Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  AND THEY were not mistaken. The place was worth the blood and the sweat and the crevasses of tears, the putrid lumps, the mad chilblains cleaving their pale feet: the valley is five miles wide, spread between the plateaus and the giant swathes of brush, flat as a palm, and edged by a river on its western side. A harsh but steadfast climate, developing predictably solstice after solstice – music paper, the scansion of their lives, the carrier of their days, monotony which closes on a final note of death; scorching summers liquefied into storms with electric skies and hailstones like Ping-Pong balls, radiant autumns, icy winters, sovereign springs, sweetness finally, the sweetness of a clearing, a thousand nuances of green, horses strolling in the prairie, youth and the strength of the reeds, tartness of the air, and rumbling of the water. And there are these violent winds from the east, carrying loess gathered on the plateaus – this permeates the ground, seeds the valley, fattens the cattle like cream on butter. Arriving here, the men who were still able had knelt on the ground and brought a pinch of earth to their mouths, tasting it with a click of their tongues – because that’s what you do – then had risen, weathervaned around, thrown their hats in the air and shouted, we’re here! This is it, goddammit we made it, we made it – in any case they didn’t have a choice anymore, it was here or never, the horses were fevered, the children had stopped speaking, the women’s bellies were covered with eczema, and they themselves were going mad.

  IN THE EARLY days, Coca curls up in turtle position. The pioneers are alone in the world, terrified, convinced of their superiority, propped up by their belief that they have been chosen. They settle in, they colonize. They proceed methodically, like the Greeks: mark out the territory, build the sanctuary, trace lines in the earth, put up gates, houses, share the arable land. They don’t see the old Spanish mission thirty miles to the south – so regularly destroyed by Indian raids, dysentery, and fevers that only some thirty members are left, and you should see the state of these guys – not one of them would be able to tell the story of that January morning, two hundred years earlier, when three forty-ton caravels with tough black hulls and sails worn threadbare pierced the ocean fog, approached the coast, unloaded priests and soldiers, powder, chalices, pots, barrels, bibles, and censers; not one of them would be able to tell this story: the men had barely placed one foot on the ground before they did exactly what they had come to do – they scattered here and there all along the coast, put up camps encircled by low stone walls between which the ringing of heavy Catholic bells could soon be heard, the spearhead and the backbone of evangelization, cultivated, hunted, sang, baptized everything they came across, Scriptures in one hand and musket in the other – and then began to die of isolation, they literally die, hang or drown themselves, bungling their entrails with grain alcohol; and not one of them would be able to imagine the twenty-year-old Franciscan monk, wild-eyed kid with a capuchin face (the monkey) who, sometime around 1630, went inland following the eastern bank of the river with twenty men behind him, and who, after seven weeks of walking, threw together a hasty altar in a prairie at the foot of the limestone plateau and celebrated the Eucharist, the river mirroring a wooden crucifix: mission accomplished, you are the children of God, you have arrived in Santa Maria de Coca.

  COCA LAYS low behind its palisades, its enclosures, its pigsties, and its corrals. It doesn’t have the same expansionist rage of other cities on the continent, born in more or less the same way, and never sets foot on the opposite bank, on the other side of the water, where the bulging forest hatches heretical and cannibalistic tribes. Conversely, it works to preserve its perimeters, to consolidate its circumference: a burrow of a city clenched around its assets – weapons, flocks, oppressed women – this is what it is. A hole. A cluster of rough and blunt individuals bustle around, working like dogs by day and growing fearful once night has fallen – because night in Coca is the night at the bottom of a well, a double layer of darkness where fear turbines, because night is in the sky but it is also in those who never lift their heads and limit their world to their own feet and their own stomachs – and so they kill, dance, copulate and rape, steeped in alcohol to the roots of their hair, and finally collapse onto straw mattresses that stink of sweat and humid hay. Who, in the morning, stagger out onto the doorstep in boxers or undershirts, hirsute hair and pasty breath, one or two dogs at their heels, and piss legs spread eyes blinking, point their guns at the riverbanks, target otters or any other half-witted mammal frisking about in the clarity of dawn, bang! bang! and, having shaken off the dust, go back inside the house to demand their coffee with a sullen groan. Pure rednecks, say the few travellers who risk coming to Coca by water, armed themselves, pistol barrels stuffed to the brim.

