The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers

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A Saturday morning in Casablanca. Nagib and Hamid sit in a café, bored and about to have a pointless argument about an article from Le Matin du Sahara, when their friend Dadine offers to tell them a story instead — the story of Bennani’s bodyguard. A bodyguard, they ask in amazement. A bodyguard, here in Casablanca? As Dadine tells it, this Bennani fellow was one of those rich teens from the Lycée Lyautey, and he turned up to a celebration the less fortunate students had organized with a bodyguard in tow.

This was in the old days, Dadine continues, when high school students could still host a dance party in Casablanca without worrying about who might notice their beer, or who might blow themselves up in a crowded street. In the old days, when even the children of the poor could attend an institution like the Lycée Lyautey. “Happy days!” Nagib and Hamid say. “Joyous age!” Yes, Dadine notes wryly, this was in “an age when three people out of two were in the police, where snitches abounded, where you could be denounced by your own shadow — the bitch.”

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