Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  A HUNDRED and fifty feet from Mo, Soren Cry’s head also spins – crazy, all these guys in a daze – at the first shout of anchorage. But it’s not the proclamation of the inaugural phase of construction that he hears, not these orders shouted as though they were performing a military manoeuvre, leaving the barracks, not this bombast meant to galvanize the workers: it’s the call of a wolf that tears at him, and with it the shame of having been thrown out of paradise lost. In another life, Soren Cry had lived in Anchorage, Alaska – he would speak of it like this, he would say “in another life,” because this past no longer belongs to him, he can’t even tell the story, but oh he feels it like a burning brick in the back corner of his brain; he had liked his life there, felt no different from the other guys who passed through the place, men disinclined to conversation, seasonal workers whose focus was hardly distracted by bowling, beer, and sex. Soren works as a carpenter first, on a boat-building site. After three days, he calls his mother from a telephone booth at lunchtime – an extraordinary gesture for him, since he doesn’t really speak anymore – clears his throat and says: I’m gonna stay here, this is the city for me, I think it’s gonna work out. At the other end of the line, the woman with her hair in pale-green rollers and a housecoat the same colour nods her head without really knowing what to think, this enthusiasm is suspicious, doesn’t sound like Soren – so incapable she is of seeing the possibility of such a conversion in him, she imagines at first that he’s in the clutches of a sect, drugged, in danger. Meanwhile in Anchorage, Soren likes living far away from his mother, loves the blue light and the glassy cold. The darkness that bathes the streets eight months out of twelve saves him from his own ugly face. It gives him a second skin that protects, a camouflage that hides: he dissolves into the polar night with a newfound joy and quickly gets used to this place, this wild life where men live side by side with great furred mammals: bears make garbage out of houses, linger in the change rooms of stadiums, swagger on the shores; moose hang out in the parking lots of supermarkets; grizzlies venture right up to the doors of the McDonald’s; and finally, above all, there are wolves. Death prowls, men are armed, all around are enormous and carnivorous animals, and Soren feels more alive here than he has anywhere else and makes his way among all of them. Once the construction is finished, he becomes a warehouseman in a fish factory, then a bus driver. In the end he knows the city like the back of his hand, the smallest street, the most unremarkable suburb. He drives his little yellow four-wheel-drive bus, picks up kids after school, helps the disabled, even waves to the old folks. Often after his shift, when night has fallen, he drives north, gets out of the car, and moves forward into hostile nature. At the foot of the first ice hills, he listens to the rustling of space, becomes part of it. Listens to the wolves. Calls to them. Then one night a woman is there, recording the pack, crouching in the dark. These human cries are wrecking her work, she shouts at him in the night. In the end they find each other in the darkness – she’s a researcher in a zoology lab, he knows the place well. Soon she comes to live with him in his one-bedroom apartment where the electric heat dries out their hair and makes their eyes red. Soren cooks for her, they drink quietly and go out on farther and farther excursions into the wild. And then it all goes to shit. One morning, Soren flees the city, takes the first plane for Chicago, gets on a Greyhound, eyes glazing before the dreary, muggy countryside that comes back to him all at once, sticky as fate. He heads towards Kentucky. The next morning, seeing him come through the door of their house, his mother understands but says nothing. He sits down on the couch, takes off his shirt: his winter coat is spattered with brownish stains and so are the bottoms of his jeans. She doesn’t ask any questions, just stuffs everything into the washing machine and turns it on, so happy he’s home.

  THE EXCAVATORS churn up the ground, the men dig, and they’re off. The field seems to offer itself up without resistance, loose, cleared now of all human habitation, though the imprints of geometric shapes in the earth attest to the fact that, until just recently, this ground was occupied. Strips of thick grass border these bare surfaces, traces of tires brush them, some tracks layered so thickly they leave crevices in the earth; there are several stinking pits, hearths covered with fine-grained ash, and if you look closely, if you pay attention as you lean closer to the ground, you can still find lots of things here to fill a trash can.

