Prickly

It's no secret that Samuel has a certain design streak. Admittedly, many of his ideas get a raised eyebrow at first, but often, once installed, or built, or painted, the effect is room defining, in the best way. A month or so ago, we found a few round mirrors at the flea market and Samuel announced that he was going to transform their ho-hum wooden frames by lining them with porcupine quills, like a crown of thorns, only these, with their black and white striations, much lovelier than Christ’s bothersome thistles.

Hamoud assured us that porcupines are native to Morocco, and suggested that we visit the “Berber pharmacies,” or herbalists, ubiquitous in the souks. Their shops are filled with all sorts of exotic treats, some reputed for white and even black magic. We have a friend at one, a sweet Moroccan in his early twenties who speaks fairly good English and claims to have a girlfriend from Florida who is a teacher at the American School. Anyway, Zacharia doesn’t have any when we pay him a visit with our odd request, but promises to procure the quills from his sources in the countryside. In the meantime, Samuel locates some at another herbalist and purchases 200 at 2 dirhams apiece. Based on our fuzzy math, it seems we’ll need about 600 quills to encircle one mirror.

After a week or so, we check back in with Zach and he proudly races to the back of his shop, returning with a porcupine pelt with its quills attached. “Ah,” we say, “but we only need the quills.” “No problem,” says Zach, “just soak the hide in hot water and the quills should pull free.” It’s one of those moments like when you swear off beef after reading about slaughterhouse conditions. The idea of soaking the pelt in hot water until the skin and flesh decide to give up the quills is, well, a bit disgusting. Not only that, but it’s impossible to tell how many quills are on the hide. Samuel makes a quick calculation – a guess, really – and he and Zach reach a price. “If I’m right, we just got a good bargain,” says Sam, “but if not, we just paid too much for the quills, plus I’ve got to do all this work.” You said it, buster, not me.

The next day, Sam gamely does set to work, filling a plastic bucket with hot water and lowering the vile pelt into it. After an hour, he reaches in and pulls the steaming hide from the water and begins the delicate, and immensely painful, extrication of quills. After a minute, Sam begs me to look around for some rubber gloves; I think the task even has him a tad grossed out. And his hands are already red with welts from the prickly quills. I remember my mother tenderly disengaging quills from the mouth of our Labrador retriever, but that was in Maine, where she’d come by them honestly, out protecting our property from rodent intruders. Sam’s welts are self-inflicted and I wonder if his high-concept mirror design merits the pain.




Oh, and not only did the quill extraction take days, each quill, once pulled out, then needed to be cleaned of the flesh that clung to one end and polished with cooking oil. Another ghastly chore for our fearless decorator. Afterwards, Samuel arranged all of the quills, totaling nearly 600, by size and color in glass jars, which have become a fixture on our desk. For days, I’ve asked Sam: “Should we affix the quills to the mirror today – get that thing hung in our bathroom?” “Hmm, maybe,” he replies, distractedly. I’m worried the porcupine quill mirror, like other creative projects involving a fair bit of effort and grit, might remain unfinished, the hard part’s over, after all. Maybe the mirror will be left to be discovered in a dusty closet years from now like a great unfinished masterpiece. “Oh, yeah, that was during his Moroccan period,” some descendant might say when the jars of quills are unearthed.