The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers

by Fouad Laroui

  This, he says to himself, stunned, is what I live for.

  BORN NOWHERE

  In a café in P*, capital of F*, a young Moroccan approaches me quite civilly (“Are you really What’s-his-name, the gazetteer?”) and vehemently assures me that I must hear his story—he seems to have only one, like most people.

  My first instinct is to flee.

  But let’s analyze the situation. October. Saturday. Beginning of the evening. The sky low and heavy outside weighs like a lid / and discourages strolls. So, may as well stay in the warmth, in this bar, opposite the church S* G* of P*, to hear what the young man has to say. Light years away from Café de l’Univers (so far, all that…), leagues from other locales, X (that’s his name) recounts:

  “A few months ago, in order to obtain my passport to come study in France, I had to give to the appropriate authorities, in Rabat, an official copy of my birth certificate, which I had received myself from the moqaddem of the area for a shiny new ten-dirham bill. Once in my hands, I passed on the aforementioned document, without even glancing at it, to the prefecture—those men, those women, the famous appropriate authorities.”

  “Not even glancing at it, you say?”

  “Not even.”

  “Well, my dear friend, we can already predict the worst catastrophes are in store for you. One must always read everything when it’s an administrative affair. Down to the last word, every comma. And even between the lines.”

  “Perhaps. But I didn’t pay any attention to the information in the document because I believed (naively) that I already knew the details.”

  A pause.

  “After all, I know who I am, right?”

  This was said in a defiant tone, the strands of his hair disheveled, his look somber. I, prudently:

  “We say that, and then one day…”

  He cut me off, vehemently:

  “But no! Big mistake! We don’t know who we are, monsieur! We know nothing, monsieur, no matter what Aristotle and all of philosophy have to say about it! When I received my identity card, I saw with stupefaction that after ‘place of birth’ came the response: ‘Khzazna,’ even though I believed I remembered—vaguely—having been born in Rabat.”

  “You remember your place of birth? That’s a bit precocious.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I mean to say that I’ve always more or less known that I was born in Rabat. Where did this strange Khzazna come from? It wasn’t a series of typing errors, the letters in ‘Rabat’ and in ‘Khzazna’ aren’t close on the keyboard. I verified—even a monkey typist, even a doddery drunkard, could not end up with ‘Khzazna’ while trying to type ‘Rabat.’ Or else, he would have to be flailing around in every which way…”

  He leaned toward me, finger raised.

  “I calculated the probability of getting ‘Khzazna’ while trying to type ‘Rabat’: one chance in one hundred thousand billion. On the human level, monsieur, it’s an impossibility!”

  “Excellently said.”

  “All this was bizarre. At that moment, I couldn’t do anything, for I was preoccupied with my departure for France, which constitutes, as you know, a veritable obstacle course, with its pre-registrations, its registrations, its thousand certificates…But I remained intrigued by this story.”

  “Why not just forget about it?”

  “Forget about it? It quickly became an obsession! After resolving a thousand problems related to settling in France, I reached a calmer period of my life; and, to be honest, happier. We are, after all, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world?”

  “Mmm.”

  “One of the most interesting?”

  “Hrmblmmmn.”

  “But all my friends at the Cité Internationale where I had set down my luggage, all my friends were born in prestigious places, such as Fes or Rabat or Marrakech, or at least interesting places, such as Azrou or Azemmour. But Khzazna? Quès aco? I kept a low profile, buckling under the weight of my shameful secret. And if they were to ask me where I had seen the light of day? Would I be able to lie?”

  A waiter materialized above our table, haughty in black and white, and enjoined us to order something (“or else disappear,” his scowl seemed to say). We ordered two coffees and he left, full of disdain. The young man resumed his story.