  THE NATIVES do finally show themselves. At last. One fine day they come out of the woods and move closer to see, flow into the bushes without even rustling the leaves, and suddenly rise, immense. They’re here, standing near the huts, armed with lances and naked. They breathe like people. Terrorized themselves, they cause great fear, heavy rifles are pointed at them, stay where you are, don’t take a step, don’t make a move. They don’t understand a word. Well, we warned them. Shots are fired, bodies crumple, everyone leaps into action, and then nothing – little groans among the tall grasses and the scent of gunpowder. After that, the settlers are scared: they don’t like us, they seem cruel, they eat human flesh and drink blood hot from the carotids, like a spout flowing straight into their bestial mouths. What if they come back? Scouts are sent into the woods to locate them, to evaluate their numbers, and to scope out their strength, the dying mission even sends emissaries to give them a chance to finally learn that all men are brothers in the eyes of God. Rare are those who return safe and sound from these expeditions: posts planted at regular intervals appear along the length of the river, at the forest’s edge, exhibiting mutilated bodies that attract bronze-eyed lynx (Felis tigris cocaensis), speckled hummingbirds, and electric-blue snakes. At night, people barricade themselves inside wretched little huts, weep with terror, twist their mouths, stroke their chins, and finally give up on risking their necks to cross the water, to clear out the forest any more. In Coca, the river does its job – it composes, it separates – and the years pass.

  Because yes, there is this river that excites it, caresses its side. Long golden cobra lazing and wild, lying curved like a trigger across an entire continent. Three thousand miles. Deep in these parts, and the fords impossible to find even though scouts on horseback have been sent out on the banks to plumb the riverbed, deep and yet also wide – at least a mile – wide enough that you can see storms roll in from the high seas, and strong, the dark and rapid waters pleated by a powerful current. It’s always drawn as a little frozen torrent grown to a lazy giant in the middle, where it touches Coca, and then as a managed national river, canalized for commerce between the city and the sea. People like this gushing of crystalline waters that deepen in colour, opacify, and then grow cloudy with motor oil, disgustingly polluted in certain bends, before mixing with the salty water of the ocean in the gulf. Okay. But the problem is that we don’t know where the animal comes from, its source is a mystery, no one has ever been able to pinpoint the precise location, not the GPS coordinates, it’s an uncanny thing, and has been the same story since the city’s beginnings, not the young Franciscan monk with his hooded monkey face and his expeditionary body devoured by anguish and mosquitoes, not the young aces of the first convoys, not the geologists and the hydrologists from London, Boston, Decazeville, and Lons-le-Saunier who would take up residence in Coca between 1866 and 1925, travelling upriver for months – the last ones to come play the detectives, tell the story of the fire at the Pernod factory in Pontarlier in 1901: the zealous employee who emptied barrels of absinthe one by one into the Doubs to avoid an explosion, the wide river that was instantly alcoholized; the soldiers at the riverside garrison who filled their helmets and drank, who burst into guffaws, splashing into the water to quench their thirst, letting it flow down their chins, s
patter on their beards, coats unbuttoned, a miracle, Jesus descended into the valley; and the following day, nine miles away, another river is contaminated, its waters turned opalescent green, the fishermen are pissed off, this better not mess up the trout; and this is how it is discovered that the Loue River, believed until then to be autonomous, original, is in fact a resurgence of the Doubs – astounding the profession – a first colouration in the history of hydrology – no one has found the river’s source, no solitary adventurer, no reality-show hero tossed into the forest from a garish helicopter equipped with infrared cameras; all of them eventually turned back, got lost, tumbled wounded into a ravine, or got tangled in thick vines and fluorescent ferns, backed away from the enormous waterfalls that suddenly rise up three hundred miles to the north, liquid walls whose most minor trickle would shatter the strongest steel-hulled boat; and finally all agreed to establish that there was not just one source, but many, and that they would come back later – and later never came.

