The Queen's Caprice

by Jean Echenoz

  Saint Clothilde, queen of France, leaning an elbow on a column, crosses her hands one atop the other at chest height. Coiffure: two very long double braids. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: faraway.1

  CIVIL ENGINEERING

  RIGHT AWAY, IN THE ongoing storm, Gluck volunteered to help with the rescue but was given to understand that he might hinder the professional emergency personnel. He soon saw their point and, no longer bothering to wear his hat or use his logo umbrella, he returned to his car in the parking lot near a foundation block at the entrance to the disaster scene. He set out again going north on U.S. Highway 41, where police barriers and diversion signs in the form of enormous blinking arrows were already going up in the opposite direction; he preferred to follow the shore road to the turnoff toward Orlando rather than go more directly to that city via Interstate 75. This would take longer but now he had all the time in the world. To dry his clothes and thinning hair he turned the heat way up, which made the inside of the windshield increasingly foggy until he reached the little town of Ruskin.

  Driving along U.S. 41, which supposedly hugs the water but from which one cannot contemplate the bay as one would wish to, Gluck did not try to peer out at beaches, waves, or boats but simply wiped the windshield with a rag from time to time to clear his view of the highway. His staring eyes and contracted features might have indicated an intense effort at reflection, unless they meant a flood of some extreme emotion. Be that as it may, one or the other must have disturbed his proper concentration on driving and he probably realized this, because he stopped for a coffee in the waterfront community of Apollo Beach, at an empty diner called As the Crow Flies, where the rain kept beating, relentlessly, against the windows. After that, when he sat down again behind the wheel, Gluck must not have been any better able to focus on driving the car, a lime-green Chevrolet Caprice Classic convertible a touch too young for him that he’d rented, two days earlier, at the Budget concession at the Orlando Airport. So he simply set the cruise control to take over that decision for him and rested his hands on the wheel, looking vacantly out at the suburban setting cluttered with tourist facilities and blurred by the swishing windshield wipers in this spring of 1980.

  Although this scene takes place in the southern United States and there are plenty of people named Gluck scattered around the globe, this particular one pursued university studies in France all the way to the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. Then he got married and took an interest in construction rather than in mines, which were also opening their doors invitingly to him. Quickly joining an agency as a chief engineer, after rising to supervisor he left to establish his own firm where, for twenty-two years, he kept many people working on various civil engineering projects. Most of these involved building bridges, or sometimes dams (which are certainly related to bridges), and at other times tunnels (which are perhaps the opposite of bridges), but anyway mainly bridges, and when his wife died in the winter of 1974, for the next five years Gluck never considered looking for another one.

  After the death of Jacqueline Gluck, he sold his agency for a fine price. He no longer had the heart for building, still less for seducing, so here he is alone now, rich enough and jobless, at leisure for the rest of his days if he likes. A widower no longer attached to anyone or anything, he swiftly realized that basically nothing interested him anymore but bridges. Even though he’d given up building them, he still had to admit that he’d known nothing but them, having devoted all his time, all his attention, and all his thoughts and talents to them. Since abandoning his profession had not changed his taste for bridges, Gluck resolved from then on to devote himself to them alone, to continue and—why not—finish up his life exclusively in their company, without ever needing to leave home. That is how he resolved to tell their life story, a project that at first took the form of “An Abridged General History of Bridges.”

  Chronologically, it’s rather simple. Tired of swinging like a gibbon from tree to tree on a vine, someone had the idea of using this vine for a different purpose and braided those climbing lianas into ropes with which, in order to cross gorges and torrents, we devised the first bridges, properly speaking.

  Very quickly, however, experience determined this model to be too fragile and precarious, liable to early wear, and of short life expectancy. So the next inspiration was to bridge such natural obstacles by throwing chopped-down trees across them, simple trunks at first, pruned of their branches, so that one could walk across a chasm without getting too dizzy. (The appearance of vertigo in the history of mankind, by the way, offers much food for thought.) Once all wonder at this tree-trunk inspiration had passed, but taking the trial and error method into account and given the numerous accidents that necessarily ensued, standing balanced on such a bridge was still a major undertaking. Above all it did not allow—as had been promptly anticipated—the transportation of heavy loads, mainly of foodstuffs. So these tree trunks were soon laid in parallel pairs to turn them into a substructure across which smaller logs could be laid, thus giving some breadth to the enterprise: an enrapturing innovation rapidly perfected by using earth and branches to make the logs level.

  This was a decisive and most welcome but still insufficient improvement, it was felt, for it restricted the reach of these constructions to the height of a single tree and thus to the necessarily limited length of its trunk. Since the width of certain abysses inconveniently exceeded the size of the oldest oaks, a way of multiplying those dimensions was the next step. This was accomplished through the invention of pilings, designed to support a bridge over water. The piling was first perfected with heaps of rocks tumbled into rivers large or small, followed by stakes driven in a circle into this foundation to make a kind of caisson, itself then filled with boulders. Such supports, placed at intervals across a body of water, permitted folks to line up tree trunks to their heart’s content. Now that’s progress.

