Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  DIDEROT GOT up again and went to the window. A bridge man again. Good. He exulted in silence – building a bridge is still a source of elation, even in a stinking hole like Coca, a dump that no one’s ever heard of. The ultimate job for an engineer. He paced in front of the bay window, then pressed his burning forehead to the pane that crackled with lights of the night like paper on fire, and already the thought of disconcerting his entourage amused him, they were so quick to compliment him; the thought of thwarting this childish admiration because, come on, the symbolism of the thing – the link, passage, movement blah blah blah – went straight over his head, he didn’t give a rat’s ass: what really excited him was the technical epic, putting individual competencies to work together within a collective project; what thrilled him was the sum of decisions contained within a construction, the succession of short events leading to the permanence of the work, its inscription in time. What filled him with joy was to operate the life-sized fulfillment of thousands of hours of calculations.

  SITE MEETING – SOMETIME AFTER SEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning and Diderot is talking, standing mountainous at the end of the oval table. Bare room, thin partitions, thin carpet hastily placed, smell of glue, smell of new, freeze-dried coffee, classroom chairs dragged in. These accommodate some fifty individuals, among them Sanche Cameron, the crane operator, and Summer Diamantis, the girl in charge of concrete – Diderot watches these two surreptitiously, the boy with the dazzled face, the girl who takes notes without lifting her head. He directed the comment at them when he said, fingers joined in a bouquet over his chest, hey, rookies, call me Diderot.

  HE CLEARS his throat and begins in a loud voice. Okay, let’s get started. Plan of action: one, dig the ground – he lifts his thumb; two, dredge and clear the river – he lifts his index; three, get started on the concrete – he lifts his middle finger. Turns to pull down a wall-mounted screen, starts up a laptop, turns back, slowly surveys the audience, and then slams down the first words.

  So, dig the ground. He turns to the geotechnical map projected on the screen, takes a zapper from his back pocket: two types of soil coexist here. One – a red point of light lands on the map, perfectly synchronous: Coca side. The limestone plateau of the high plain. Arid on the surface, fractured farther down – hard, with a tender heart, it’s the trick of the cream filling, we know it well, we’re not crazy about it, but it’s better than the opposite, right? The room agrees, laughter erupts, soft and complicit. The problem – Diderot whips around without a smile to look at the audience – we’ve got limestone rocks sitting on marly clay that could cause landslides. Be very careful. Two – same choreography: Edgefront side. Damp and inhabited ground, roots to tear out, we’ll have to pierce the glebe and go deeper to get to the mineral in order to have a strong foothold for the foundation. So, two types of ground, which is where we get two types of material, but one single strategy: the Neolithic gesture! In other words, cleave the ground – and as ever he joins the action to the word, the blade of his hand slices the space in front of him, he brings the scene to life, he likes theatre. Finally, he recapitulates in a loud voice pointing two red spots one after the other on the map: we’ll start by making two holes in order to anchor the bridge. Got it? Good. Moving on. Dredge the river – Diderot continues while the map changes on the screen: we’ll proceed as usual, we’ll send in the dredger, clean it out, remove the sludge, stow the biodegradable materials in clearings here, and here – two consecutive shots of the zapper in the forested area – and put the contaminated materials on a barge that will travel all the way back downriver and shove this shit four thousand feet down into the ocean. There you have it. We signed agreements with the municipality, it has to be done. And back there it’s not over, we clear out the river, dig the channel again, enlarge it all the way up to the future port, and then we consolidate, we raise the embankments where the steel cables will be anchored, and we dig, we dig the river bottom to embed the towers.

  Notes being taken in notebooks and spidery scrawl of the men in light short-sleeved shirts, it’s hot, they open the portholes to let in some air, the room swells with the clamour of the outside – zooming on the freeways, hubbub of the stock market, panic of wild ducks, putt putt putt of motors on dinghies out on the river, barking of dogs, gunshots – and Diderot’s voice coils with all this without drowning it out. Funny soundtrack, thinks Sanche Cameron who had closed his eyes for a moment, since he didn’t close them at all last night, seized as he was beneath the sheets by the restlessness that had overtaken him, so happy that the site was starting up, that the grand life waiting for him there was finally beginning. He slants a glance sideways at Summer as she tries desperately to write everything down, tells himself it’s just like a girl to be meticulous like that. Diderot has started speaking again.

