“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…”
“Sure, but hang on a second, someone must have pulled strings for you. One doesn’t just become a freelancer for La Tribune like that.”
“You think someone pulled strings for me? You accuse me of being some kind of bourgeois? etc.”
Five minutes later:
“One day, and this is what I’ve been trying to get to, one day, I found myself in Khouribga, researching (get this) ‘men who matter.’ Bizarre, no? (And note that I’m talking about men, not women — freelancers aren’t sent off to research icons or muses…”
“That wouldn’t be a bad film title: No muse for the freelancer.”
“…nor the skilled kolkhoz women, even less the Cleopatras or the Kahinas, as if those tramps’ counterparts didn’t exist in the Cherifien Empire under Hassan II. But anyway.) You’ve asked me to essplain. It was a sudden whim of the director of La Tribune. Thumbs passed through the holes of his cardigan (he didn’t have the money to repair the seams, you know how poor the gazettes are), so, fingers in the holes, a badly lit Casa Sports dangling from his disdainful lip, spectacles on his nose (à la “press boss”), he hit me with the following, at dawn: ‘You’re gonna do a piece for me on men who matter…’—utterly untimely—‘…in Khouribga.’ I didn’t dare ask him what he meant by that. (A freelancer shuts up or gets out.) I wasn’t so much worried by the strangeness of this inquiry: why the devil was La Tribune de Casablanca interested in what went on a hundred miles to the east, high up on this arid plateau where nothing grows except esparto and problems? I’m a freelancer, I don’t bother myself with these considerations. So I rushed pronto to the bus station, I boarded a bus dating from before the Flood — held together only by a bolt, paint, and prayers — and after a trek which it’s best you know nothing about (someone even vomited on me, a baby), I got off around noon in Khouribga, a dusty little town…”
“…with every intention of staying that way…”
“…where a cousin of mine had been wandering around the Tadla bitumen office for months. I quickly stumbled upon him, as he spent all his days in a café, hoping for employment that never came, but still living in hope. Emotional embraces, taps on the back, I’m fine, my brother, hamdoullah, and your mother, hamdoullah, and your sister, hamdoullah, fine, fine, thanks be to God, and the little Narjis, he’s getting bigger, hamdoullah, and the old Allal, may God rest his soul, oh really? ma cha’llah, and the neighbor So-and-so, we hung him, and the cat, etc. Five minutes had passed when I suddenly remembered the reason for my expedition.