Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  Because yes, the Natives are here now. Set up at the edges of the forest, their dwellings thicken the border and send up smoke between the branches, a milky-white veil against the black of the woods. People say they were drawn like magnets to Coca because of the bartering on the river, the sparkle of electric lights, and the bitterness of the beer, that they want to read the newspapers, speak several languages, and go to the movies, that they do what they have to in order to follow the path of progress, that they’ve chosen to evolve. People like to say that they were attracted to the city simply because it was much warmer than their gloomy woods and that the tiniest room with a concrete floor is superior to the dirt floors of their mouldy huts. People like to say that the city was simply desirable, and so they desired it – just like we desire it when we’re fifteen and live far from everything, bundled away in the country, in a backwoods town where the church bells keep time, stuck in the bleak countryside dying of boredom, where you sleep with chickens because, shit, there’s nothing else to do, though what you’d really like is to bust your eardrums and let loose on the dance floor, or at least watch it rave the whole night long. More rarely, people imagine that they’re refugees, and that it’s actually fear, violence, and hunger that have pushed them here, huddled together, on edge and lost.

  The truth is that the status quo had gone on for too long and the first lumberjacks ended up making their way to the forest. They were newcomers to Coca themselves, guys from the interior, from Montana and Nebraska, but also Europeans, giants with flaxen hair, Slovaks, Germans, Poles; they had short and gnarled arms, empty bellies; they knew how to do the job already and kept costs low for a downtown boss. We know that they would begin gently at first, choosing the youngest trunks, spacing out the cuts, two guys at work while three or four others kept a lookout, and then they’d haul the trunk together, one behind the other, clearing out narrow corridors through the forest as they passed like veins that they would use again the next time they came back to work – all this so as not to leave a trace, so as not to break the implicit pact that had governed life in the area for so long: they poached Native land in silence. But, little by little, becoming bolder, they shrank the space between cuts, began to set traps themselves, and sometimes even got so close to the villages that they mistook domestic livestock for wild game and grabbed them shamelessly. Then they rapidly tightened their hold on the forest, turned the pressure on the tribes up a notch: encampments were set on fire in order to gain territory, animals poisoned with sulphuric acid, girls were abused – a little seven-year-old Native girl was raped and strangled, found floating in the river, body swollen like a wineskin. Still no roads but forest channels that would become a netting of paths in a few years’ time for lumber vehicles. So the Natives got scared, and while some of them plunged farther into the immense forest, following the game – their sustenance – others, desperate, walked all the way to Coca. It was a surprise to see them turn up like that – some were even disappointed – so this is what the Natives look like? These are the people who gave the territory its name, who terrorized the early settlers? These are the noble warriors who walk with God at their backs and the plain beneath their feet? Feathered, quivers full of arrows, proud gazes and agile bodies racing through the deep forests, they were objects of fascination and fear – the caricature was helpful for illustrating an enemy worthy of the courage it takes to hunt him; a sexual fantasy for well-dressed women, an aesthetic model for all those nostalgic for the noble savage who would be glad to bring one back to their conferences – fattened up, cloistered in the vapours of rubbing alcohol, chewing rotten tobacco from morning till night and getting swindled by kids – bear’s teeth for coppers – it was crap, and no one gave a shit.

  A SECOND wave of immigration happened in the 1950s. Although isolated, Coca continued to attract new populations that need to be housed – families driven from the coasts where life has become too expensive, where work is scarce; modest and working families besotted with detached houses and nature, poor folk seeking to remake themselves, lost souls seized by the dream of the West, that stubborn myth that colonizes their minds. They speculate on land to be divided into lots, take over the pasture land, conquer the fields; little by little the tractors are put away and gas stations pop up, wagons are soon replaced by pickup trucks and Fords – and some real property swindles go down. A few roads are rapidly outfitted with motels, fringed with restaurants that serve cheap meat, with bowling alleys and supermarkets, with warehouses. At night, neon signs trace the outline of girls in pink garters, stetsons on their heads, mugs of beer in hand. Because – funny thing – the more the city modernizes, the more people turn to the clichés of the past to attract regulars – in other words, the fewer real horses, the more rodeos there are – in freshly done-up arenas plastered with giant ads, and so people pay their share. The descendants of the pioneers stick together, fold inward reflexively and cement a violent aristocracy whose financial dominance is based in the major areas, or what’s left of them – they keep close ties with the police, the courts, and the banks, and the most intuitive ones team up with the unscrupulous wheeler-dealers who operate here. Violence itself changes shape. Where there used to be brutal brawls, settling of accounts and ordinary vendetta, now there’s petty crime, drug trafficking, women traded like horses, and sexual crimes. Now there’s racketeering, deportation, extortion, and usury; now they use intimidation in order to take their pound of flesh.

