Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  The unfinished bridge is massive in the night, a monstrous presence, very dark – Waldo stares at it in a low voice, the lighting at night shouldn’t be too bright, too spectacular, Georges, I don’t want flame sabres, beams that slice, bulbs that carve, all that grandiloquence junk – the towers won’t be lit right up to the top, that way you’ll be able to imagine them extending into the night, the deck will be a simple stroke like a vanishing line, and we’ll regulate the balance between shadows, between different qualities of shadows, we’ll let the materials, the river, the city, and the forest touch, and, for the bridge, all I want is for people to sense the strength of the cables. Diderot listens to the architect’s voice flowing through the murmur of Coca and that of the forest, and holds Waldo back as he leans dangerously far out over the waters, seeing nothing; he turns him around gently so they can go back together, and whispers in his ear, about the lighting, no problem, I’ve got a plan for that too.

  SANCHE HAS A COUPLE OF MINUTES LEFT BEFORE the day starts up, before he has to decode the workers’ hand signals as they prepare and balance the loads to be lifted – standard gestures outlined on professional charts, official crane operator language learned by heart and hard-hatted silhouettes drawn on white paper on the day of the exam – and then hoist each load of reinforcing steel that must be placed within a half-inch degree of precision. A few minutes left to enjoy his position. Sanche turns towards Coca, his gaze grazes over the city, stops at an intersection where silhouettes rush along, says to himself how much he’d like to turn his boom towards that tower on the river’s edge, thirty storeys high in aquamarine blue, and maybe he would be able to touch, with the end of his extendible arm, the window of that girl who welcomed him in Coca, that twisted, splendid caller at the square dance of life.

  FIRST FORMIDABLE hours of his arrival in Coca, the girl who’s all legs who lifts his name up on a placard, the car that rushes towards the city, the radio turned up blasting international pop. This impression of crazy speed and light that spatters, this incredible feeling that life is racing ahead. Shakira croons, sings loud on the choruses, shakes her head, her hair coming loose, taps her hands against the wheel, pressing the accelerator at the same time so that they move in rhythm with the stereo, smokes red Dunhills, slants a look at a text, and once they’re alone in the middle of the plain says to Sanche in a husky, ironic voice, don’t worry, sugar, I love to drive in heels, and he grimaces a smile, a smile of panic and enthusiasm, that will need to be elucidated; his mouth is dry, now, the reverberation of the sun exhausts his eyes so thoroughly that he finally lowers the visor, tells himself he has to buy a hat right away, a black one, a stetson with a leather band, promises himself he won’t go cheap; and then the highway that cuts through a desert zone with powdery ground, white as a lake of salt, occupied here and there by little groups of shacks, by thirsty coyotes – Sanche imagines them lingering around the oil wells – and by cacti with arms outstretched like Christs in glory. Suddenly space gaping open before him, a lateral scope, the faraway hills at both ends of the plain, shadowy forms floating on the haze of the heat, blue, drowsy like dinosaurs, while here, right beside him, the girl is another mountain who adjusts the A/C and pays attention to the vibrations of her cellphone; Sanche, stunned by their communal presence in this mercurial racing car, shivers, rubs his hands together, smiles again that same smile people like about him, head held high and facing the windshield; he says to himself in this second, here I am in the latest Mercedes beside a Russian girl with legs to die for, I’m twenty-seven years old, I’m a crane operator who just flew fifteen hours to come to this site, my first bridge, and I know like everyone else that anyone who wants to build a bridge must first make a pact with the devil, and before him, the highway is like a fatal funnel he dives into headfirst with her beside him.