  Sometimes, however, up in the colder northern regions, few trees were available. There people turned, for lack of wood, to stone slabs hewn as best they could, until they realized that this substitute material was in fact preferable, much more solid and durable, and put it to general use. But sometimes as well, in the torrid south, few stones were available amid all the sand, so bricks were invented and used first to build temples and palaces, ramparts and ziggurats, and then—quite naturally—bridges. Recourse to brick now offering increased stability and implying new methods of construction, people wound up inventing the arch, some seven thousand years before Gluck. The arch is certainly the best thing we came up with, the thing that would change everything, an invention with which we were by no means finished for there are a few others like that, along the lines of the wheel.

  As the first suspension bridges were appearing, along with pontoon bridges made of sampans or barrels lined up and bound together, we began to refine our choice of materials depending on their range of qualities. In the wood department, obviously oak was admirably suited for substructures, alder made excellent posts, while cedar and cypress were best employed in surface construction. As for stone, since tuff had a tendency to disintegrate, travertine burned easily, and marble often had to be imported from far away, a great step was taken with the recourse to mortar. At that point the hardest part was done—and in large part by Rome, until its empire collapsed and the barbarians arrived who, not building anything, destroyed everything they could.

  Around 1000 we returned to constructing major roadways, streets, and bridges, all undertaken by a monastic order anxious to rediscover and develop the art of Roman architects. These Bridgebuilding Brotherhoods1 did not, however, offer much in the way of technical innovation, beyond modifying the form of the arch, from the semicircle to the basket handle and on to voussoirs,2 while awaiting the Renaissance and the invention of the lattice girder—a structure with a long span composed of compressed elements under tension, a novelty that would also shake things up considerably. After which the serious
and methodical leading lights of the Enlightenment would thoroughly reconsider all these acquisitions, before the dawn of a new age of metal.

  Helped along by the Industrial Revolution, wood and stone gave way to cast iron. Yet cast iron, ironically, is fragile, tires quickly, and the whole thing ends up cracking, breaking, collapsing over precipices in one catastrophe after another, the worst tragedies in the entire history of bridges until we finally decided to invent steel: robust, resistant, ductile steel. Then came the bright idea of mixing gravel, water, sand, and cement to create concrete, which is a lot less costly than everything else, hard as stone although just as fragile but which comes into its own when reinforced by steel, the two of them now inseparable from then on and voilà.

  Thanks to these new materials we began to build new suspension bridges, as in the olden days, except that we dropped the ropes and lianas for helically wound cables or parallel strand cables, sheathed in nylon to avoid corrosion. Attached to pylons by these cables or by heavy rust-proof chains, these suspension bridges were in line to become the longest in the world, their load-bearing capacity allowing them to cross the deepest valleys, the widest estuaries, the mightiest rivers. And while folks were at it, for shorter spans, they thought up the cable-stayed bridge, on which a series of inclined cables supports the weight of the deck, running directly to the pylons in either the harp or the fan design.

  At the same time, old models were rethought: cantilever bridges, drawbridges, footbridges and other viaducts and we didn’t stop until we’d perfected all that, as much as we could, on an Earth given to quaking a thousand times a day, as everyone knows.

  •••

  Having sketched out this first outline of his project and developed it as much as he could, alone in his room, Gluck felt the need to refine, illustrate, and clarify it by going to see these bridges in situ and while he was at it, to finally get out and about. That was three years ago, but for the moment, the rain has calmed down a tad just as he was leaving Spring Hill. Now he will follow the directional arrows that, via Brooksville and Clermont, will guide him to Orlando.

  So this is not his first trip, and he has taken a lot of them since he decided to travel the world. These journeys, however, were not begun solely to take his mind off his bereavement: that kind of travel usually goes nowhere, beyond making you go around in circles, for the air’s no better far away, you don’t feel any freer or more in control or perkier there and there’s no end to it. It’s even a stretch to tell yourself that you’re somewhere far away: for a heady few minutes you see or think you see new things with a fresh eye yet it’s a trap, a misunderstanding, because it’s not so much a place you’re discovering as it is a name you’re visiting instead. You feel proud above all about inhabiting it, about tramping around the exotic syllables of this name rather than the panoramas of the place itself, which to be honest swiftly becomes a backwater like any other where you soon think of nothing but going back to the old one, home, when you know perfectly well besides that it’s no better there so in short—what was the point.

  You should not bestir yourself, therefore, without a goal, an axis, a heading, an idée fixe, otherwise you’re better off staying inside your own place looking out. Well, since the only constant thread in Gluck’s ideas had always been bridges, it was the project of seeing them that had gotten him going. Bolstered by all his experience, having read all the books, he had therefore decided to visit the greatest possible number of these bridges existent in the world, ideally even all of them although that would be difficult. The bridges, but also of course everything around them and all they overlook: since the type and style of a bridge vary according to the nature of the obstacle it must traverse, the study of that obstacle and its surroundings ought always to be part of the exploration.