  VERY SOON there was a port in Coca. Dynamited stone from the canyons east of the city moved forward into the river in compact heaps, forming breakwaters where high-tonnage vessels began anchoring in the beginning of the nineteenth century. These are fitted out in the opulent cities of the estuary and travel upriver for seven days, bringing machines, casks of wine, precious fabrics, health remedies, books, and newspapers, and leave again heavy with bricks and anthracite, cattle, skins, and furs. Traffic intensifies, the river becomes the umbilical cord by which Coca grows fatter and then slims down: technical innovations, moral evolutions, musical revolutions, medical progress, developments in fashion, noise of wars and celebrations, all of this surges back towards it aboard these long phosphorescent ships – they make of it a continental lighthouse, a faraway light burning in the dimness of an immense and wild land where only the edges have been civilized. Also, in 1850, an actual lighthouse is built. Joshua Cripplecrow, mayor of the city at the time (named for the darkness of his hair, nails, and teeth, for his lameness and scheming – he’s a killer) has only this in mind, this is his life’s project. It would be raised at the river guard, where the bed narrows before opening out again towards the south in a rift basin fringed with marshland, and would be crowned with a turning flame beneath a glass cupola: a lookout tower. Soon beacons are placed along the length of the banks, buoys are roped up, a harbourmaster’s cabin is built, a dry dock, dockyards, captains are trained, and today Coca is still the last port upstream on the river. Beyond it, the mangrove creeps forward into the water, the islets in perpetual formation threaten to ground vessels, the map of the riverbed is drawn twice a year, and navigating requires a light, flat-bottomed craft – canoes, dugouts, kayaks; farther still, there are only mossy wooden pontoons floating in front of riverside cabins. At the level of Coca, however, if they’re well manoeuvred, two giant tankers can pass side by side.

  AT THE time the lighthouse was built – let’s go back for a moment – gold was discovered on the western bank: three clean nuggets in the mud, three little flickers that quiver in the sun. Gold, gold! Immediate influx – men, mostly, young guys who are strong, poor, and full of belief. A new wave of migrants reaches Coca following the continental path of the pioneers while another crosses the ocean, comes to skirt the black coasts aboard stinking ships; they advance slowly, very slowly, and find the entrance to the bay – such a narrow passage – a tiny door, the eye of a needle – and it is so moving to suddenly come upon the bay, intact, secret, just by craning your neck the way you’d poke your head curiously through a half-open door, it was such a strong feeling – the ship moors deep in the gulf, a troop disembarks and travels upriver, usually on foot, unknowingly following the path of the young missionary, and then branches off towards Coca. Once they’ve arrived, the newcomers spit into their hands, build boats, rafts, cross to the other bank, transporting what they need to clear the land. There’s traffic, a Frenchman sets up a ferry business, charters a first vessel sixty feet long and deep enough to hold two horses, a dozen men, a few cases of sugar and flour, a barrel of hooch, and twenty barrels of powder. By Jove, it works like a charm.

  The guys don’t pull punches, they charge ahead and make a space for themselves. First-come, first-served, that’s the name of the game – you just gotta go for it. They know nothing about this part of the river, nothing about the Native burial grounds parallel to the river, bodies buried with heads towards the ocean and draped in blankets embroidered with shells; they know nothing about the sacred trees, the giant sequoias clustered into cathedrals of foliage, the pines (Pinus lambertiana) and the little clay altars with parakeet feathers and clusters of honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) burning. They cut, clip, and clear relentlessly, bust through, turn around and dig. They set themselves up and some of them do touch gold – these ones are rare, but they brandish their pebbles, eyes popping, screaming their heads off, a long cry that swells between the trees and thus reactivates the hope machine. Others see them, envy them, tell themselves that they got lucky, and wonder, is luck democratic or are there chosen ones; does fortune smile on just anyone, might she even one day smile on me, just one tiny little smile that would revive in one fell swoop this mass of exhaustion that I call my body.

