Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  THE BOA gets the news instantly, informed by a call from his chief of staff while he’s on his way back from an official visit to Dubai – where the birds are more discreet, it seems to him. And of course he explodes. How is it that no compromise with these cocksucking ornithologists was possible? Couldn’t we have just promised to finance new studies, new tagging campaigns, new binoculars as powerful as astronomical telescopes, new computers? Forehead glued to the bay window of his gigantic office, he watches the birds floating gently on the river for a long time, then suddenly turns and shouts: and the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, isn’t there a single asshole here who thought of that? Is dealing with these ballbreakers more than you can handle? Acres of marshland in exchange for ecological tolerance on the site of my bridge, isn’t it in you to think of a thing like that? He collapses into a large leather armchair and loosens his tie. One of the Boa’s secretaries, believing things have cooled off – stupid kid – starts talking, assuring him that he knows about the bill that was approved by U.S. Congress in 1934, popularly known as the Duck Stamp Act, but the risk with that was that hunters in Coca would just see it as an additional tax. The Boa stares so hard at him that the young man’s voice shrinks and chokes till he’s silent. He says, you, get out of here, leans his head back in his chair, and casts his gaze out the window, far, the farthest possible distance away, into the agitated sky.

  THE SAME sky that Diderot examines while he’s out smoking a Lusitania – sick of pacing like a lion in its cage in the meeting room, satellite phone to his ear to mollify the bigwigs at head office who bray like donkeys, furious, the birds, what bullshit, what a fucking pain, we’ve gotta get rid of them, take care of it, Diderot. The situation worries him. Three weeks is a long time. The guys will go bumming around in the city, and the ones who began by hooting about this fowl situation, rubbing their hands together – two or three days to score some cash, to knock about in the city, or play hooky, time off on this kind of site is nothing to scoff at – will soon be disoriented, bodies unoccupied and heads heavy with this idleness, they’ll sleep in, laze around till the middle of the day in greasy barbecue joints, or they’ll sit clicking away, eyeballs swollen in internet cafés from taking in so many onscreen promises of sex, pussies, tits and ass, half-open mouths, and if there’s a glimpse of tongue all the better, they’ll click furiously, most of them geographical bachelors from the universal contingent of mobile workers, and, come evening, the same ones will sweat it out in streets along the river, no pay yet, no cash really to burn, they’ll end up cracking, turning the mattress over to go get drunk or find something that’ll get them high, ’cause it sucks here, we’re doing dick all, and while some get depressed others’ll split in double time, and there you go – a shitshow. Diderot chews the insides of his cheeks and paces up and down, three weeks of forced loafing around means much more than a delay to make up: it breaks the site’s mechanism, interrupts the flow of energy, wrecks the work rhythm. It will be more difficult, afterwards, to reactivate everything; it will be heavier, slower, more painful, like starting to run again after stopping, all the muscles cooled down.

  A FORMATION of Arctic tern flies off and nosedives over the river. The bird in the lead suddenly leaves its position, exhausted, and repositions itself at the end of the line. Diderot too feels exhausted: his bandaged side hurts him, a piercing pain bores into him whenever he speeds up his movements and it condemns him to a rigid chest – he moves like an old man, with small steps, torso leaning stiffly forward, and since he’s only mobile from the neck up, his cervical vertebrae clang against one another: looking up has become a torture. Whispers fly that he’s paying for his stubbornness with this – in the days that followed the attack, he’d kept working with the help of morphine injections, without taking a rest or even the time to press charges – he seemed to be redoubling his ardour in order to stop thinking about his wound, and people press their lips together saying pedantically, he’s repressing, not a good sign, but hold back from speaking to him about his convalescence, because he doesn’t engage anyone in conversation anymore and turbines around like a madman, the whites of his eyes growing more and more yellow, his sweat more and more bitter and his words more and more rare. Mad – he gets that way at night sometimes when the bells pass over his pallet and ring out, bastard, bastard! and he wakes up, breathing hard, the back of his neck on fire, legs heavy; he gets up, distraught, and goes to take a swig of alcohol straight from the bottle, any kind, exaggeratedly, but without any pleasure in being drunk, only hoping to go back to sleep like a log and never managing to before dawn: he’s losing ground.

