layered cheese and pastry dish just out of the oven. Ed selects too many dishes, and Rachid is perhaps embarrassed. But he eats. The kefta, the ground meat, he says, is camel. The joke he tells us involves tourists who refuse to eat camel and are tricked constantly. Regular customers go in and out of the kitchen, serving themselves. The barbecued turkey on skewers may be the best thing that’s happened to turkey. We clean the plates, except for the ground mystery meat.
Surely the tannery souk is not long for the world. Every tourist is taken there, followed by detours into leather shops. Before you arrive, the traffic of donkeys loaded with fresh animal skins stiff as cracker bread announces where you are. The hides are soaked in pigeon excrement as part of the curing process. A man stands up to his knees dunking skins. Vats the size of hot tubs contain bright colors. Where is the industrial revolution? We’re not exactly rushing toward it here at the vats; this work goes back to roots of industry.
Rachid says, “The yellow is from saffron or mimosa, the red from poppies, the green from mint.” I don’t believe that; the colors are lurid. His shop-owner friend hands customers a sprig of mint to hold to their noses. I buy a pair of the yellow slippers everyone wears. Rachid says, “Everything goes with yellow.” Later I leave them on the roof under the sun to dispel the smell. Couldn’t they give the leather a dip in rose water as well? Bins of pink rosebuds are my favorite sight in the food stalls.
Bundles on the street are often incredibly tiny women beggars, their faces the color and texture of walnut shells, their hands like paws.
Rachid says, “A good Muslim gives alms to the poor.”
Ed, only a fallen-away Catholic, reaches into his pocket. “How much?”
“One cent.”
Late in the day we return to the masseria to meet Fatima, a cousin of Hafid, who has come to prepare a home-cooked dinner for us. She sets up a round clay habachi-sized charcoal cooker and wipes off her tajine, the conical glazed terra-cotta dish that gives its name to the famous Moroccan one-dish meal of infinite variety. Fatima, who must be sweltering in her heavy pink djellaba, is a substantial woman with her hair covered. Her eyes are not downcast, however, and she smiles as she unloads her sack of groceries and starts to prepare vegetables for the tajine. She improvises a kitchen on the roof, drawing a bucket of water from the faucet for rinsing, and spreading an oilcloth tablecloth for her work surface.
She minces more parsley than I would have thought, then cuts up a parsnip, potatoes, zucchini, onions, and tomato. How easily she starts the charcoal going. As soon as the coals glow, she pours oil in the tajine and sets it on the fire. Then she lays the beef—I hope it’s not from one of the fly-specked piles I’ve seen for sale—in the oil, then places onions on top of the beef. She makes sure we understand that the vegetables go on the meat, not in the oil. She sprinkles on some salt, lots of black and white pepper, paprika, and cinnamon, then covers the tajine and finishes cutting the vegetables. I’ve never seen anyone hollow carrots before, and Hafid says she always cuts away the center. They don’t look woody. After the meat has cooked for about twenty minutes, she layers the other vegetables on top of the onions and adds half a teacup of water and several more pinches of seasoning. The roof is hot, even late in the day, and I’m shocked when Fatima peels off her djellab
a and continues to cook in her long cotton knit undergarment. Under that I see that she has on another layer of something. I’m warm in a short-sleeved linen shirt. The fire burns slowly now, and the tajine cooks on gentle heat for another hour.
We drink mineral water and look out over the medina at sunset. Ed asks, “Are you going to get on the plane carrying one of those tajines on your lap?”
“Yes.”
“Why does it have that carnival-hat top?”
“Steam collects on the inside of the cone and drips down on the meat and vegetables, a self-basting process.” I make that up, but it might be true.
“Fatima’s tajine looks like beef stew, only layered.”
“Basically, yes—but with a liberal use of spices.”
“A stew with attitude. Wish we had some wine.”
“We’re in the medina. Lightning would strike us. Or a donkey mow us down.”
Fatima pulls some jars out of her bag and serves eggplant spread and a tomato and cucumber salad with small round loaves of bread. All over the medina I’ve seen children running, holding aloft boards covered with cloth. Rachid says everyone still makes their own bread dough, then sends it to the bakery. Peering inside one, I saw the children’s boards on tables, stacked with warm bread, ready to be picked up. Every tiny quarter of the vast medina has its own ovens. The face-size flat loaves are perfect for the salads, spreads, and juices of the tajines.
A Year in the World Page 19