  A NECKLACE of bric-a-brac houses appears in what comes to be known as Edgefront. They’re pitched in the mud overnight according to the rule of the fait accompli and stand shoulder to shoulder on a band of earth no wider than a mile but at least twenty long, tacked onto the river’s edge. Families move in, some of them come down from Sacramento off the train that unifies the interior of the territory from then on. They grow gardens, set out rabbit hutches and all kinds of enclosures for chickens and pigs, dusty paths cross-hatch the large strip; women give birth screaming beside basins of boiled water, and soon there are children playing with sticks, building huts and trapping coypu. Calm returns, the great status quo: no one thinks about the Natives anymore, sometimes you can make them out here or there at the far ends of the strip where the sylva touches the river, and some even exchange words with them. But no one goes into the forest anymore except for the fur traders, and these men are wrapped in a cloak of mystery: they’ve trafficked alcohol and weapons, squatted beside leathery shamans to chew hallucinogenic roots, learned their language which includes four vowels and four consonants (the women have only three vowels at their disposition), hunted sable and deer, tamed the blue fox and the whiskered screech owl (Otus trichopsis); they’ve tracked that bronze-eyed lynx and played knucklebones with forest men clothed in tunics made from salmon skin and adorned with shells collected from the banks – knucklebones with the debris of skulls, nose cartilage, portions of clavicles, and all kinds of phalanxes – they’ve followed little girls dragging flat dolls with fish eyes all the way back to their huts and done business with their mothers, then have followed these same women into the immense swampy prairies populated with spirits and magic sounds, and while some of them get killed, others have children. Intermediary men, they’ve plumbed the thickness of the brush over a range of at least two hundred miles and when they return, when they emerge from the sticky gangue and blink their eyes, blinded, lips dry and green at the corners, skin livid, the people run towards them, encircle them calmly, welcome them with respect and open arms: they bring rare plants and materia medica, bitter berries and leaves that salivate, more furs, and, more rarely, gold and carnivorous flowers.

  A FIRST BRIDGE was built in 1912, baptized the Golden Bridge. It’s a burly, rustic, but also umbilical and thus ambiguous bridge, as though its primary function was less to de-isolate Coca and aid its expansion to the other bank and more to regulate the flood of poor people who live on the other side from then on, to filter their incursion into the old city and, once night falls, to facilitate the return of those who work in the city’s central neighbourhoods – above all, to prevent them from lingering where what’s prized is order and security.

  In the decades that follow, the city sediments, its grid is etched into the ground
, its map – airy, diaphanous, still containing numerous enclosures of high grass – unfolds slowly: temples, schools with bells, newborn civic buildings, flour mills, cart makers, stores, hotels and exhibition centres, a small university, a theatre, a few restaurants, several bars and saloons, all this coagulates gently during the prosperous years that follow the First World War. A way of life develops that siphons all space, sucks areas clean, absorbs and neutralizes them, the day-to-day triumphs, while vernacular fictions solidify – those fictions that will populate the city from now on until they’re indistinguishable from it, like a second skin; fictions surrounding Coca’s foundations, risen up ex nihilo beneath the infinite sky, extrapolated from the virginity of the New World with this sense of accomplishment of communities held in the palm of God’s hand; but fictions that also bump up against the city’s earthy melancholy, its aphasic silence, as though living there amounted to facing adversity, since humans would never get another chance – there would never be another Earth.

  THE RIVER, this liquid wall, continues to draw a borderline in the heart of the city, fixing more strongly than ever this “other side of the water,” this area that excites or repels. So silty, so thick along the banks that the children who swim between two fish traps can’t see their hands beneath the surface, and their feet have completely disappeared into the red sludge where thin black snakes slither past. But it has also become an integral space of life: people work here, circulate here, draw their subsistence from it. There are hundreds of vessels upon the water each day now. Ferries multiply, crossing the river or descending towards the bay, barges trade and transport; in summer simple rafts are poled along to conclude minor deals, and in winter little cargo steamers fight their way through the greyish ice; canoes fish here – and when the salmon come back upstream during spawning season, boats are suddenly packed in shoulder to shoulder and there are shouts from all sides, screams and laughter, because dammit, fish are spurting from the surface, it’s a miraculous draught of fishes, and tonight, it’s a party, a festival, a belly-splitting good time, grilled onions and boiled sea asparagus, crispy potatoes; tonight it’s violins, a ball, prohibition wine pouring forth from barrels, boobs at attention in the cleft of corsets, pricks in hand, in mouths, and sex all you can eat, tonight it’s all-out mayhem – and, racing over the waves like arrows, you can catch sight of loads of Native dugouts.