  BY THE END of the millennium, Coca’s getting bored, super-provincial, and so confined. Definitively insular. The youth who mope around here spit in its face. The asshole of the world. The city has nevertheless verticalized with a few buildings. People also say it’s a modern city. White city hall with columns, white courthouse with cupola, white chamber of commerce. Standard American decor with large dark-windowed sedans gliding past. You wonder where the people are. Air conditioning everywhere and long bars of automatic watering on the beds of close-shorn grass, of a gaudy green. Indifference towards the world, exacerbation of family powers, suspicion towards foreigners, contained prosperity, sorrow of women whose elegance is lifted directly from the pages of fashion magazines from Paris, New York, and Milan – copied so closely it breaks your heart, truly, it hurts to see – no distance, no delay, the latest lipstick on their dry lips, the right bra, the right panties – people are suffocating here.

  Luckily there’s the water. The movement of the water. The light of the water. The deep, wide, fertile river. The frozen river – skating rink that cracks on all sides when the thaw comes, wakes like an animal and shakes its scales of ice, suddenly so alive beside the weary city. Luckily there’s this freedom. But on the other bank, the neighbourhood of Edgefront is still nothing but an edge – edge of the city, edge of the forest, edge of the river, thrice marginal, triply fascinating – densely populated strip served by the old Golden Bridge and the cohort of ferries crammed tight with people who are pushed back from the pleasures of the city, them and their motorcycles, strollers, cars, those who live in the shanty towns leaning up against the forest. There’s nothing of interest here. Sure, there are factories, harbour docks, a football field without bleachers, a supermarket, a school. But no one puts a kopeck into it. Volunteer associations set up free clinics in prefab buildings that start leaking at the first sign of the rainy season, maintain the church, care for the cemetery. That’s it, and the general opinion is that that’s enough. It’s the land of cobbling things together and small-scale deals, schemes, ploys, all the little survival strategies that keep the mind alert; the land of small gardens, all the yards in fertile disarray; the land of hammocks cobbled together in damp shacks, the latest plasma-screen TVs and fridges full of beer; of trailers where Natives with piercing eyes sleep, depressed; and slapdash houses that won’t make it through the winter – the floors warp, the electric wires melt once the space heater is plugged in, the exposed pipes freeze to the front walls. It’s the land of the other side of the water, it’s the outskirts of the
city and the suburb of the forest, it’s the land of the edge.

  WHEN JOHN Johnson, called the Boa, bursts onto the municipal political scene in the early 2000s, he causes a stir – he is the reform and the new – and by bypassing the elite, supplanting the local heirs and using surprise, he creates a tactical advantage that lasts until his election. During his final campaign speech, he presents himself as Prince Charming, called to wake Sleeping Beauty. The one you’ve all been waiting for to begin living again.

  A THIRD LANDSCAPE

  WINTER GOES ON FOREVER, A SHEATH OF GLASS. Cold corsets the city. Oxidizes perspectives, clarifies sounds, detaches each gesture, and in all of this the sky plays an exaggerated part. On the river – bleached ashen like the rest – people are at work and the bridge expands. Near the enormous columns that are now like the two indestructible ankles of this whole story, there are now long concrete seawalls reinforcing the banks. Steel is unloaded onto them, carried by rail to the Pontoverde platform, and then transported here aboard barges equipped with icebreakers.

  It’s phase two of the site, we’re switching over to height, colonizing the sky. Diderot, in fine form, lifts his glass to no one in particular during a gathering on the work site, New Year’s resolutions formulated by the skin of their teeth on December 31st, mulled wine served in translucent plastic glasses that immediately melt a little – but we know that his glass holds only Coca-Cola. In other words, Diderot’s voice smacks, we’re finished with the holes, the excavators, and the explosions, terminado the digging and the blasting of the ground, heads underwater and feet in the abyss, eardrums shaken by dynamite and the pressure of underwater chambers, the mud and the mire, done with the dredger – Verlaine packed his bag three days before Christmas – the time has come for cranes and arrows, the time of welders, rock bolters, the time of skilled labourers. We begin the raising of the towers: the Coca tower and the Edgefront tower, seven hundred and fifty feet high. Cheers! Shouts fuse together over the esplanade, and one voice distinguishes itself from the hubbub – a vaguely nasal timbre, probably that of Buddy Loo: seven hundred and fifty feet, yeah, kinda like the Empire State Building, eh – an assertion that’s corrected right away by Summer Diamantis – the Empire is taller, ours will be more like the Tour Montparnasse, and she’s barely finished her sentence when Sanche’s voice sounds in her ear, Diamantis, there’s not a single person here who knows the Tour Montparnasse, and without answering him, she migrates towards the wine.