  When he gets back to the building, he heads to the meeting room where they’re waiting for him. The news precedes him. The team leaders are tense: so what’s happening, are we stopping work? We’re stopping all this because of a few warblers? For how long? After that it’s not gonna come cheap when we have to play catch-up! One of the engineers plays the smartass, exclaims in a loud voice, well, I’d like it too if they protected my reproductive zone! The room laughs. Diderot waits for things to calm down, coldly announces that the site is shutting down for three weeks, and then he leaves the room.

  FLOCKING ABOUT the different sites, the workers are assembled on the esplanade and the team leaders line up in front of them. One of them clears his throat and announces the temporary halt to the work. Three weeks of vacation, guys. There’re birds reproducing and we can’t bother ’em, that’s how it is, guys, that’s nature. Stirring in the crowd, a hubbub, heads turning and necks outstretched as though the bodies were suddenly looking for air to breathe – some oxygen that wouldn’t lie; shoulders undulate, hands fidget nervously inside pockets – and some close into tight fists that soon swell crimson – legs shake, or pace: the air quickly grows tense over the site. And are we gonna be paid? First question to fly. With a worried look the team leaders evade this, they don’t know, hazard doubtful orders – take advantage of it to get some rest, to visit the region, to stay with family, or to find yourselves a girlfriend, huh? There are tons of good-looking girls around, eh, whaddya say? But the guys laugh bitterly, nice try: why not say thanks while we’re at it, thanks, boss, why not congratulate ourselves and give ourselves a pat on the back, isn’t life great? What proof do we have that the site will start up again, why don’t we get paid, at least? It’s one of the guys from Detroit who speaks up, a guy with an emaciated face, dry skin marred by old acne scars and red patches, blond hair tapering to a rat-tail at the back of his neck. His eyes are very pale, almost white. He’s suspicious, says he knows these grand speeches by heart, I’ll tell you, I’m not gonna get fucked over twice, and the others behind him nod their heads in approval, yeah, yeah, we’re sick of being had. We want our money now, we want it right now or we pass the buck, we ditch this place for good. His voice carries across the entire work site, cavernous and broken, a violent shake of his head punctuates the end of each sentence and he brandishes a smoke-stained index finger at the team leaders, the nail bitten to the quick and ringed with hangnails. The leaders confer with a look, one of them turns to Summer, we’ve got to send word to Diderot, tell him shit’s hitting the fan, they want their dough, then he says aloud, very calmly, okay guys, you gotta be reasonable – we can’t guarantee that you’ll get your pay today but we’ll do our utmost. How much is that? The worker from Detroit doesn’t let it go – back there, thousands like him had been taken for a ride, kept in the factories with false promises while everything fell apart, and when General Motors began laying off men in groups of ten thousand, it was too late, it was all over, he’s the one who closed the shop and since then has been kicking himself for not leaving before the breakdown, there were fewer guys hung out to dry then and his references were good, he would have got more dinero and been able to get back on his feet faster, and probably would have been able to keep his wife, too, who’d left to go back to her parents’ place with their little girl after the house was seized one Sunday morning, the day of their anniversary,
the house and the television, the well-equipped and pretty little kitchen, the three-seater couch, the barbecue, her exercise bike and his fishing rod, the kid’s electronic karaoke machine; the truck sent by the bank was parked right in front of the garage and it sucked up their life from the inside, swallowed everything. It didn’t stop. You couldn’t see anything from the outside but you could hear the sound of furniture and things being heaped carelessly behind the tarps, pushed, piled, and for sure there was breakage, it was like a giant vacuum cleaner that emptied the house, emptied out their life. His wife had watched it all, straight-backed and silent, and then once the seal was on the door, had thrown a big suitcase into the trunk of their beige Rover, buckled the little one into the back seat, and turned towards him, glacial, you’ll at least let me keep the car? How much is your utmost? he asks again, yelling this time. Summer has taken her place in the ranks again with a message from Diderot: we’ll pay them. Once the guys hear the news, some of them form a line to get their cash – among them Katherine Thoreau, Soren Cry, Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, and the Natives – while the others head for the locker rooms, at a loss. Summer and Sanche are side by side: what about us? Will we be paid or not? It’s Sanche who speaks, see-sawing back and forth from his heels to his toes. Yes, everyone, Summer smiles, everyone will get their cash and meet again in three weeks.

