A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco Read Free Page B

principle of social order, with individual expression subsumed into a harmonious whole. For this reason it is regarded as the model Muslim city. Its streets are not merely visually stimulating, but give the other senses a workout as well. The spicy scent of tagines wafts out of kitchen windows, mingling with the yeasty aroma of bread and cakes from communal ovens. There’s the heady fragrance of fresh cedar being shaped into a door, a window frame or a piece of furniture. Less attractive is the acrid stench of glues and solvents. Donkey dung litters the wider alleys, and I soon learned to watch my step. Just as quickly I became inured to the reek of cat and human pee.

    Being a female turned out to be an unexpected advantage in my house search. Usually only women are at home during the daytime, and they’re generally reluctant to admit a strange male to the house. But when they saw me they would visibly relax, and we were always invited inside. In the space of a few days I saw so many houses that they began to meld into each another, and it was difficult to remember which kitchen or terrace went with which house. To overcome this, I took photos and notes and went over them at the end of the day.
    David had given me some tips for determining the age of a house. He told me that those with
masharabbia
– intricate wooden mesh screens on upstairs balconies and on upper windows facing the courtyard – were built before the late nineteenth century. Under Islam as practised then, the faces of women could not be seen by men outside their own families. This meant that when strangers came to the house the women would retreat to sit behind these screens, where they could see what was going on in the courtyard while remaining hidden from view. As attitudes became more relaxed during the nineteenth century,
masharabbia
began to be replaced with less expensive wrought iron.
    With other information David gave me, I was soon able to estimate the age of a house from the height at which tiles stopped on the walls, and from the colours and decorations used. But it wasn’t always straightforward, as plasterwork and
zellij
were usually renewed every hundred years or so. A house could be much older than it appeared on the surface.
    I saw some once magnificent but now forlorn houses that were crying out for restoration, deserted by wealthy families who’d left for Rabat when the French protectorate made that city the capital instead of Fez. Now these huge crumbling edifices were full to bursting with squatters, drought refugees from the countryside. Where one family might previously have lived, now there were five or six. Having had no maintenance for decades, their once grand rooms had an air of neglect and quiet desperation.
    ‘What happens to the people here if the house is sold?’ I asked the agent as I inspected one particularly glorious but decaying example, the one-time residence of a Sufi saint. Every room was occupied by a different family, and the outstanding woodwork was cracking with age and exposure to the weather.
    The estate agent had also been recommended to me by David. Larbi was a small, grey-haired man who refrained from the incessant sales patter his Australian counterparts engaged in. Maybe this was because he spoke not one word of English.
    ‘They are paid to move as part of the deal,’ he told me via Nabil.
    That made me feel less guilty, but we couldn’t afford to do the amount of work required to save the Sufi’s riad, even if we’d been able to scrape together the asking price. I just hoped someone with the money and the know-how would come along soon.
    Some houses I saw were too far gone to consider, their structural problems severe enough to overwhelm even the most ardent restorer. There were fissures in walls and undulations in floors that spoke of subsidence over the centuries, poor foundations, and other, unknown forces at work in the earth beneath.
    My aim was to find a house that had been spared the