  “Sometimes it was the opposite—I was caught up in a flash of exaltation and saw myself as a duke or at least a marquis, lord of a land perhaps inundated with history, and I was ‘of Khzazna’ as others are ‘of La Rochefoucauld.’ But the exaltation faded fast and I was rotting away once more in the agony of not knowing who I was, having been born nowhere. I needed to be sure! After research worthy of the best explorers, conducted at the Centre Pompidou and at the Bibliothèque Nationale on the rue Richelieu, after exhausting numerous road maps, I succeeded in locating this place where I had been born, at least in the eyes of the law. The pre-war Guide Bleu, unearthed at a secondhand bookstore, was adamant: Khzazna existed indeed!”

  “That must have reassured you.”

  “It was a spot on a map!”

  “That’s better than nothing.”

  “Mmmmyeah. A Guide Bleu dating from the Protectorate, suffice to say from prehistoric times…So, a few months ago, during summer vacation, back in Morocco, I wanted to be sure. Without saying anything to anybody, I took the bus to Rabat and I went to see. I saw. In fact, Khzazna is not the name of any city, nor any village, nor any hamlet.”

  “A ruin, then? A poet’s dream? At least a well?”

  “No. It’s a beautiful land fifty miles east of Rabat, a rather pleasant countryside where time stopped long ago—in the age of the Guide Bleu perhaps. It’s swarming with cows, sheep, hens, and rabbits.”

  “So far, nothing extraordinary.”

  “Nothing extraordinary, certainly; but imagine my surprise when I learned, after approaching a local gnome and asking him a few questions, that there wasn’t even a hint of a hospital nor of a maternity ward in this place. There’s only a free clinic in the small neighboring village, constructed two years ago. I’m a little bit older than that, after all.”

  He slouched in his chair, brow furrowed.

  “The question you must be asking yourself now, that I asked myself a long time before you, is the following: where was I born, exactly? Between two trees? On a hill? There, next to the stream?”

  “In a barn, like Jesus?”

  “There wasn’t a single barn in the vicinity. (Do you mind? It’s my story.) When I returned to the house, in the grips of a great anxiety…”

  “…of identity…”

  “…I rushed to the kitchen and demanded that my mother enlighten me. She was kneading I don’t know what in the half-light. A good minute passed before anything happened. Then she replied, seemingly unbothered, that I was born in the maternity ward of Rabat, like everyone else…”

  “…but…”

  “…but that my maternal grandfather had beseeched my parents to write the word “Khzazna” in the family records, in the appropriate box.”

  “The grandfather’s always to blame.”

  “Indeed, but why? Why? You’ll never guess in a million years.”

  “I give up immediately.”

  The waiter appeared and placed on our table, in a brusque gesture, two cups of coffee (tintinnabulating as they knocked against each other); then he left, full of arrogance. The young man leaned toward me once again, as if he were about to reveal the third secret of Fatima.

  “All because, at the time, he would often run as a candidate in the local elections in the district of Khzazna! Elections he sometimes won, but with the tiniest lead: one vote, one alone, could make all the difference.”

  Now I really got into the discussion, my voice vibrating with incredulity (80%) and indignation (20%):

  “You expect me to believe that in this land where there are only, according to you, cows, sheep, hens, and rabbits, they vote, they elect representatives of the people in real assemblies? There
are congressmen? Councillors? County magistrates, perhaps?”

  He drank a small sip of coffee then struck his fist against the table (an abundance of ! followed).

  “Exactly, monsieur! There is all that and perhaps even more! Laugh as much as you like!”

  “But…why?”

  “The first governments after Independence wanted it that way, probably in order to balance the weight of Rabat, that nest of leftists who voted like one single man for Abdallah Ibrahim and his friends. As I just told you, there were so few voters in Khzazna that one sole vote could make the difference. For my grandfather, I then represented not his grandson newly landed on earth (you-you-you! ululated the women), but a potential elector who would vote for him when I came of age, twenty-one years later.”

  I was flabbergasted.

  “Twenty-one years later?”

  “Indeed!”