  Diderot trips over a deflated soccer ball and tucks it under his arm. He knows little about the expropriation campaign that preceded the start of the project. On this field, for example, the inhabitants had been reluctant to leave, complicating the task of the men from Pontoverde. The latter had protested at first – no one here possesses the least title of ownership, in fact these people are nothing but squatters who, after years, put their mobile homes up on concrete blocks, slapped a roof onto their sophisticated tents, weatherproofed their wood cabins – like the second little piggy’s house – dwellings all rigged up with satellite antennae on the roofs. Nothing worse than squatters’ rights, the Boa had cursed, scratching his head, we’re screwed. Pontoverde had finally hurried in an armada of super-technical young lawyers armed with laughable repossession notices, but the people were dogged and quick, they knew their rights, the jurists didn’t have a leg to stand on and the furious Boa demanded they be sent home: he would do the negotiating himself. New, functional lodgings in the suburbs of the city were offered to the inhabitants. Some of the women went to visit them, suspicious, haughty, inspecting the taps, testing the switches, flushing the toilets. They came back spitting no, rather die than leave their homes. Cameras were set up in the field and before long these families were given the chance to speak every evening. Their refusal to submit was praised, as were their contempt for modernity and their freedom. The sausages speared on sticks and cooked over a wood fire, barefoot kids growing like wild grass, the warmth of community against the anonymity of prefabricated houses, urban solitude, and individualist instincts. These images warbled of endless holidays, the coolness of poor-but-happy princes: the inhabitants of the field became heroes. According to the Boa, all this was a bluff, and the bids rose higher. He smiled: would they really prefer their potholed strip of grass on the river’s edge to a new duplex, these tribes, these huge families, these marginal, long-haired characters? But soon, weary and fearing the negative effects of a police raid at dawn, billy clubs in hand, evacuating the dwellings and pushing screaming families into vans before work on the bridge even began, the Boa turned again to Pontoverde. The company would compensate the inhabitants, pay for the moving costs, and find housing for everyone downtown.

  A MILE TO the south, Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo jumped onto the dredger, side by side – these two are joined at the hip, sleep under the same blanket at night, drink from the neck of the same bottle in the same tin shack hidden on the green bank – watched the movement of the group on the beach behind, and were soon spotted by the engineer Verlaine, who took down their names in a spiral notebook before leading them through increasingly narrow passageways into the machine room where the din was so loud no one spoke anymore. Duane and Buddy had never been in a boat of this size – the dredger is a hefty vessel, some hundred feet long, fifty wide, equipped with a hydraulic drilling machine capable of digging up to sixty feet deep, attached to which are vacuum tubes and discharge nozzles; these two only know dugouts propelled by motors borrowed from speedboats whose owners tanned dark in the Fifties, off the coast of Florida, water-skis bikinis fishing all with big jugs of rum coconut whisky lots of quick turns and vertical jets of water like celestial rain; they only know pistons unscrewed quickly, brokedown cars where you’d attach an axle and a propeller, and Verlaine’s aware of this, the guys they send him are always the same – there isn’t a single one who has a clue, he seethes; conversely, Verlaine himself (who’s sometimes seen in the Gare du Havre when he goes home to visit his two sons) only knows service boats, dredgers, tugboats, the barge that never leaves port and hobbles along in the canal on one foot, la
me, with a measured step. Duane and Buddy are appointed to control of outflow – they keep an eye on the regularity of flow in the pumps, make sure the motors don’t overheat, it’s a job that requires a good ear, and these boys have two each (so at least they aren’t deaf); you have to hear when it shakes, when it drags, and when it gets tired, Verlaine explains all of this to them in rudimentary English, and at every chance he gets joins the action to the word.

  THE DREDGER advances slowly in the river’s current, heavy and stubborn; it clears out, scrapes, sucks, scours the riverbed of all the shit that’s been thrown there, that’s still thrown there, day after day; blasting the channel, it’s hailed as the marvellous irreplaceable scullery maid, as its enormous drill with three heads – three times the strength and power of the best deep-water oil-drilling rig – digs into the rock to carve out a passage for the hulls of majestic ships, freighters, and state-of-the-art oil tankers. The two boys take a step back in front of the tanks where the riverbed is poured out, blackish sludge of sediment risen from the depths, ageless alluvium, no sparkle in there, nothing, still they watch for a section of a wreck, a piece of iron, some human debris, maybe a skull, yeah, a skull or a chest full of gemstones, a treasure, yeah, that would be awesome. They’re getting excited, grinning, seeking nothing, hoping for nothing, not even luck, for the future has no form for those who live day to day, with no other weight on their shoulders than the weight of youth. They hold out their hands with vast palms and able fingers, always ready to take the next gamble, to make a little cash, always ready to take off on the next bullshit plan.