  THE WORKERS drink, pace, and comment, glasses in hand, we’re gonna have to climb up there, gonna have to do it, with a mix of impatience and anxiety unbridled by the alcohol. Sanche Alphonse Cameron swallows a smile, arms crossed over his chest, puts on an innocent face: his time has come, and he knows it. Four months overseeing vehicle maintenance was enough for him – now he’s going to gain some altitude. The Coca and Edgefront towers will be identical, each one composed of two immense steel piers placed thirty yards apart; these will be solidly anchored to a concrete foundation and then innervated to each other via crosspiece supports, sorts of gangways that will also serve as platforms to hoist people and materials. The piers themselves will be composed of prefabricated steel girders, bolted one to the other all the way up – requiring a rhythm of twenty-five girders per worker per day, the guys have been informed. With each tower thus reinforced, they’ll rise yard by yard, and the higher they get, the more a mass of cables, pulleys, winches, and hoists will trickle down, and the crane will also progress, unfolding its boom in tempo with the work. Sanche’s crane will work on the construction of the Edgefront tower.

  He dribbles his way along the crowd to the buffet, lingers over the pot where the liquid churns like a priest’s robe scented with alcohol, pepper, and cinnamon, orange zest floating, refills his cup: he likes this wine that rasps his tongue, exactly as this city has rasped his skin from day one. Because in terms of promising the good life, Coca has done more than meet his expectations: it has reinvented him. He arrived in September as a model crane operator, a loving only son, an attentive fiancé, but since then he’s had the feeling that each day he’s slipping a little further out of his lovely smooth skin, his even skin: it has dried, flaked off, fallen in scraps, and he rids himself of it with a stiff joy, kicking in the shavings, in the slough. Everything happened as though the city, which acted on his skin like silver nitrate on photographic paper, was revealing the stigmata of desire and ambition, the taste for the game, the will to power, and now he enjoys the feeling that another skin is forming beneath the old one, another skin that he doesn’t yet know but that is the skin of real life, there is no doubt, and when he looks at his leopard body in the mirror, he feels handsome, yes, and tells himself that the moment has come to let what is inside him come to life.

  DEEP INSIDE the multitude, Katherine Thoreau for the moment keeps her distance from Diderot, who verifies her presence with quick sidelong glances – they’re waiting for each other. Night falls, the crowd disperses, people throw their glasses into large trash cans and drift towards the locker rooms; the alcohol has warmed them, but it’s bonuses they’re talking about as they open their lockers, this Christmas bonus that no one has got yet, can’t let ourselves be lulled by cheap wine, we gotta sort this out. Trestles, portable stove, and cases of wine packed up, emptied, thrown out, and Mo Yun, astounded by these actions, begins to turn near the pot, there’s still enough to fill his flask and this is what he rushes to do, then sets about fishing out the orange peels one by one and stuffs them in a piece of newspaper, a cone he pockets, excited by this sweet deal, and then wanders away – and it’s at this precise moment that Diderot makes out Katherine’s hair as she moves towards the workers’ facilities, tells himself she’s leaving and he’s going to miss her, tosses his cup in the can, and with hands in his pockets launches himself in her direction – after all, I never really got to thank her, this is what he tells himself to get himself in gear – and intercepts her, almost solemn, hey Thoreau, one thing, I wanted to say thank you – and Katherine, who had seen him, a moving mass slaloming between the last groups still on-site and had instinctively slowed her step so they would meet – choreography of collision, it’s as old as the hills and still totally magic – she stops, opens her alcohol-clouded eyes wide, thank you? Thank you for what? She’s had too much to drink, Diderot sees it right away, her face is capsized, he gets right to the point: thank you for the other day, the fight, you know what I mean. She rests her naked eyes on him, transparent irises stinging behind the slight swell of her lids, oh, that’s all in the past, she pouts, that’s behind us; she wobbles on her feet, puts a hand to her temple – I have to eat something, I’ve had a few drinks, I have to eat, and Diderot seizes the opportunity – a miracle of a chance – to simply say, wait for me, let’s go.

  LATER, THOREAU and Diderot are sitting in an ordinary snack bar, dazzled and stunned to be there and for it all to have happened so easily – even though they had to perform several circumventions in order to slip away quietly, and even though as soon as they’d been seated Katherine had to get up to go vomit in the toilet bowl, vile, in the bathroom – and, plunging her head into the hole, holding her hair back in a ponytail, she’d wanted to laugh again, I’m drunk, this is ridiculous – then she’d copiously splashed her clothes while rinsing her mouth under the faucet. The room is sparsely populated, only a few individuals lingering, two cops taking a break on their patrol, a man with a very long beard who soliloquizes. Quick, Katherine, have something to eat – this sudden first-name basis accelerates the cadence – Diderot calls the server over and Katherine checks her breath in her palm. You okay? He looks at her, smiling, and Katherine lifts her head, I’m great, and then, as though she couldn’t wait any longer, she shrugs off her ugly parka, and, taking off her sweater, crosses and uncrosses her arms from bottom to top, a large movement, her face disappearing fleetingly into the wool collar, then she opens the top buttons of her shirt beneath Diderot’s eyes that comb over her, imperturbable, and finally sh
akes her head lightly so her hair settles – a light moisture dews her top lip and her cheeks are red, and with this gesture she’s just made you think she was too hot, but no – and in a rush of unexpected directness she says, I’ll warn you, this is all I have to offer; Diderot, vaguely outdistanced, chews the inside of his cheeks and then states in turn, just as calm as she, and direct, that’s already a lot, and Katherine, in a trembling voice, says I think so too.

