Blog

The Carpenter

Mr. Reda is not Moroccan. If you ask him where he comes from, he smiles very sweetly, his eyes lost in creases, and lowers his head a fraction in a bow.

The Ferronier

If it’s pure unadulterated skill you’re after, then Mustapha the ferronier is one of those people who’s a rare diamond of a man, one in a generation. I hardly know where to begin describing him, so I’ll start at the beginning.

Four years ago while I was in the middle of Casablanca gridlock, I spotted a shortcut going off to the side. I didn’t know where it went, so I carved my way up it, a narrow alley, tapering as it went. It turned out to be the most heavenly shortcut in a city where crazed traffic is a way of life.

The thing about Casablanca shortcuts is that you have to surge up them fast, foot flat down. If you don’t, then all sorts of cross traffic hurls itself in your way – cars, trucks, carts, bikes, trikes, blind men, wild dogs, donkeys, geese, chickens… everything.

So I was careering up that alley, teeth gritted, face in a frenzied snarl, and then I saw it: a panel of the finest geometric wrought iron work imaginable.

I slammed on the brakes. Screech. Wheels locking. Then, injured by the whiplash, I leapt out, and started to shout:

‘Who made this? Who did this work? Please will someone tell me at once?’

There was silence for a long while. Silence, except for the hooting from the traffic that was backing up behind my car. Then, after a minute or two, a passing child jabbed into a filthy workshop with his thumb.

I went in, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. I scanned the place: there were three or four anvils, odd lengths of metal, a heap of wrought iron, the stench of sulphur and of coal and, in the dingiest corner, the shape of a man.

He was bent over the forge, his short wizened outline emaciated as if a terrible illness had taken hold. In his right hand was an oxy-acetyline torch. Over his eyes were a pair of cheap sunglasses, extra dark.

I nudged a hand out into the sunshine, motioning towards the panel of geometric ironwork.

‘Did you make that?’

The figure switched off the torch. It went out with a crack. He nodded.

‘Will you work for me?’

He nodded again.

That was four years ago. And in that time Mustapha the ferronier has become a huge part of our lives. Whatever we need made, he will do it, and he’ll do it with a touch of genius. I would give my front teeth to have skill like that, mixed with a gentleness, a calmness, that allows the mind to spark, and brilliance to unfold.

He has made wrought iron beds for the children, curtain rods, tables, and garden chairs, and gates eleven feet tall adorned with the most intricate work, fire tools and screens, iron fences, display frames and bookcases, and even wooden cupboards when the iron ran out.

The only thing you have to bear in mind is that, once in a while, Mustapha gets a little bit unstable. That probably doesn’t sound good. But it’s not so bad. He likes a drink, you see, from time to time. And when he drinks, he disappears for days, or weeks or, occasionally, for months.

When friends come over to Dar Khalifa and marvel at Mustapha’s work, I hold up a finger and caution them.

‘He’ll do magic for you as well,’ I say, ‘but his magic comes with a price.’

And I am sure that’s how it always is… raw skill in the left side of the scale, and instability in the right. Think of the greats – Picasso, Van Gogh, and all the rest. Genius is, I am sure, a form of insanity. It’s an affliction, a burden, something that is couched in torment and in the most severe pain.

Mustapha went off about a month ago now. He didn’t finish a friend’s garden furniture, although I had warned her that his sell-by date was about to descent.

Sometimes Rachana finds me fretting and she knows what’s in my mind. I worry about him like a mother whose teenage daughter is out late.

When I’m in a state like that, Rachana touches me gently on the shoulder, and whispers,

‘Don’t worry, he’ll be here soon.’

And, usually, the next day there’s a tap at the door.

And Mustapha, my Picasso, is home.

TS

The Water Seller

We have all seen them, in the flesh or postcards of them, standing in the central square in Marrakech, bright costumes, ear to ear smiles, furry goatskins full of water dangling at their waists. Think Morocco and you think of the inimitable purveyors of water. Their costumes are red, wide Berber hats providing shade, shallow brass cups polished so brightly you can see your face in them, their shoes as shiny as a soldier’s on parade.

The Cigarette Man

The sign is made from an old empty crumpled Marlboro carton, wrapped around a plastic bottle, a few inches of sand weighing down the base. Beside it, squatting on the ground in the shade, is the cigarette man. You might pass him without another thought if you were in a hurry, or if like me you didn’t smoke.

The Butcher

In England I grew accustomed to buying meat in shallow polystyrene packs, clingfilm tight over the top, a price, weight, and barcode printed neatly onto the sticker at the front. Years passed of running down to Tesco to grab some meat. And in that time I rarely gave it any thought. Indeed, I began to think that meat came in white plastic packs, straight from the animal. Or even worse, I began to forget that it came from an animal at all.

