‘Like the cheese,’ he says with a well-worn smile.
He has a house in the old town, which he’s been restoring for three years, speaks impressively good English, once lived on a houseboat on the Thames and at one time designed a Moroccan-style bathroom for Mick Jagger’s house in Richmond.
He’s shorter than me and about twenty years younger, with a neatly trimmed black beard, white djellaba, bare feet tucked into a pair of babouches, backless yellow slippers, and an efficient black briefcase.
Twenty-first-century Fez may look mediaeval, but it’s a working town. Thousands live, shop, worship and do business without ever having to leave the medina. The streets are narrow, and though all motor traffic is forbidden, you’re quite likely to be run down by a mule or squashed against the wall by an overladen donkey. In the Arab fashion, domestic life is discreet and hidden away, but commerce is open, visible and upfront. It’s also organised traditionally, into guilds of craftsmen. Each guild area announces itself with a distinctive scent, what Fettah calls ‘a geography of smell’. The acrid whiff of pigment in Dyeing Street, cedar wood shavings in Carpenters Street, leather in Tanners Street, the fragrance of fresh-made sweets and nuts in Nougat Street, the seductive sizzle of grilling meat along Butchers Row.
A traffic jam in old Fez can be a treat for the nostrils. At one point on Talaa Kebira (Main Street) I’m thrust to one side by a man with a tray of freshly-baked bread on his head, who is trying to avoid a woman carrying a basket of fresh vervain, who, like him, is trying to avoid a mule laden with fresh oranges.
We pass along an alleyway of open-fronted stalls, which rings with the sound of metal beating. The din is cacophonous and comforting, and through the smoke from their fires I can see men and boys, forging, beating and shaping copper and brass into an inexhaustible supply of low-tech utensils. There are huge bowls, some 3 or 4 feet wide, in which meat, dried with salt and spices, will be preserved through the winter (a throwback, says Fettah, to the siege days, when the city gates sometimes remained shut for months). There are tall fluted instruments for distilling perfumes like rose-water, crescent moon and star fixtures for cemeteries and mosques, and stacks of teapots. Down the street a young boy and an old man with thick gold-rimmed glasses are stooped over a low table, stitching together pointy-toed leather slippers like the ones Fettah is wearing, and a little further on a man is turning table legs on a spindle, using one foot to drive it and the other to guide a chisel tucked between his toes.
An arched gateway, sandwiched between two small shops, gives onto a courtyard where lime is being daubed on animal hides to strip them clean. This funduq is a monochrome world, full of ghostly surfaces so thickly coated with white lime and plaster that it’s difficult to see where the layers of paint end and the buildings begin. A tall black African stirs a vat of fresh lime with a wooden pole, as stocks of fleeces sway through the archway on the backs of donkeys.
There is not a single piece of machinery here. It is a glimpse of a pre-industrial age.
Fettah says he has something special to show me. It doesn’t look promising. We squeeze up narrow stairs covered in threadbare red carpet into a shop packed tight with leather goods of all kinds. We pass through ever smaller and more claustrophobic rooms, until, without warning, we’re at the back of the building and light is spilling onto a wide terrace.
With a dramatic flourish, this tight, concealed old city, is thrown wide open. Below us, like a giant paintbox, is a honeycomb of fifty or sixty stone vats, each one around 4 feet across, filled with pools of richly coloured liquid ranging from snow white through grey, milky brown and pale pink to garnet red, metallic blue and saffron yellow. It is a complete and immaculately preserved mediaeval tannery.
Water, heaved up out of the Fes river by a massive wheel, is distributed amongst the vats, in which the tanners mix the heavy combination of water, hides and dye using only prehensile feet and the pressure of the muscles in their legs. This is a young man’s game. The tanners have no protection from the sun, and temperatures can rise above 50degC/122degF in high summer. For a day’s work in these conditions Fettah reckons they take home 100 deram. Around six pounds.
And it’s not only the heat they have to endure. A sharp acidic stench rises from the kaleidoscope of colours below, a combination of the sheep’s urine and pigeon shit used in the dyeing process. The tanners have had to get used to it. A tour group watching them from an adjacent balcony are offered sprigs of mint as nosegays.
Apart from the slow, rumbling creak of the water wheel, there is no sound other than voices, splashes and the sound of wet hides slapping on the side of the kilns. If I close my eyes I could be in a great open-air bathhouse.
Fettah reminds me that the Fez of 600 years ago would have had 200 such tanneries, as well as 467 funduqs, 93 public baths and 785 mosques.
There is a minor jam along one of the passageways on our way out of the medina, caused by a donkey shedding a load of mattresses. No-one seems impatient to pass, nor to pass comment on the Laurel and Hardy-like attempts at reloading. It’s the way life is in this extraordinary city. The walls of Fez have kept the modern world at bay. What I have sensed today is little different from the impressions of two French travellers, the Tharaud brothers, who came through here in the 1930s.
‘In Fez there is only one age and one style, that of yesterday. It is the site of a miracle. The suppression of the passage of time.’
Day Seven
FEZ
Today Fettah has asked me round to his house.
The entrance gives nothing away. A discreet little doorway set into the high walls of one of the warren of passageways in the medina. This gives onto another much narrower passage, dimly lit and smelling of cool, damp plaster, another modest doorway and then, a revelation. A covered courtyard, its walls decorated with intricate arabesque patterns and glazed zellij tiles, rises 60 feet to the roof of the house. This soaring space opens onto a blue and white-tiled terrace, almost as broad as the courtyard is tall, with a garden beyond, full of flowers, shrubs and various fertile trees, which are pointed out to me in detail by Narjiss, one of Fettah’s two young daughters, with occasional promptings from her mother.
‘We’ve got lemon, we’ve got orange … we’ve got, er …’
‘Pomegranate …’
‘Yes … we’ve got pomegranate …’
‘Olives …’
‘Yes, we’ve got olives.’
‘Kumquat …’
‘I know! I know!’
As at the tanneries yesterday, the contrast between the close-packed streets outside and the airy spaciousness inside is more than remarkable; it’s almost an optical illusion.
‘Doors within doors within doors,’ is how Fettah describes the phenomenon of public and private Fez. ‘The more you get into it, the more you’re lured into it.’
His property has a floor space of 22,000 square feet, but it’s by no means the largest private house in the medina. Many of them are in poor condition, and it is only over the last three years that there has been much interest in restoring them. In London, such a mansion would be worth many millions. It cost Fettah PS60,000.
Abdelfettah is proud of his city. As the craftsman son of a craftsman father, he believes passionately in the preservation of the medina and the traditional styles and skills of the craftsmen within it. He does not see his enthusiasm as narrow or nationalist. Since he and his wife returned here after seven years in England they have welcomed people from twenty-eight different countries to a house which they see as a meeting place for musicians, writers, filmmakers and, of course, artists from all over the world.