...of complicity

Half-hidden behind the trees, Tristan watched Esther and her parents as they waited. He was a little ashamed because he and his mother didn’t have to stand in line; they weren’t like the others. It was right there in that square that Esther had looked at him for the first time. It was raining off and on. The women wrapped themselves tightly in their shawls, opened their big black umbrellas. The children stayed close by, not running, not shouting. In the shade of the plane trees, Tristan watched Esther standing in the middle of the line. Her head was bare, drops of rain sparkled in her black hair. She was holding her mother’s arm, and her father looked very tall next to her. She wasn’t talking; no one was talking, not even the carabinieri standing in front of the door to the restaurant. Every time the door opened, Tristan caught a quick glimpse of the large room lit by the French doors thrown open onto the garden. The carabinieri were standing near the windows smoking. One of them was sitting at a table with an open register in front of him, he was checking off the names. For Tristan, there was something awful, something mysterious about it all, as if the people that went into the room wouldn’t come out again. One the side of the hotel facing the square, the windows were closed, curtains drawn. When night fell, the Italians closed the shutters and barricaded themselves inside the hotel. The square was pitch-dark, as if uninhabited. No one was allowed to go out.
It was the silence that drew Tristan to the hotel. He’d left the tepid room where his mother was breathing softly, the dream of music and gardens, to come and watch Esther amidst all the dark shapes waiting in th square. The carabinieri wrote down her name. She went in with her mother and father, and the man with the register marked her name in the notebook at the bottom of the list with all the other names. Tristan would have liked to be with her in the line, move up with her till they reached the table; he couldn’t sleep in the room at the Hotel Victoria while that was happening. The silence in the square was too heavy. The only sound was that of the water in the basin of the fountain, a dog barked somewhere.
Afterward, Esther came back out. She walked in the square a little off to one side of her mother and father. When she went past the trees, she saw Tristan and there was a blaze in her black eyes, something like anger, or disdain, a violent flame that had made the boy’s heart beat too fast. He stepped back. He wanted to say, you’re beautiful, I can’t think of anything but you, I love you. But the silhouettes were already hurrying off toward the narrow streets.

[Wandering Star, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]