  LATER THEY reach the end of the high plain, the highway ending bluntly at the edge of a precipice beyond which, crouched in the valley, the city of Coca shimmers – a camo moth, thinks Sanche, leaning closer to the windshield, it must show up best at night. In the middle of the day, the sky reflects its serene grammar in the facades of the towers, and the entire landscape is absorbed into them while the cranes, cranes by the hundreds, planted close together, augur the city’s power to come. They merge onto a street that’s fairly wide but fissured, pavement eroded by couch grass; it winds along the side of the plateau in sweeping bends grossly hollowed out from the limestone plateau, and once it reaches the valley, blends with the interchanges and other fast streets, the way a white strand sneaks into an otherwise vigorous head of hair. Later, when they reach the heart of the city, Shakira Ourga’s large hand makes excited deferential gestures as she points out Coca’s riches, her face tense with a restless rictus. She makes a point of slowing down in front of the giant aquariums inside which he can see the gleam of luxury racing cars, check it out! Ferrari, Mercedes, Porsche – they’re all there, Sanche nods his head solemnly, leans forward to see, whistles, and in so doing gives Shakira great pleasure; soon she tosses the keys of the Mercedes to a Filipino valet, dark as a spectre in front of the door of a restaurant on the first floor of a mirrored tower – for seven years he’s been standing here, in his narrow redingote and tasselled cap pushed back on his head; seven years since he immigrated to Coca, seven years, you have to stop and imagine such a sequence, counting on your fingers, the faces of the wife and kids fading inside the pages of his passport, a monthly money transfer sent to the village and the crumbs of his paycheque gone to pay for a room without windows in a basement somewhere, very rarely a woman with him, and candied tangerines that he sucks in front of the television, he says only thirty words a day, but the same ones a hundred times over.

  They eat lunch quickly once Shakira has put down her phone and taken the waiter to task for serving the table beside them first – she speaks to him in a hard tone, face closed, the nail of her index finger tapping the gold-plated face of her Swiss watch. Face-on, close-up, the relief of her face is brought into focus, and Sanche follows its line, rising and falling, a route that unfurls its black coil behind the table where the girl devours her meal, citizen of Coca, new and jewelled in an irreproachable body, cared for like a precision tool, behind this avenue where she works for the city, behind this tower where she sleeps with the director of the powerful chamber of commerce (who happens to be the owner of the Mercedes), a route that unlaces dirty bus stations and the fear of being killed, the back of covered trucks where she knocked against others like her, baggage holds, trunks of cars, train toilets, robberies, the joy of coming upon a half-full can or a sweater at the bottom of the garbage, freezing your ass off and filthy. And behind her curving back that’s already been through so much, things are fidgeting, stirring, shouting – behind her is Russia, the war, and Youri, her little brother the soldier, the one who was posted to Chechnya, the one she didn’t wait for. The one who left as a young man without knowing, not a war lover, no, more like a lazy sun-basking snake or a clever monkey, who left in January 2000 without knowing, in just the same way you’d get up from the couch to stretch your legs – and who is now charging into suspicious buildings in a suburb of Grozny, breaking down doors with great kicks, submachine gun held firmly against his hip and pointed inside at hypothetical enemy bodies vanishing into dark corners, staked out in the rubble, or covered in mud, and who freezes in front of the apartments, waits, listens, keeps watch, and at the least noise sprays a heavy shower, sprays a ton, sweeping the space with the gun rat a tat tat tat tat, sprays like a madman, and after a while he doesn’t even go to the trouble of listening first, nor of casting a look inside – he breaks down the door and machine-guns straight away without waiting – he’s that scared, he’s seen that many of his buddies in agony after being ambushed by surprise gunfire, and then have their throats cut post-mortem – he’s that terrorized, broken, out of his head, and that’s how crazed, deceitful, and fanatical the other side is, that’s how much they want his scalp, and through all this there’s th
e waste, there are drops, it leaks even, dammit it drips, blood and guts, there are cries and screams and old women and children, through all this he leaves a hell of a trail of carnage, that Youri, he spends his time machine-gunning, he’s the kamikaze of the squadron, he doesn’t know how to do anything but this anymore, and when he stops, it’s to drink his face off with other guys who, like him, left without knowing, or it’s to go to the brothel – but he can’t even get it up anymore, there are too many little noises in the room, too many suspicious breaths – or to write to Shakira, his beautiful sis. Shaki, wait for me, wait for me to get back to Moscow, we’ll get out of there together, I’ll have the cash. But Shaki left without him. And behind her, Youri breathes down her neck with his fraternal breath, a nauseating stench of gunpowder and hot blood.