  AT MIDNIGHT, AT THE WHIRR OF THE SIREN THAT signals the end of the second eight-hour time slot, the men stagger from the Pontoverde platform, skin tight, eyes burning under flickering lids. While most of them go back to their digs, a few others head for downtown Coca, zone of games and pleasures. The single ones value this rhythm even though it exhausts the organism and disturbs the nervous system (they get up around two in the afternoon, work from four until midnight, party till dawn), it lets them have the nightclubs when they’re bumping. They like night on the work site, night that encapsulates them, encloses them in pools of light – multitudes of bulbs light up the darkness like a celebration, vehicle headlights signal to one another in code, the drivers’ cabins are lit like alcoves – and emphasizes their community, their solidarity, and their strength: they are comrades, brothers in arms. So they don’t stagger too long, no, they get excited, a little dazed and impatient to go hit on the easy women, to drink and gamble, impatient to find, after the difficulty and the tension of the work, a little simple flow, a little sweet fluidity. Once they’re out, they walk through the fallen dusk in groups and keep up a good pace all the way to the shuttles that will take them there; they climb inside, already jostling one another, a pack of kids joking and jeering, a gang of electric schoolboys. Soren Cry, with his skirting-the-walls attitude, usually goes to sit at the back of the bus, solitary, and leans his head against the window, his gaze wandering out into the darkness; he likes these trips that are like decompression chambers, floating tunnels where he’s taken in, transported, where he can finally let his guard down. He doesn’t even see the guy who sits down beside him, who gives him a few taps on the shoulder so he’ll turn around and holds out a solid hand, Alex. Soren extends his hand reluctantly and then turns back to the window, but the guy hits his shoulder again, three quick hits whack whack whack, I know, I know who you are, I knew you in Anchorage. Soren starts – no one can see it but I know that his heart jolts inside his chest as though he was suffocating and then starts up again in a torrent – he replies slowly, naw, man, you must be mistaken, I’ve never been to Anchorage, I’m from Ashland, Kentucky; but the guy suddenly leans in close till his shoulder is touching Soren’s and lowers his voice, let’s not waste time, Soren Cry, don’t bother talking shit, you got it? Then, as Soren nearly pukes from terror, the guy spits out rapid fire in a falsely relaxed voice you had a little trouble in Anchorage, Soren, a story of a girl and a bear, not pretty – Soren’s catapulted upright on his feet as though on a spring, leave me alone, man, I’ve never been to Anchorage, I’m from Ashland, you must be getting me mixed up with someone else – but the other gets up just as fast to push him back down with a palm pressed hard against his shoulder, listen up – this is your last warning before I go to the cops, they’d be glad to get the guy who killed someone with a bear, believe me, everyone there was real shaken up – are you listening – hey, are you listening to me? Soren lowers his head, the back of his black hat covers his brow and his eyeballs vibrate in the darkness, strangely liquefied, yeah, the guy comes to press his cheek violently against Soren’s as though for a tango and breathes nicotine-gum-scented breath in his face, when we get downtown we’re gonna get off together, but you’re not gonna take off and play right away, we’re gonna talk first, got it – I’ve got a job for you, a thing you can’t say no to, or else, bang – he’s placed his first and middle fingers together in a pistol against Soren’s temple, blows on them like the professional after the clean execution of the contract – and Soren stiffens in place, cornered – and in fact, cornered is exactly what he is. When the guy finally steps away from him to joke around with the others in the front seats like nothing’s going on, Soren turns his head to the window again: microscopic islands of light and noise – neon signs, yellow-gold windows inundated with the warmth of kitchens, glowing embers in car ashtrays, blue halo of television sets, dogs yowling, solitary joggers who breathe and hit the pavement in cadence, bikes that zip through the night – perforate the urban darkness, residential neighbourhoods that stretch out, that hold embraces, hold dreams, all this is not for him who will never, it seems, find any rest, never, ever. Soren knows the way, just a few more minutes before they reach the big time bad luck of the sidewalks, deep in the orange belly of the city; he is emptied out, and while the suburbs slide past the window, his past unrolls like a great scroll, just as black and shadowy, and, in a few linear bursts of light, there he is, back in Anchorage.