  This was his modus operandi. He would arrive at a site without ever paying attention to any possible tourist attractions and head straight for the objective. He card-indexed it, photographed it from every angle, examining in detail its setting, the places it joined, the space it spanned; he would cross it in both directions and then leave, and this had been going on for almost three years. His trips to bridges had taken him anywhere there were any and God knows they’re everywhere, whether it be above the straits of Kurushima, Messina, the Great Belt and Neko, the gorge of Salgina, the estuary of the Severn, the channel of Kap Shui Mun, Lake Maracaibo, the Bosporus and the Ganges, the waters of the Elbe or the Guadalquivir or the sound that separates the islands of Falster and Farø. Gluck saw them all, having the time and money to do so, now a collector of bridges the way others collect aquatints or bad luck.

  He carried a small suitcase containing a change of clothes wrapped around his camera, plus a bound notebook and a memo pad. He stayed in midrange hotels without frills or bedbugs where he didn’t try to speak to anyone: the idea never occurred to him. He would spend two days there and in the evenings, up in his room after having supper with a newspaper in the dining room, he’d copy his jottings into his notebook and then good night all, good night all alone. The more bridges he saw, the fewer people he saw, and his mission sharpened his solitude. He never addressed a living soul beyond the hotel staff or, for example, once when his soles wore out, a man selling locally made shoes.

  Chronologically scrupulous, Gluck had begun his bridge research with the forerunners of the art, going off to Dartmoor to inspect the first rough-hewn stone constructions made of two uprights capped by a lintel, the Sassanid arches at Kermanshah, the ancient wooden cantilever structures of Nagqu and, at Iwakuni, the scalloped profile of the Kintai-kyo; he surveyed the Pons Augustus and the aqueduct of Segovia before backtracking to take the measure of the Pont du Gard, summarily exhausting the Classic Age, so the hour had come to deal with the constructions of modern times.

  He looked. He loved to watch a flash of August lightning fall upon a pylon vibrating proudly like a lightning rod. He loved to see, when the mist had dissolved the tall piers of the Royal Border Bridge, the dark span left floating in the air above the Tweed, and the somber waters of the Potomac reflecting the pale marble arches of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge or, in a narrow passage of the Adriatic, three arid rock islands linked by a trussed thread of a whiteness so like their own that it seemed they’d spun it out themselves. He loved to hear the wind caress a deep chord along a harp of cables or imagine he heard, in a basso continuo, the counterpoint of a steel curve on the concrete of a straight viaduct. He loved to count the arches of these structures, which are their successive breaths, creating bridges with varied respiration rates, producing in their reflections on flowing water mobile, trembling sine waves, like those green lines tracing biological cycles one watches on a black monitor at a patient’s bedside.

  Always impatient to see a new bridge—and sometimes without waiting for it to be finished—Gluck would also eagerly visit work sites around the globe. Just as he had back when he was building bridges, he still liked to see one take shape, watch a suspension cable unrolling in slow motion, tie-cables being attached to the roadway; he liked watching gloved, helmeted, harnessed workers in the heights, rigged out like alpinists or speleologists, checking the anchorage of the suspending rods one by one, and at the end of the assembly he felt deeply moved by the emplacement of the central span between two sections of corbel arch. A professional, he was unbeatable at evaluating the wisdom of choosing this or that girder depending on the site requirements and the purpose of the construction: lattice girder, box girder; narrow and tall or broad and slender; with a rectangular or trapezoidal cross section; an I-beam, T-beam, N-beam, X-beam. He approved or not of the configuration of the cable stays, the symmetry of the masts, the setting of the anchorage blocks. The question of the keystone, separated from the imposts by its haunches, held no secrets for him. He was an expert on the warping of concrete.

  Incidentally, while examining every structure, he also took pleasure in locating its breaking point. A point specific to each bridge, a trouble spot hanging in the balance—agreed u
pon beforehand by the architects in consultation with the local national army for strategic reasons—where a tiny explosive charge would suffice to bring down the entire thing in case of conflict. A point, therefore, both specific and confidential, closely guarded by the military authorities for reasons of national security.

  That is how one looks at a bridge, from all its angles and curves, in the spotlight of its future, from its pure profile against a background of clouds to its violent fate among tanks. One could devote one’s life to this. One could also tire of it, however, as did Gluck after a few years. Not that he was disenchanted with his mission but, little by little, he began to feel the weight of solitude. Bridges, always bridges; perhaps, in the end, that wasn’t a life. When he’d inventoried the ancient structures, the past had still kept him company enough; while inspecting the modern ones, though, he would have liked to share his impressions. He soon began to feel that the thought of looking for another wife, after all that time, would not necessarily offend the memory of Jacqueline who, off where she was, might even approve.

  Buoyed by this sentiment, Gluck had therefore resolved to open himself up to the world, to speak to people in hotel corridors and, down in the dining rooms, to try smiling as much as possible. But for a man who for so long had addressed women only to point to a dish on a menu or at shoes in a shopwindow, everyone can agree that this sort of thing doesn’t just happen on its own, that seeking a female companion is a surefire way not to find one, that in such an enterprise it’s better to be lucky than persistent. Clumsy, lacking experience and method, he’d done his best in vain before giving up. He turned his thoughts elsewhere.