  AFTER THE meal, Shakira steps away to compose a message on her phone and then suddenly does an about-face, decides to take a trip to the beach stretched out along the length of the river north of the city, and Sanche lets himself be carried along even though just the idea of a beach seems bizarre to him right now – a beach! – it hadn’t even crossed his mind – all he’s seen so far of Coca is an assembly of towers arranged in a geometric cadaster.

  On the way, they pass other sedans that are as powerful and drive past other buildings that are as dazzling although still unfinished. Shakira sums it up: here, the rules are simple – if you have money, come on in, and if not, well then, bye-bye! – her hands leave the wheel to illustrate the words – inward/outward flaps – and Sanche, gobsmacked, contracts his buttocks on the seat as the car plunges full speed ahead in the fast lane that hugs the river’s edge.

  Water-level parking lot, new cafés, patios, umbrellas with logos, cheery soundtrack, and always pop, synth versions of old standards. At this hour, a high-rolling sun varnishes the surface of the water and the sand of the beach sparkles like sugar. They walk to the shore. This is the only place where I feel happy, Shakira breathes deeply, sends her thongs clattering with a kick, walks towards the water, hikes her jeans up to mid-thigh, and enters the river, calling out to Sanche, come on! come on! and Sanche has the feeling that things are becoming clear. They’re becoming clear in a strange way, because his gaze abandons the girl to move farther off, towards Edgefront and the opposite bank: greens of all sorts mix their shades into a sonorous and profuse border of vegetation, tall as a man, a few roofs of sheet metal emerging here and there, shacks, motor boats anchored beneath the branches, rowboats, and pontoons floating on tires, and farther still, in the depth of the field, the rise of a forested mountain devours the sky loudly. Then, Shakira’s voice again, come on! come! She smiles at him from the riverside and he smiles back, shaking his head no, hands in his pockets and feet scraping the minuscule stones; and he’s sweating beneath his shirt, he’s thirsty, wipes the corners of his lips. So the Russian stepped from the water and walked straight towards Sanche with long strides, thighs streaming, hair floating like feather dusters, stopped right in front of him and commanded: take off your clothes. Weighed up like this, Sanche rubbed his chest with an indecisive hand: he hated to disappoint. Right now he’s wondering if he’ll have to carry out the lubricious actions appropriate to the situation – in other words, contained as they are within a limited perimeter and subject to high temperatures, he, a Russian girl, and green water bathing the length of a city given over, mouth open, to a future bridge; asks himself if the time had come to, if he was being watched, if this tall chick straight out of the taiga was a test, a lure; he unbuttons his collar, loosens his tie, suddenly catches sight of a guy combing the sand with a metal detector, warns the girl, careful, he’s going to get you – Shakira lets out a stunned whinny of a laugh and picks up her sandals, Sanche mops his forehead, and they leave the beach.

  Before starting the car again, Shakira had carefully wiped the sand off her feet with tissues slipped between her toes and then curtly crumpled and tossed out the window one by one, the whole box soon squandered. Sanche’s eyes had followed the white Kleenexes that floated in the air, fluttered softly, deformed by the slightest breeze, and finally settled on the ground, little by little smudging the entire landscape.