  And now, the concrete. Your domain, Diamantis! – he turns towards Summer, their eyes meet, the girl immediately sits up straight in her chair, Diderot spreads his arms and makes circles in the air, he adds flatly: you’re responsible for feeding the site, Diamantis, you’re in charge of perpetual motion. Then he retracts the screen with a sharp movement the way you’d pull on a blind, turns off his computer, and circulates copies of a handout detailing phase one of construction. Since no one has spoken any questions aloud, everyone leans over their documents, comments to one another about the technical data, and then the surveyor confirms the plan measurements, the steward presents the menus for the first two weeks, they ask about beer at lunchtime – one 473 ml can per worker – and Diderot cuts them off, forget it, white with rage. Get out, all of you. Meeting’s over.

  Summer Diamantis has only one idea in mind: to go see the mixing plant. Shuffling of papers, repositioning of chairs, she holds herself apart at the end of the table, dawdles, pretending to read over her notes, waits for the men to finish leaving the room, and now some of them turn towards her from the doorway, see you tomorrow, Diamantis! And ready to roll, eh, Diamantis!

  IT’S ALMOST nine o’clock in the morning when she leaves the building and the heat takes her by surprise, the hot breath of it, and though nothing budges in the sky, a cushion of burning vapour grabs her by the nape, already she’s mopping her forehead. She sets off across the site, a hundred yards on the diagonal, rocky ground the colour of plaster, crunch of her steps in the silence; she continues past the cranes and the parked vehicles that gleam, the bluish sheds; steps over pairs of rails and goes round the water tanks; the earth smokes in her wake and quickly coats her ankles in a fine flour, not a living soul on this side, nothing, it’s crazy, she looks at her watch mechanically, thinks tomorrow at this time we will have started, continues on her way, throat tight, step growing firmer, silhouette precise against the backdrop of the tidy site, hand soon held as a visor at the level of her eyebrows; she speeds up, repeats Diderot’s words to herself, maxillae strained by a smile that clogs her mouth since she doesn’t open her lips (too restless, she too) – he’d said: the concrete, Diamantis, that’s your domain – she’d nodded her head in all seriousness, yes – the plant, the towers, the bins, the drums, all that, that’s you – his gesture was wide and his voice loud, he’d looked her deep in the eyes, he’d designated her place. All this, she sees it now that she’s reached the plant, all this takes up about a hundred yards by sixty – in other words, a fair portion of territory, edged by a quay on the river. Summer immediately begins to familiarize herself with the internal organization. Her eyes move from the river to the quay, from the quay to the giant mounds placed in the centre of the space – cement, gravel, sand – following the line of the conveyor belts that link the materials cone to the blood-orange concrete towers, notes the mixing buildings, walks past the control room, inspects each of the twelve mixing trucks, drums aligned neatly and ready to go, lingers by the recycling pit, the basins for water treatment and reuse of aggregate and waste concrete. Panoramic tracking shot, traffic plan, Summer takes in the validity of the organism: an open-air factory, a concrete factory. So all this is
me?

  IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE that she would have her doubts. Although the Coca bridge had selected her, Summer had not always been chosen. This contract redeemed in one fell swoop a particular event from her childhood, an event that was labelled a core trauma by a psychologist who coloured checkerboards on graph paper during their sessions: when her mother left, she took Summer’s little brother with her, in her arms, and left Summer behind. Not enough time for two children, not enough money either, not enough space in the one-bedroom apartment in the chic suburb of Saint-Raphaël where she was going to start a new life. Rationality, then, pragmatism, you’re big enough, you’re seven now, my darling, my darling, she murmured, and also the little girl was so much like her father, didn’t need anyone, so brave and other suspicious caresses on top of her head. Thus Summer stayed with the ex-husband who had asked for it – since he’d fallen into an admirably regimented and quite sincere polygamy. So you’re stuck with me, then, he said to her the night they found themselves alone at the kitchen table before a Pyrex dish in which a shepherd’s pie was getting cold. From then on, it was Saint-Raphaël during school holidays, her mother didn’t ask much of her. Neither did her father, in his own way. The little girl was left in peace. At least we’d like to believe that. Would she have had to be born as a boy in order to be chosen by her mother? Would she then have had to replace, for her father, the pudgy little male carried off to the French Riviera? We can see that she brought herself up as a boy, or rather how she imagined a boy should be raised, which led her to consider optional and even random phases as mandatory. She equipped herself in such a way as to compensate for the lacking maternal touch: soccer and video games, comic books and sci-fi novels, math, physics, and industrial design. Always dressed the same – jeans, a jacket, not many colours, hair in a ponytail – she learned to take apart a moped motor and then put it back together; during parties she took her place by the stereo and DJed rather than lining up against the wall at the first bars of a slow song, drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney – Marlboros, you guessed it – cowboy for cowboy, she’s an expert on westerns, unbeatable on questions of all the Rios and all the Rivers, which will end up being very useful, as we’ll see. Tough, concise, indefatigable, dry-eyed girl of steel – someone you could count on, in short, someone you didn’t have to baby – how’s it going, big girl? What are you thinking about? It was so obvious, so clumsy, that no one saw through her strongman poses, this outrageous sham – especially her father, caught up in a multiplex harem from which he struggled to extricate himself, and who congratulated himself each day for this child who asked so little of him, didn’t make demands, wasn’t into drama, never cried; a girl, finally, who was so little like a girl is what he thought, watching from the window as she left through the garden gate, a good little soldier, yes, how lucky he was. We can understand how Summer, encouraged in this way, began to see kids her age as lesser beings. She hastened to escape their obsession with love, their interminable confessions, their masochistic laments, the acidulous fragility they put on so willingly in order to seduce. In so doing deprived herself of their skin, their laughter, their nocturnal complicities, their solidarity – foolishly deprived herself of their sweetness. And decided for herself, at thirteen years old, one day when she let herself be felt up at the movies by a boy who she liked but who didn’t care about her one bit, she knew it – he kneaded her breasts shamelessly, slid his hand up between her thighs, and scraped the roof of her mouth with a harsh tongue – decided that love, okay, fine, but let’s not get carried away. Not at any price. Thus deciding something for herself, to do it for the rest of her life without glutting herself on hogwash like the heart has its reasons blah blah blah – love allowing us to make all kinds of stupid moves, to lose our time, to surrender our skin, to clash and wound the better to devour each other immediately after, to scream in stairwells, to call each other at all hours of the night, to drive drunk through the hostile countryside, ’cause that’s how it happens, that’s the only way – yes, for a girl so young to judge love like this, coldly, clear-eyed, was certainly surprising. She zigzagged between boys. They found her hard, cold, proud, and all in all not very feminine. These were their reproaches. It’s hard now to measure the incredible strength she needed to call upon in order to maintain her independence and the splendour of solitude, to choose that she would never again be placed heart pounding on the scale, or “stuck” in second place for lack of being chosen. At twenty, she looked affectivity up and down with a free smile – what does a free smile look like? What does it look like, Summer Diamantis’s beautiful smile?

  She liked school and sports, she liked competition. Had tried taking part in other selections where she excelled too often without winning: any time there were only two candidates left, a mute panic drilled into her solar plexus and paralyzed her momentum, and they picked the other one. A token finalist, rarely the champion, Summer got a label: it was confirmed that the choice of her mother, whose heart (and the square feet of plush carpet that went with it) she failed to win, had resulted in a failure complex: she often stayed slouched on the players’ bench, even if she did so elegantly. Her father, immune to these analyses, suppressed such propositions with ever the same bored silence and rewarded his daughter every morning with a debauched British smile yawning vaguely no big deal. Then came the Blondes who don’t take any bullshit and who beautifully inked out this jinx the way you’d push a lock of hair back from your forehead sharply, for more visibility, more presence, and more joy. They made Summer part of their club one July night while all three of them were spread out on the grass in the stadium, their bodies arranged in arrows in front of the end zone, after Summer had blocked their penalty shots with happy approximate dives. There was no question of second place: they needed a third to share the cost of a rental in Manchester in August. Summer had seen them before around the club, had envied their blondeness, their heads held high, and had admired their getups even though they had also irritated her with their hysterical giggles, the showy complicity of girls. James Diamantis must have watched the scene from the terrace of the lodge, radio glued to his ear, cigarillo under Panama hat, and when his daughter came back, he delicately inquired about what she would be doing in August, put a hand in his wallet, and gave her a nice pile of money.