  IN THE FOURTH week, the divers show up. There are fifty of them. Their aura precedes them, plume of anguished admiration, and when they get out of the black vans from the Deep Seawork Co., jumping out one after the other in agile bounds executed at regular intervals – Navy commandos when it comes to projects – everyone scrutinizes their faces the colour of Dove soap, their heroic faces. After which their reputation pushes its way through the crowd of assembled workers, the waters part, the divers advance in slow steps, relaxed, large sports bags slung over their shoulders. Among them, the deep-sea divers get the most attention: amphibious creatures twenty thousand leagues under the sea, they elbow dragonfish, moray eels, and lantern fish, graze stray jellyfish migrating towards the surface, caress the bellies of cetaceans, and tug on the moustaches of seals, are blinded by plankton suspended in the bars of light, marvel at the coral, collect strange algae; multiplane workers, they walk helmeted with heavy feet upon the earth’s crust, a hookah giving them something to breathe from the surface; frogmen who dive with webbed feet, a reserve of oxygen attached ad hoc to their backs. These are mutant men, and the darkness of the abyss is their office, their factory, this is where they toil, repair, weld, smash, explode, dynamite the riverbed, pulverize the sedimentary layer, cut the banks anew, level the shallows; this is where they assist with the drilling operations launched by the engineers above water, activating a satellite system on the surface able to integrate the least variation in the earth’s curve, they control the extraordinary precision of the work – they are as meticulous as box hedges planted in a French garden. Underwater, their lungs inflate, bit by bit hold the compressed air; their rib cages crack under the pressure, their hearts are heavy inside, but little by little they adapt and beat more slowly, and their malleable bodies hold up.

  DIDEROT GREETS them personally, shakes the hand of the team leader for a long moment, a small man with a waxy pallor who he recognizes from projects in the Port of Busan, South Korea, where reinforced seawalls had required powder, he’s very pleased they’re here: internationally renowned divas, the boys from DSC are mostly old minesweeper divers cast aside by the army and who now transfer their experience from one site to another – and their participation comes at a pretty penny – Pontoverde must have stretched the cash, quality doesn’t come cheap.

  Their plan: prepare the riverbed for the foundations to come. Knock down the base rock, locate the flaws, then break the crust with explosives – dynamite will be tossed down from the surface in fat steel pilings. The divers will work blind, the waters are murky here, muddy, full of alluvium, they’ll have to be prepared for strong currents, for strange centrifugal swirls and unpredictable draughts from gas escaping, from the resurgence of springs, or from climatic hazards that can swell the water’s rate of flow and speed its course. Diderot warns them of all this in a low voice in the intimacy of the meeting room. Then, he continues, we’ll hammer sheet piles into the bedrock and line them with concrete so that, once sealed and weather­proofed, they will form cofferdams, each of which can contain nine million gallons of water, then we’ll pump out these giant pockets before pouring a hundred cubic yards of concrete into them and they’ll become the indestructible sheaths for the towers to come. A herculean anchoring.

  IT TAKES A FULL DAY’S DRIVE ALONG THE LOGGING road and then a walk for several hours along the path to reach the Native village. A pathway furrowed by rains and full of potholes, obscured by huge toppled trees, disappearing at times beneath giant ferns or even the carcass of an animal. This route has its dangers – the risk of being attacked by a carnivorous mammal is high, and the risk of getting lost is even higher. Better to take a motorboat upstream from Coca, then switch over to a dugout and paddle the two days’ journey to the village. To arrive at the end of the day, when the children are swimming in the river, splashing each other playfully, some diving in the waterfalls and others fishing with blowpipes; when the men are strolling and smoking, the women are talking, while the evening air settles with an incredible softness. This is also the time of day when Jacob makes the coffee, spooning grinds and pouring water into a large Italian coffee maker placed on the fire pit in front of his house, and he waits there, for the coffee to heat and for the villagers, his friends, to stop by and drink it with him in white tin mugs.