  THE SIREN sounds, Sanche gets into position. On the ground, carpenters, welders, and rock bolters press together, having stepped off the river shuttles. They wear hard hats, they’re getting ready, heavy-footed. They pace without getting anywhere. At the second sounding of the siren they remain aggregated, their shoulders move in an abnormal wave, and suddenly one guy steps away from the group – the others encircle him – he speaks for a long while, brandishes his fist, shakes his head no, and it seems like the others are with him. Sanche calls an engineer on the platform, the walkie-talkie crackles, there’s a lot of noise down there, shouts, stirrings of anger, what’s going on? A circumspect tone responds, things are heating up, the guys won’t go to work, there’s a communication breakdown. Sanche presses against the window to see better – an abnormal restlessness prevails below, the guys who try to head towards the crates are prevented by others who grab them, hurl abuses at them – features change in an instant: mouths that open wide, circumflex eyebrows, red blotches. The crowd has become a body shaken by spasms, Sanche thinks to himself someone’s gonna end up in the river, thinks the water’s freezing, doesn’t understand anything, and decides to climb down. Once he’s on the ground, what strikes him is the raging commotion, the tumult. The guy who set himself apart tries to keep the crowd calm, a white guy, torso narrow as a playing card, shoulders like a coat hanger, pointed, a kind of gypsy; he lifts two knotty arms to silence the crowd, hey, hey, two black sideburns lie like Arabic daggers along clean-shaven cheeks, and when his thin lips – a dark stroke – finally open, they spit out words one by one: no one goes to their station, no one – we want a daily raise, and until we get it, we don’t go back to work. His voice furls in the brief silence that follows, then spurts out again, playful for the first time, we didn’t get a Christmas bonus – well, we’re gonna get something better than that.

  Men are now forming a barricade across the platform, linking together, arms like basket handles threaded through one another, they align themselves solemnly. Sanche walks among the workers, curious, a little marmoset come down from his branch fishing for information, irresistible and a pain in the ass, smiling brightly, he doesn’t pass by unnoticed. After some time steering through the crowd, he finally comes upon the man who was speaking and asks him, what’s happening? The other scans him with a suspicious eye, what’s happening is that we want to be paid starting when we set foot on the work site, and not only from the time we fasten the first bolt, get it? Sanche nods his head yes and the other continues, speaking as though he was spitting with anger, they deduct the time it takes for us to get here, but the thing is it takes thirty, sometimes forty minutes between punching in on the platform and arriving here – so multiply that by two, coming and going, and that’s at least an hour extra per day – at least. We will not be exploited. The man is cold, rubs his hands together, looks at his ancestor’s watch on his wrist tattooed with barbed wire, we’d better not take too long or they’re gonna lose their temper in the back. At that moment a group of workers approaches, worried, we don’t want any trouble, we can’t afford to lose our jobs; and the man with sideburns slashes them with his eyes one by one, coldly, his mandibles pulse beneath their fur, baa, baa, so we’re sheep then? baa, baa – he scowls, terrifying in his anger – Sanche follows the exchange with fevered attention, wonders how this is all going to play out, already wants to be a part of it, when suddenly the guy with sideburns shouts at him with a jerk of his chin, you management? Sanche assents without blinking, and specifies as though apologizing, I’m not under local contract; the other looks at him contemptuously, well you’ve done well for yourself then, and turns back towards the men all packed together, stamping the ground, some of them smoking with hands cupped around their mouths as though to warm them. Sanche stands frozen in place, terribly alone.

  The w
orkers are trying to organize themselves now, talking about defending their interests, tongues are loosened: untenable pace, sketchy safety measures, shitty salary. The story of the twenty-five box girders per worker per workday – this means three assembled per hour in the deafening noise, discomfort, and glacial cold – is brought up again: the guys shout that the box girders have been badly assembled in the prefab workshops, that all too often they have to weld in order to make sure the steel pieces fit, to standardize them, to make them watertight, and that this slows the rhythm – and not all of them are trained welders, a certified skill, a craftsman’s job. The man with sideburns walks among them, introduces himself – he’s a carpenter, from Ontario, and Seamus O’Shaughnessy is his name. From time to time he casts a glance at his watch and eventually comes back towards Sanche, you – you’re management, so call the bosses and tell them to step on it, we’re cold out here. Sanche nods okay, steps away from the group – happy to be the messenger – calls Diderot, who picks up, listens, asks him to specify the number of guys and the causes of the walkout – you can just see him twisting his mouth and stroking his chin – says okay, I’m coming.