MARRAKESH - Morocco (part I)

I knew nothing but its name when I entered the gates of the Jardin de Majorelle in an early morning of the late December.

Winter in Marrakesh means cold downs, early sunsets and heavy snow on the close Atlas Mountains. The muezzin wakes up the town; his solemn prayers flutter over a sky that is never cloudy or rainy for long, over flat roofs in terracotta shades bristled with antennas and fluttering clothes. Trades, markets and traffic begin then in a crescendo. By the time tourists leave their elegant riyad, streets will be crowded with carts and buggies, drawn by donkeys driven by men muffled in sombre, pointed djellabah. White, old taxis miraculously avoid careful pedestrians, smoky motorbikes and rusty bicycles. Vegetables are on offer in scanty heaps on stalls or scattered on mats, scanned by still cats lurking in the shadow. Stray, lean dogs rove around butchers’ windows where bodies of male animals are exposed. Impassive glances cross coloured veils, big air-conditioning buses and pinkish dust. Habit breeds indifference: they never rise to sift the squared minaret of the Koutoubya Mosque, they never stop to turn back the world when its surface dazzled in full moon wrapped in ceramics and stuccos.

This is the life, the energy and the light that fascinated Monsieur Jacques Majorelle when he first visited this country in 1917.

Son of Monsieur Louis Majorelle, a famous French furniture-maker who was involved in the development of the Art Nouveau movement in France, he became a painter, after his first studies as architect and decorator. To complete his education, he travelled diffusely to Spain, Italy and Greece lingering in milder climates, kindling creative sparkles. In 1910 he left his native Nancy, France, the snowy, small north-eastern town where ‘700 left tidy squares with impressive golden railings plunged in a persistent scent of vanilla, for Cairo, Egypt. The simple life of ordinary people, who live in the outskirts of the town, as the majestic temples of the High-Egypt became his endless subjects for four years. Here, he experimented with colours and pictorial techniques, with the shape of people and places and with a relentless and untameable sun.

Then, the family friend and Resident-General of France in Morocco, General Lyautey invited him to Marrakesh. The dry, hot climate revealed itself excellent for his poor health and its light inspired and challenged this painter as many other European and American artists in that period. Trailed by ancient tales, shifting his horizons as he travelled southward in the African continent or he faced the Atlas Mountains with bearers carrying easel and trunks, he settled there.

A few years later, he acquired a plot of land outside the Walled Medina, in the Nouvelle Ville; he built a small house and a studio, and spent the rest of his life painting and creating this garden, open to public for the first time in 1947.

Colours, plants, water and animals feature Le Jardin de Majorelle today as when Monsieur Majorelle created it.

He defined himself a “gardenist”, colours were his language. In 1931 he painted the studio in a cobalt blue.

-to be continued

Photos:

Travel in a garden.
The painting: Le souk aux tapis à Marrakech, huile sur toile, M.B.A. de Nancy
Itineraires marocaines, Maurice Arame

Walden; or life in the woods - By Henry David Thoreau.

I started reading Walden, or life in the woods from Chapter 13 “House-warming”. I jumped over Chapter 14 “Former Inhabitants”, started again with Chapter 15 “Winter Animals” and plodded along Chapter 16 “The Pond in Winter”. Then I stopped, checked the length of the last two Chapters, Chapter 17 “Spring” and Chapter 18 “Conclusion”, and judiciously decided to ignore them to dash myself randomly in the previous twelve Chapters.

This book is included in the selection of authors I have to study for my Anglo-American Literature exam. At first, it seemed inviting: a report of two years and two months spent by the author in a small house he built himself, on the shore of Walden pond, in a wood close to the small town of Concord, Massachusetts. I did not suppose it to be particularly exciting or surprising, but a pleasant and fluent reading, neither discouragingly long nor excessively boring.
To my surprise, all my endeavours ended in slumbering readings quickly neglected, with faint excuses, for sudden, more important tasks.

Then, there came the snow: large, white snowflakes whirled slow and fast for an entire day, the last day of the Christmas holidays. Snowfalls are not unusual in early January in Milan. What retained my eyes was the obstinacy and the disarming energy of these snowflakes that silently were covering the town. They reminded me a passage of the book. I started turning over the pages to find it, towards the end:

“…The snow had already covered the ground…, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavoured to keep a bright fire both within my house and my breast.” (chapter 13)

Winter did not surprise him: he had gathered wild apples and shiny chestnuts, had stored in his cellar potatoes, peas, a little rice and a jug of molasses. He had lathered and plastered his house, regretting …the rough brown boards full of knots … that let cool air and light in, but admitting that now his dwelling had become more comfortable and suitable for the freezing weather. He had built a chimney too, the most vital part of the house, devoting days of hard work towards the end of summer. Snow and ice confined his world for months; in the morning, he looked for water with axe and pail and collected dead wood for the fire, a trusty companion that warmed and purified his thoughts. Silence and solitude enhanced the voices of the wood. The melodious sound of different birds sketched in his words, which combine the preciseness of science to the intenseness of literature, perfect pictures of a life ...above a forest of solemn pines bent down with snow. The morning run of red squirrels over his roof, that woke him up and then amused him with their quick and crazy acts. The raged and demoniacal bark of foxes which ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game (chapter 15). The creaking of the snow while he travelled, some eight or ten miles away, to pay a visit to an old pine, a beech-tree or a yellow-birch whose outlines had been shaped and re-design by the snow. The sound of the ice, which had turned the smooth surface of the pond in a living lesson, applies to nature and to men as well.

This is not my winter. This is a wild nature, not hostile but mysterious and unknown. Busy in a never-ending cycle that repeats itself in seasons, in days, in the life of all beings, always the same but always different and so worth to be present at it.

He went to the woods to front only the essential facts of life. Simplicity and discipline were his means to reach pure thoughts, to find an inspiration that was always more difficult to seize, to reconcile to a life that was addressed, by then, to maturity without the fruits he had hoped to pick up.
Thoreau wrote this book in 1847, when he left this house, but it was released just seven years later, eight years before his death. It took time to find the right words to express the renewal of his spirit using the imagines of Nature, to write an hymn to celebrate her infinitive and unrestrainable strength.

I have not finished the book yet. The glorious rebirth, the encouraging certainty that light and warm sun will rise again have just been skimmed. It is too early, even if days are longer and showy primroses are on sale. I still feel winter with its cold, low and grey sky. I still see its naked, twiggy and brown trees; brighten by car lights, with heaps of dry leaves squashed at their feet. They would only disappear, sink under the frozen asphalt covered with dirty snow, blend their brown-greyish shades with the dark ground. I still hear twittering from invisible and unknown birds that drown, for an instant, town noises, and I still need …the suggestive inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy of Winter… this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer (chapter 17).

Chapter 17 will wait until the snow has melted and new hopes are ready to spring.

Photos:
Travel in a garden.