The Baker

Walk through the shantytown which surrounds our home and you will see children as young as six or seven hurrying forward, oversized trays balanced across their arms. Over the tray there’s always a cloth, pulled down tight. Under it there’s a loaf of flat round dough, ready for the oven.

The children scamper fast through the narrow alleys which run between the shacks, with the trays. They run around the side of the bidonville, where the donkeys laze hobbled in the morning sun, and present them to the baker.

His name is Mustapha. His arms are scarred from the wood fire, his hair all singed at the top from the interminable heat. All day long he shuffles the loaves into the oven with a long wooden paddle, and then shuffles them out again.

In Morocco there is no food as sacred as bread. Indeed, it’s far more than any simple food. It’s a symbol of something far greater than a food designed for alimentary sustenance. The idea of ever throwing away a morsel of bread, however stale, is completely unthinkable.

In our home, a piece of bread that’s unfit to eat is never thrown away – not ever. Instead, it’s passed on to someone or to something who will have use for it.

I once wondered what happened to all the stale old bread that was unfit to eat. There must be tonnes of it created in Casablanca alone every day. After all, no one throws it away. They protect it, defend it at all costs from the dustbin, and ensure it is given a fitting end.

I never asked anyone where the bread landed up, but the question was always in my mind. Then, one day, I was strolling through the muddy junk yard in the nearby area of Hay Hasseni, searching for old Art Deco basins as I do, and I saw it… a sea of stale old chunks of bread. There was every shape and size, every colour from white to the darkest brown.

I went over. The stench was terrible, as a great deal of the stuff was rotten, or gnawed at by rats. It was winter, and the Atlantic winter climate is merciless… especially on bread.

Every so often someone would stumble up, hand a small coin to the bread guardian, and saunter off with a bag of the stuff. The guardian told me that people bought it for their cows, that it kept them healthy and free from illness even in the coldest weather. ‘It’s a sort of miracle food,’ he said.

In the bidonville, Mustapha the baker told me he knew of the bread dealers in Hay Hasseni. ‘They make quite good money,’ he said. ‘And I thank them for their work, they are honorable men.’ He paused, shuffled another paddle of loaves into the fire.

Through a kind of alchemy, Mustapha and the other bakers transform the raw dough into the magical comestible and, as such, they are regarded with special esteem. As bakers – and they are exactly that – men who bake bread, they continue in a profession which remains unaltered since ancient times.

One mention of the history, and Mustapha holds still, rests the end of his paddle on his thigh.

‘The Prophet said never to discard a crust of bread,’ he said, ‘and that if you ever see it even the smallest piece on the ground, you must pick it up and put it on all wall. Then, if a beggar is passing and is in need of food, he will not have to stoop down. Because however poor a beggar, he has dignity too.’

TS

The Barber

Hamid the barber crouches in the doorway of his shop, a cut-throat razor in one hand and a tired leather strop in the other. As soon as a client arrives, slips across the sunlit threshold, and eases himself into the black vinyl chair, Hamid comes alive. He’s like an automaton, wound for a few moments, cued into action by the prospect of a coin and an audience.

Ask him any question and Hamid will tell you his tale. It’s a story crafted from pride, fantasy, and from an enthusiasm for dreams, conjured by the magical twilight world of his own mind.

‘We were warriors,’ he says, massaging lather into my cheeks.

‘Who were?’

‘My ancestors.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘From the mountains, and the desert.’

‘They came from both?’

‘Yes, yes, from the mountains first and then from the desert.’

The razor was dipped in cool water, inspected for sharpness, and applied at an angle to the cheek bone. At no point in the day is Hamid ever more content than when a bristly cheek was beneath his hand. Not because it means he is making a little money, but because it allows him time to talk, uninterrupted.

‘My grandfather was from the High Atlas,’ he said, carving the blade south towards the chin. ‘He was so brave that every villager for hundreds of kilometres were fearful, terrified of just hearing his name.

‘What was his name?’

Hamid paused, wiped the cut-throat to clear the soap.

‘He was called Abdul-Kader,’ he said, filling the name with vigour like a balloon blown full of air. He said the words as I would tremble at hearing them.’

‘Would you tell me about him?’

But there was no need for the question. Hamid had already begun:

‘Haj Abdel-Kader was four years old when the chief of the village threw him a lamb bone,’ he said. ‘It was covered in meat, juicy and tender. But just as he caught in his small hands, a dog leapt up onto him and wrestled him for the bone. My ancestor was enraged, even though so young.’