  “And they say Moroccans don’t know how to plan for the long term?”

  “Utter nonsense!”

  “That they only live in the moment?”

  “Baloney!”

  Moved, we looked into each other’s innermost depths, proud to be part of a people so concerned with the future, and we ordered a pomegranate juice to drink to the health of triennial, and even quinquennial, plans.

  The waiter insolently asked us if we really intended to sip pomegranate juice after drinking coffee. He seemed to imply that we were sinning against the spirit of the place, against the P*sian custom, against all traditions. We told him to get lost, which he did with a majestic step.

  However, the young man was worried. He started up again, in a melancholic tone:

  “This story has plunged me into a state close to nervous breakdown. (Yes it has! Yes it has!) To learn first of all that I’m not who I thought I was, which is to say a Rabati; to get used to this new identity as a citizen of Khzazna; then discover that this identity that I had ended up accepting was itself a fiction; and that this fiction was a political manipulation designed by my own family…”

  “We cannot be betrayed but by our own.”

  With a distracted finger he wiped the bottom of the pomegranate juice lingering in his glass; then he sucked his finger, becoming more and more heavyhearted.

  “Well, I wasn’t yet at the end of my troubles. That same night, while I confided the discovery of my precarious stateless state to my uncle Brahim, how did my uncle respond? Comforting words, a fitting hadith, encouragements? Not at all! He pushed me even further into my distress by revealing to me an even more bizarre fact that concerned me as well.”

  He squeaked:

  “My own uncle!”

  “Family, I tell you… But what did he say, exactly?”

  “This: ‘My dear nephew, not only were you born nowhere, but, in a certain way, you were never born at all.’ Just like that!”

  “Allow me to write that phrase in my notebook.”

  “‘My dear nephew, not only were you born nowhere, but, in a certain way, you were never born at all.’ And he went on to recount a detail that everyone had forgotten—except him.”

  “Uncles, they forget nothing.”

  “It’s important to know that I was born (if we can call it being born) toward the end of December 1973. My father was summoned to a council where he was told the following: ‘My dear Abdelmoula’—did I tell you that my father was named Abdelmoula?—‘if you declare the birth of your son today, or even tomorrow, he will lug around for the rest of his life a year reduced to a few days. Everyone will think he’s eight years old, when really he’ll only be seven years and five days old. Better to wait for the beginning of the coming year and only then go bother the civil registrar.’”

  “Understandable.”

  “For close to a week, and while I was wriggling about, innocent, in my diapers, nothing happened. I mean officially. In practice, my family probably slit the throat of some ram, or at least a rooster, and offered plates of couscous to the poor near the mosque; but I didn’t yet exist on paper. In my diapers, yes; but on paper, no. Then, around the 2nd or 3rd of January, my father went triumphantly to announce my birth to the authorities. The authorities, who are used to—the imbeciles—believing the word of citizens, thus noted that a certain X*, son of Abdelmoula Y*, was born in Khzazna January 2nd, 1974.”

  “Fake birthplace, fake year! Bravo! You’ve got it all!”

  “This avuncular revelation stupefied me. I went stumbling out into the night to wander in the little streets of Rabat. It was gorgeous outside…”

  “Let’s stick to the story.”

  “The question I was asking myself that night, stumbling in the streets, haggard, the question I’m still asking myself, is: am I really myself if I was born elsewhere and the year before?”

  “Colossal enigma!”

  We ordered another fruit juice to better meditate on life’s uncertainties. The young man seemed to have calmed down, now that he had emptied his heart of past resentments, as if the confidence he had taken in What’s-his-name was enough to appease him.

  He glanced at the parvis in front of the church S* G* of P*. A tourism van had just unleashed tens of Japanese tourists who were agitating silently. A Comoran was selling hot chestnuts while two Tamils seemed to be surveying the area. A beggar, sitting on the steps of the church, was reaching an alms bowl toward the faithful entering into the house of God.