  THIS PARTICULAR evening, hearing of the construction of a motorway bridge over the river, Jacob is seized by a tremendous fatigue. He swallows his coffee in small sips, his gaze running over the surface of the water, opaque now, and reflecting, through the green canopy, fragments of a spilled-milk sky. In the spring, it will have been twenty years that he’s been coming here, for long stretches at a time; twenty years that he’s been studying this small community besieged by history, and doing its utmost to ignore it. He’s changed a lot, of course – the young intellectual, fresh from Santa Fe, armed with his belief in the power of ideas and determined to describe this precious alveolus of unchangingness with rational transparency, has little in common with the man who, this evening, thinks that a society cannot be deducted from a system, and for whom living here one semester out of two means investing in a different way in his own existence. The matching half of his year plays out in Berkeley. A few men from the community have arrived by now, and are drinking coffee with him, joking around; passing women greet them, their hair smoothed back from their foreheads and held with obsidian combs, their faces wide, cheekbones full, they laugh, hip to hip, one of them pregnant beneath a large white T-shirt emblazoned with the Los Angeles Lakers logo. Jacob lights a cigarette – never could bring himself to smoke anything but lights – he knows perfectly well how intrusive roads are, is aware of the probable degradation of the forest, the planned disappearance of the Natives, and has already been struggling for a long time against nostalgia: he won’t be the herald of an academic ethnography, and he won’t be a pitiful scholar; no, he’d rather die than that. And yet, in this moment – the coffee hour, peaceful hour when fullness is so complete it hurts, like a stone in the belly – when the heart feels squeezed inside the rib cage – he’s thinking only of his life, his life here and now, and his greatest emotion is for this present, wearing thin. His fatigue comes from this. He places his mug down on the white wicker table and goes inside to lie down. He needs to sleep.

  WE MIGHT ask how Jacob got wind of the story of a bridge in Coca – we could imagine the murmur of the construction site travelling all t
he way to him, slipped between the scales of a fugitive trout, hidden beneath the wings of a junco or perched on the petiole of a hardworking ant that made its way right to the heart of the massif via some network of underground tunnels. But really it was just men, always the same ones, who’d come upstream from Coca – people like you and me – bringing the news. These guys trade with the villages of the “interior,” know how to reach them without danger, branching off into one arm of the river, then another narrower one, and another still, following a path that only they know in the aquatic labyrinth that webs the forest. It’s they who, among other things, bring Jacob his bricks of coffee and his cartons of smokes. And this evening, like every other time, they docked their boat in front of the village houses, unloaded bundles of clothes and blankets, cases of canned goods, batteries, a television and two radios, then went like everyone else over to Jacob, who’d seen them coming and held out mugs to them, lifting a hand in the air – hey guys, come on over, come over here. There are three of them – two brawny guys and a teenager with an orange cap, and they come, shaking hands with “the professor” – that’s what they call Jacob – then the two older ones give instructions for the transaction, quantities that Jacob translates using categories like a little, a bit more, and a lot, and the Natives start bringing out the baskets – baskets of a rare beauty, woven baskets whose round bellies depict the cosmos, very high-quality baskets. This is when the young one with the orange cap starts talking about the bridge in Coca – soon we won’t be coming anymore, it won’t be worth it, we’ll load up a truck and all this will be done in a day’s work, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! He has his hands in his pockets, concludes by saying that’ll be faster, huh, we won’t have to sleep outside anymore, and he smiles while kicking at the pine cones that carpet the ground; and Jacob, who has been watching the coffee maker, turns, looks him deep in the eyes and asks softly, controlling his surprise and feigning nonchalance, oh yeah, is that right, they’re building a bridge in Coca? The boy takes the bait and goes on, yeah, an awesome thing, six lanes they say, it’ll give us some breathing room, they’ve already started, they’re planning it out, you’ve gotta see it! Jacob hands him a metal box while a few yards away the men load the baskets into the boat, careful to cover them with plastic tarps, sugar? He speaks so sharply that the boy jumps and takes his hat off quickly, his hair’s ginger, as orange as the fabric of his hat, he splutters, yes, two cubes, and when Jacob hands him his cup, he takes it in one hand, holding it against his chest like a man, and squares his shoulders. The men have finished loading. One of them looks at his watch – a ridiculous gesture in these parts – and says, time to hit the road, let’s go. They want to stop for the night in another village, shaking the professor’s and the Natives’ hands – the youngest doesn’t dare look at Jacob, vaguely aware of having said too much, of having been the bird of ill omen – and hop into their boat that rocks gently. The kids see them off, shouting between branches or clinging onto the hull; the men in the boat don’t pay them any attention, occupied with manoeuvring the boat out, and finally the kids wade back towards the banks, and it seems then that the trees bow down towards the river, that the long grasses draw in along the banks, supple as elastic, and once again it’s the village that smokes, calm that hums in the forest gangue, this infinitely dilated realm at the heart of nature, this little pocket of time: the cleft of life that Jacob has chosen.