‘What did he do?’

Hamid wiped the razor once again. His voice was slow and measured.

‘He took the dog by the jaws and ripped it apart, clean down the middle.’

‘Gosh.’

The coiffeur rinsed my face with a damp cloth and sprayed the raw skin with rose water, before rubbing it with a cube of ice. He seemed pleased to have impressed me.

‘When you come back next week,’ he said, ‘I will tell you a story that will make your hair turn white with fear.’

I thanked him, adding nervously that I couldn’t wait. Then, just as I eased myself from the black vinyl, and fished for a coin, he said:

‘Remember, our ancestors can teach us more than any teacher ever could.’

TS

Ochre

It all begins with a square tile, glazed terracotta ten centimetres square, the colour of ochre. Add to this a decade of apprenticeship, a pair of hands so steady they could match those of any surgeon, a cushion of pressed felt, and a hammer with an ultra sharp edge. If you have all these things, you have what it takes to create the finest zelij mosaics in the world.

When I first moved to Morocco I thought the West had some pretty amazing tools. I used to traipse up and down the aisles in the hardware stores gawking, checking the spec of the electric drills and the angle grinders. Once in a while I’d buy one, plug it into the mains, and blow myself away with the power ready and waiting for me to abuse it.

Like everyone else who lives in the West, I became brainwashed by the system. But then, move away, decompress, and you come to understand very quickly that the names we give things, and the nonsense we consider to be important, is quite meaningless.

In the Occidental world we get all caught up with what we perceive to be power. All we talk about is how many horsepower or megawatts, or gigabytes, or amperes we have on tap. And what we forget is that the power’s not important… but what is, is the skill of hands in which the power is placed.

When we moved here to Dar Khalifa, the renovations were ongoing. They went on and on and on. And in that time I had the opportunity to observe another system at work, a system that has been honed through a thousand years and more. It’s a system that is based on transmission alone, and the idea that if you spend enough time with someone who has the knowledge, then you will learn and, ultimately, you’ll gain knowledge too.

But of course the important thing is to be in the right frame of mind from the start, or be ready to enter the right frame of mind as you progress. If you’re not ready to learn, you’ll stay ignorant. And that’s a big point. Because in the West we like to imagine that everyone is a blank sheet, ready to learn, something that’s not right at all. An athlete getting ready for a race limbers up, prepares. Only then does he put his mind to the exercise at hand.

We had several teams of craftsmen working on the house. The one which impressed me greatest with their chain of transmission were the zeligiers, the mosaic workers. There was an entire range of them, and how extremely remarkable it was. At the bottom of the ladder were a group of boys. They were about fifteen years old, fluff on their cheeks, a glint of expectation in their eyes. All they did was to move sand, cement and carry the precious tiles.

After years of struggling under the burden of the raw materials, they were permitted to sort the tiles themselves, to wash them, soak them in troughs, and to caress their hands over what would become their livelihood.

More years, and they would be taught to mark out a shape, the same shape, over and over on a ten by ten square of terracotta. There was no question of making a mistake, because given time the hand and the eye perfected the skill… a skill that would enable them to cut the mosaic pieces in hundreds of different shapes without error. And that’s how humans learn: through repetition.

Trawl the wide aisles of Home Depot of B&Q, buy into the brainwashing system, and you quickly imagine that you can do anything with a set of tools, each one with a power cord fifteen feet long. It looks so easy on the packet, or on the in-store TV display. And the mistake we are making is by assuming that technology is a substitute for skill, which is certainly is not.

During the renovations at Dar Khalifa, a man in his forties sat straight-backed on a cushion in what is now the main salon. Beside his left knee was always a glass of piping hot mint tea, and in his right hand was a hammer. All day, every day, he would chip away, cutting mosaics from ochre-red tiles. To watch him was to slip into another world, a world which surely at once existed (and probably not so long ago) in the Occident.

One morning he smiled as I watched, transfixed by the tap, tap, tapping, by the raw skill focussed on the job at hand. He whispered something. I leant forward, and he said it again.

‘To cut one piece it takes a minute,’ he said, ‘one minute and twenty years.’

TS

Black

On the east wall of the courtyard near to where I am sitting, there is a shadow. It’s unlike any normal shadow, shades of grey, because it is very very black. But the colour is not the strange thing about it. Rather, it’s that this shadow is not cast by any object. It’s a shadow without a reason.

White

One morning, long ago now, my father came home and looked white, as if he had seen a ghost. He sat in his study in his favourite chair, staring into space. We asked our mother what had happened. ”He’s had a little shock,’ she said. ‘It’s best to leave him alone.’