  LATER, SUMMER tosses her hard hat into a corner of her office and goes to the sink to drink from the tap, water splashes everywhere – for goodness’ sake, there are cups, everything you need, plus the water in Coca is polluted, no doubt about that; dries herself off with the back of her hand and goes to sit in front of her laptop: no news from the Tiger, whose face has begun to dissolve, his face and body blinking precise at intermittent illuminations, then suddenly grainy, becoming transparent, and so Summer closes her eyes more and more often, even presses hard fists against her lids, worried to think that one day there’ll be nothing left to make him reappear in full force, nothing to counter the progressive erasure of this guy, exactly the way you lift the heavy chain of the bucket in a well of shadows, exactly the way you lift it into the light, the bucket and its fragile, perishable cargo – heave-ho, heave-ho – what does he look like, the Tiger, what is the timbre of his voice, the grain of his skin, the scent of his body, what is the taste of his mouth, heave-ho, heave-ho.

  AROUND HER, the plant purrs, the workers – loader operators and mixing truck drivers – labour away, the aggregate flows at a constant speed, well spread out on the transport belts, and this continuous flux of energy gives her security, envelops her like a coverlet, a kind of mental cabin where she now passes the clearest part of her time: the batch plant has become her home, a shelter. With a view of the entire site, she oversees these industrial tools, lowers her eyes to the latest touch screen, follows the production of the concrete in real time, step by step, ready to make the slightest adjustment: at every moment, the variable nature of the aggregate can require modification of one parameter in one of the three hundred and fifty formulations saved on the computer. To those who tease that she’s a brown-noser, mocking her record work hours, seeing an excess of zeal or ambition – with Sanche Cameron at the forefront – or to those, far more pernicious and cruel to hear, who imply that the poor thing, she only has this in her life, nothing more than staring at her desk and reacting to the detection of an anomaly in the test results for the mixer, a trending graph indicating the consistency of the concrete, Summer calmly responds that she likes to be here, in her workplace, at her command post, that the metamorphosis of the material is a spectacle that fascinates her, that things do have to move forward – which is not very convincing at the moment, and they stubbornly see her articulate speech as the mask of her solitude.

  Summer examines her work plan, evaluates what these three weeks of interruption will mean for her, the one who remains in charge of perpetual movement – what a joke.

  Don’t stop. We don’t stop, this is her first instinct, we don’t stop, we’ll get ahead, we won’t stop until it’s impossible to stock the concrete on the site, we just keep on going, that’s all she can find to say, her mouth twisting over her charts, when two guys knock at the door and ask if they should stop the centrifuges. They frown at her words, and the smaller of them, a thickset Mexican, points out that the whole site is stopping. Summer turns around, looks daggers at him, not us, we’re going to get ahead. The guys back up on the landing and close the door again, she hears them swearing in Spanish the bitch, the hija de puta. Then someone knocks again. It’s Sanche. He pokes his head in the door. You all right? He’s taken off his work overalls and is dressed to go out on the town, a black leather Gestapo-style jacket with visible yellow stitching, pointy shoes, a silk scarf printed with cannabis leaves. Whatcha doing, Miss Concrete?

  Summer smiles, nothing, I’m not stopping is all, I’ve got the whole team on my back but I don’t care. I haven’t gotten any other instructions. Sanche smooths the ends of his scarf with an automatic hand, looks at her, shrugs his shoulders, answers that the whole site is stopping for three weeks. Summer remains silent. The darkness grows in the room. The lamp on her desk carves her a ghostly orange face with grey shadows, a jack-o’-lantern on Hallowe’en night, she’s scary, you should stop working, Diamantis, come with me, everyone else is already gone. She shakes her head, concrete is a very complicated recipe, you know, very complicated, we always think of it as a basic material but it’s a surprising substance, tricky, and stopping production requires a protocol – Sanche sighs, pretends to beat a retreat, walking into the door, for god’s sake, bangs his fist against it, deliver me from this crazy woman; she raises her voice now and accelerates the flow; for example, a concrete formulation must be validated by laboratory tests and then by on-site tests, they check its strength after twenty-eight days, and it takes a long, long time to find the right enunciation, the one that will suit every need, the one that will respond to the desires of the architect, the right tint, the right resistance to freezing, to thaw, the one that will endure shifts in temperature, the one that will ensure the concrete doesn’t set too quickly, doesn’t set too weak, her voice fades away softly, she turns her back to Sanche, who’s placed his hand on the door handle and is getting ready to leave as he says, stop, Diamantis, you’re such a pain. Summer whips around. A mixing plant is not a car, it’s a process, it doesn’t stop when you press a button, we have to be sure of ourselves, is that clear?

  IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. A BALCONY, Diderot, and before him, the landscape in motion. He holds himself up, leaning against the icy rail, naked, the blanket ponchoed over his head, his chest inclined towards the street where the snow has hardened into slabs now, filling in the length of the sidewalks in dirty strips. Calm arms and sleepy legs, soles of his feet soon sealed by the cold to the concrete floor, he leans, breathes, seeks, down there, leaning his head towards the river which he knows is within his reach, so close that he touches a section between two buildings, the velvety purpled surface of the water appearing beneath the wintery fog: the birds are still there.

  Last day without the bridge, thinks Diderot, shivering goosebumps as the landscape unfurls before him at the rate of the rising day, higher, brighter, wider, deeper, with more contrast; as it’s laid out in tiers and terraces – miscellaneous facades and roofs fringed with satellite dishes, underwear, and capitalist logos hung out to dry, raised parking lots, interchanges, triumphal arches, cranes, arrows, domes; as it fragments and assembles itself with the same momentum, which is still the impetus of beginnings, a powerful combination in which, far off in the background, high and grey, stands the great forest of the other bank. His heart, wrung out at the close of a long night, also begins to dilate, in unison with the upward impulse tied to daybreak, which is enough to make the blanket fall to his shoulders, his head out from under the cover, his funny head, the cold sets it aflame like a handful of dry leaves, he feels his heart beating now in his chest, bang bang, beating so hard it tears open the day without
a bridge on the horizon, goddamn shitty day he knows it already because after twenty days of forced time off without pay, anguish is what seizes him, creasing his forehead and knotting his stomach; calculations are what colonize his cranium and costs are what stack up. Bang bang. Quick look at the dry sky and he pivots inside, gets dressed quickly, a gulp of cold coffee and no shower, nothing, not even toothpaste, just a new bandage over his scarred middle, the Velpeau bandage that holds him together, a pair of bike shorts moulding his big thighs, and he dons his cycling shoes, three turns of the scarf, thick yellow wool hat, steps over the mess and goes straight out, down the stairs, grabs his bike in the garage, and there he is – outside, alive and well, the scent of the night on his skin, outside outside outside, because that’s the best place to be.

  THE TASTE of rebirth. This is the first time he’s been outside in a whole week – the last time he felt this weak he was seventeen and had banged up his kidney in a motorcycle accident, pissing blood and unable to get up; the arrival of the birds, condemning him to inaction, had only worsened his state. A low moment. He’d amassed a long string of days spent stewing, when nothing in him knew how to fend off the sadness that infiltrated his frame – came in through the cleft of his wound, he thought, even though it was completely healed over now, didn’t hurt anymore, just a purpled line of skin with no swelling – and poisoned his blood. He had spent most of his time suffering, obsessing over the man he’d fought, and was already making a thousand plans for the next time he sees him, while down there, on the site, in the slowed-down offices, the guys were glutting themselves on comments: Diderot, idol with feet of clay, paper tiger, felled oak. Some talked about finding the guilty man – Soren Cry took care to throw his knife into the river as a precaution – and got geared up to organize a punitive expedition into Edgefront, into the shady neighbourhoods, because he could only have come from there, could only be one of those guys. Strangely, no one thought back to the testimonies of Summer Diamantis and Katherine Thoreau, who had both spoken of a white man in a tie. The site’s turning to bedlam, dereliction threatens. Work has to start up again tomorrow. It’s time.