  My one-night companion continued.

  “What a truly superb city! I really think I’ll end up becoming a citizen of P*. Let it take as long as it takes. At least that’s an identity.”

  He got up and took off, just as civilly as he had approached me, after throwing a crumpled banknote on the table. I remained alone on my banquette.

  Not for long: The famous Samir J*, passing by, noticed me through the window, entered the café, and came to join me, hoping I would buy him a drink.

  After ordering, I quickly recounted the story I had just heard. J* reflected for a bit, then cried out, slamming his fist on the table, as the citizen of Khzazna had done before him:

  “This story proves what I have always believed. Identity problems don’t exist. We create them! ‘Who am I? Where am I going? What am I good for?’”

  “‘What state am I wandering in?’”

  “Pointless questions! This young man doesn’t realize how lucky he is. It’s easy to say to yourself: oh là là, I was born nowhere, at no time, boo hoo, I’m so unlucky!”

  He swallowed a mouthful of beer and continued.

  “But the worst is to know precisely where you were born, and when, down to the very second; and despite that to have a doubt. A doubt based on certitude, that’s the worst!”

  “‘A doubt based on certitude.’ I don’t understand that at all but it seems totally plausible to me. Allow me to write it in my notebook.”

  “I was born in Paris, in Baudelocque. If need be, I could find the room, the bed, the exact place, the stain on the ceiling. As for the day, I know it perfectly. The precise hour, the precise meter, everything is known, archived, fixed for centuries to come. So what?”

  He brought his face close to mine, his teeth clenched.

  “I don’t know who I am any more than this dandy from Kaza Naza!”

  “Khzazna.”

  “But at least he can imagine that an identity is possible. He can believe that if he rectifies something, two or three administrative trifles, a number, a name, everything will fall back into place. If he had really been born where the register said, the day it said, then there wouldn’t have been any problem. So he can believe that, potentially, he doesn’t have a problem! So, deep down, he doesn’t have a problem!”

  “Bravo! I understood nothing.”

  J* shouted (one of his tics):

  “However, what I’m saying is simple: identity problems, everybody has them! But they go much deeper than we think!”

  “But a minute ago you were bellowing the opposite: ‘Identity problems don’t exist!’”

  “It’s the same
thing!”

  “You’re contradicting yourself.”

  “Never! And in any case, I don’t give a damn!”

  I shouted even louder:

  “Exactly, you old rascal!”

  Then a young woman, a brown-hair-and-glasses whom I had crossed paths with two or three times at the Cité Internationale, approached us. She yelled at us:

  “Messieurs, you’re making a lot of noise,” she remarked. “People are talking. Heads are turning and a tsss tsss is reverberating through the mink coats. And since you’re mixing French and Moroccan, you’re bringing shame to all of Morocco. And to me, as a result. Because I’m Moroccan…”

  She grabbed a chair and sat down next to us.

  “…even though I was born in Vietnam to a Russian father. Incidentally, am I really a woman?”

  At that precise moment, we jumped up, Samir J* and I, and disappeared, horrified, into the P*ian night.

  We’re still running, even now, fleeing from the immense flood of identity problems seemingly trying to submerge the world and its inhabitants, and we strongly suspect, as we gallop, that these problems are not any more real than those of the native-torn citizen of Khzazna.

  KHOURIBGA, OR THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

  “One day,” Ali confided in us…

  “Wait, let’s order first.”

  (What are you going to have? I dunno…You? etc.)

  Five minutes later:

  “One day,” Ali confided in us…

  “Or rather ooonnnnne night,” crooned Hamid.

  “Stop, let him talk!”

  “Good God! If we can’t coo along…”

  “Except you’re not cooing innocently, you’re doing it just to bother him.”

  “Me? You accuse me of being some kind of provocateur? etc.”

  Five minutes later:

  “It was last year. I was freelancing for La Tribune de Casablanca—we have to pay for our studies after all…”