  A YEAR GOES by and Summer is admitted to the National School of Public Works. Her father takes her out that evening to celebrate her success – he had these conventional gestures that he dispensed with the ostentation of one who wants to appear as a man of principle, in spite of his debauched life. The scene takes place in a dance hall on rue de Malte: flattering chiaroscuro, champagne, “It Had to Be You,” the passably decadent paraphernalia of an aging womanizer, this is what Summer thinks with her legs tangled under the chair. Before the floating islands arrive, James Diamantis places a construction hard hat on his daughter’s plate, looks at her with a rare tenderness, says you’ll have to start thinking about taking better care of yourself. Summer shakes her head, laughing, embarrassed, goes to the washroom, puts the hard hat on, looks at herself in the mirror, hands against the edge of the sink, thinks she looks awful, feels manipulated. And while the crooner slicks his hair back with brilliantine backstage before starting the second set, while her father listens to the messages on his cellphone, Summer, red, hurt, and feeling as though her brain has been slapped, grows drunk with rage and breaks the mirror with great swings of the hard hat.

  IN HER LAST year of grad school, Summer chooses concrete as her specialty. People around her laugh, grimace, concrete, that’s not attractive, not even a little bit sexy, what is she trying to prove? Are you sure, Summer? James asks her one day from his far-off planet and she, foolishly emboldened by the question, answers swiftly that, yes, quite sure, when she’s specialized it will be easier to find work. You have such crazy ideas! James turns the pages of his paper, she’s stuck there, furious, dries her lacrimal canals by sticking her index fingers in the corners of her eyes. More months pass
and in the spring, the concrete gets its revenge. A dinner on the terrace, a candleholder, six place settings, wicker chairs, a short stool for James Diamantis in a new Panama hat – he’s prepared the meal, let the wine breathe, cut a bouquet of wisteria, brushed his hat. The guests are their neighbours. Summer feels pretty, she talks, she drinks. This young lady is studying concrete, believe it or not; James serves the wine in unmatched glasses. A guy is there who Summer thinks is cute. He asks her what she does. Public works, I’m a concrete engineer. Oh. The guy lifts his head. His eyes screech over her and she knows now that they will spend the night together. He is amazed. That’s exactly what I would have wanted to do, something strong, tangible, a job that’s in direct contact with the real.

  SUMMER WALKS away from the plant and reels towards the river, heart suddenly heavy, approaches a little stretch of green at the end of the quay, tufts of grass have cracked the asphalt, the water laps against the bank, she crouches down, pushes up her sleeves and redoes her ponytail, shakes her head, looks at the opposite bank, impenetrable, throws three stones in the water hup hup hup, a hummingbird manoeuvres close to the river, turquoise speck above the golden-brown liquid, I’m here now, I’m here now, she closes her eyes, I’m here, then stands up, dizziness, thinks hunger, jetlag, thinks tomorrow I have to be in good shape, knows finally where she is, black veil for a moment and then again the ecru sky.

  AT THE OTHER END OF THE PONTOVERDE PLATFORM, Sanche Alphonse Cameron is also getting his bearings. His “office” is a windowed cabin, six feet square, set at the top of a tower crane, a translucent box more than a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. He reaches it via an elevator that slides up and down the mast, but some days, to be mischievous (read: to impress the crowd), he climbs two by two the bars of a hoop ladder without pausing on the landings. I’m staying in shape is what he claims when those on the ground are alarmed to see him rise, frail little guy, all the way up the structure. Once inside his cab Sanche sits at the console, back straight against the seat, and carries out the steps of taking his position – checks the control panel (headlights, joystick, walkie-talkies, function displays and graphic readouts, anemometer, push buttons); checks the brakes and the safety system; settles his hands on the controls and concentrates. He spots Summer crossing the esplanade, follows her determined silhouette with his eyes, watches her disappear behind the machines parked near the plant and then re-emerge at the water’s edge, the blonde straw of her hair smooth in the sunlight, what’s she up to?