Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  DIDEROT’S ARRIVAL on the Edgefront site causes an awestruck silence, a mixture of reticence and curiosity. They all know his form by heart and step aside to let him pass. Who’s the spokesperson? At these words the silence grows thicker, and then Seamus O’Shaughnessy steps forward from the ranks, his lips pressed so tightly together that they are no more than a notch on his disturbing face: I am. The two men size each other up. Seamus restates the demand – always this same clipped phrasing, lips that pull back to reveal his gums: a raise of one hour per workday. Diderot looks at the guys, says we can’t do it: an hour a day is six per week, twenty-four per month, etc., multiplied by the number of salaries, I don’t have to spell it out for you, it’s pie in the sky. Oh yeah, what do you mean pie in the sky? Seamus grows tense, body like a tight fist pushed deep in a pocket, and Diderot says drily, you’ll never get it. Seamus turns towards the others, okay, so we’ll put the strike to a vote: if we don’t get a raise, we stop working. The guys start to get riled up, swell slowly in a great collective movement – it’s quite beautiful to behold – and now some of them address Diderot directly without any more protocol, some of them call him by name – Diderot doesn’t have superpowers, he’s just a man with two arms and two legs and a hard hat on his head, and he too is in deep at the moment – they repeat, we wanna be paid for the travel time, or we walk out; their voices overlap and comfort one another, one guy takes it further, yeah, and we’ll occupy the site. The hot flame of anger is reawakened in their eyes all around, the feeling of power, yeah, we’ll stay, we are the bridge. Sanche has stepped up onto a crate, we’re in a power struggle now, he trembles, excited, and watches Diderot evaluate the situation, weighing the seriousness of the crisis, knowing he has to work something out quickly, has to find a solution. Diderot states slowly, almost solemnly: I agree with the principle. Some of the guys shout, applaud, someone lifts a woman up by the waist, everyone starts pushing against each other; Seamus throws them a wrathful look, what are they thinking? We’re not here to celebrate Santa’s generosity, we’re here to put pressure on the boss. Diderot quells the crowd again immediately by announcing, with a lift of his hand, hang on, now we’ll have to do the calculations. Gust of silence and ebb of enthusiasm among those facing him, you won’t get rid of us with a few extra crumbs, we won’t let ourselves be walked all over, says the woman who was just lifted up in triumph.

  DIDEROT PICKS up the pace now, points to Sanche, you, come with me; and turning to Seamus O’Shaughnessy, asks him to also choose a witness – he picks Mo Yun, petrified in the front lines and whose excessively large hard hat half-closes his agitated eyelids. Diderot elucidates his method: synchronize your watches, we’re going to take the trip together, the weather conditions are normal, we’ll time the exact length of the trip from the locker rooms to the site, and when that’s done, and only then, we’ll negotiate.

  The quartet sets out in the shuttle back towards the Pontoverde platform, moving farther away, leaving the workers a little lost – some raise their hands and wave as though they were heading off on a long voyage. After a few minutes, Seamus points out to Diderot that in fact this is a speedboat and not the slower river shuttle that transports the workers from one end of the site to the other – he specifies, tensely, I’m telling you because we need to be meticulous. Diderot nods, that’s true, and asks the driver to adjust his speed to that of the workers’ boat.

  The bow streams along the corridor in the frozen river, conquered that very morning by other ships, the layer of ice hasn’t closed over again, and they can hear the water splashing against the hull, no one speaks on-board as though they were all thinking only about the time that passes, that materializes in this spray, thick and white, exploding in heavy pendants and then slowly dissipating into greyish strands. Diderot thinks: this is not the first time he’s been confronted with a crisis, nor threatened with a strike – but the previous times, the guys were organized, represented by unions, negotiations followed an official protocol, discussions moved along a clear track, bolted step by step according to a pre-established timeline, each emissary with a few cards up his sleeve. But in Coca – which is, after all, a remote nowhere – the teams mix several different nationalities, the projects require the workers to split up on sites that are far from one another, and, moreover, everything was thought through so as to prevent their coagulating forces: at least half of those hired are under short-term contracts, weekly gigs that, even though they are automatically renewed from one week to the next, thus creating identical linear presences, still instill a sense of profound difference in status among workers on the site, maintain a feeling of precariousness in some – that of a vacation that could end at any moment – and in others, some of whom were lucky enough to have a year-long contract, a feeling of privilege, of a security that should be protected at all costs, the naive sense that they are sitting on a sack of gold, and that there should be no false moves, easy, Tiger, no point in trashing this incredible luck for nothing. And so the conflict had immediately taken on a primitive aspect – a gust of wind whipping, a fire spilling over, a fist in the stomach – it is sudden, confused, unpredictable, gathered up into a single violent desire for justice that shines a torchlight on all the faces; and it is exactly this that shakes Diderot.

  Fifteen minutes have already passed in the trip. With his face turned towards the prow, delighting in the frontality smacking him in the face, Sanche prepares himself for his first conflict – so happy in this moment to be in the heart of the action, recollecting as best he can the greatest moments in the labour movement as told by the man from Nouakchott over the long nights when they had sweated together – while Mo Yun, not used to being singled out from a group, is standing circumspect. Once they arrive at the Pontoverde platform, they walk towards the workers’ facilities, crossing the esplanade at such an absurdly normal pace that Sanche stumbles, he’s trying so hard to control his ankles. At the door of the building each one of them reads his watch face aloud, elbow lifted to horizontal, and Diderot concludes: the trip took twenty-six minutes, are we all agreed? The others nod. All right. We can begin negotiations.

  ONCE AGAIN the overheated room, once again the schoolroom table and chairs, once again the tension partitioning the room into two camps – the bosses (Diderot, Sanche) – before the workers (O’Shaughnessy, Yun). And they’re off. Seamus, diving right in, restates the demand for a raise: fifty-two minutes of supplementary wages calculated in proportion to an hour of salaried work and multiplied by the number of days worked. Sanche, who volunteered to be secretary of the meeting, scrupulously notes the demand, and after a few minutes Diderot presses the speaker button on the telephone and begins to read this paper to the board members who, practically ulcerated, pass the words along – you have to handle the troops, Georges, the CEO scolds him thoroughly – a raise of this much is impossible, and I’ll remind you that the work just got extended by at least three weeks because of these bloody stupid sparrows – and suddenly there’s nothing more idiotic on earth than these voices, these little authoritarian gullets that, through the intermittence of the satellite connection, become vulnerable, quavering even, mixing in with the static and the inopportune echoes, the satellite delays – it becomes completely staggering to think that these nebulous packets of vocal waves could have a part in this story, that they’d be granted room to manoeuvre, and even crazier to think that they’d be obeyed – it was all such a farce – and Diderot tried to hold back the hysterical laughter that rose up in him. And when he summarized the conflict for them, he kept to the essentials: the workforce is paid for eight hours of work even though they’re here for nine hours, so either you stretch out the dough or we tighten up the shifts – in any case you’ve gotta move fast or the guys won’t go back to work, the strike will be put to a vote at noon, and then we will have lost the whole day.

  SIX O’CLOCK strikes now at head office in Bécon-les-Bruyères, a crisis committee meets chop chop, and already the financial directors are in violent
opposition, those who are for a raise arguing that a reduction in work time will lead to paying much higher lateness compensation to the municipality of Coca, and those who are for a reduction in work time panicking at the thought that the bridge’s budget will explode if they pay this additional hour. Calculators heat up between impeccably manicured hands. Some of them, zealous, frenetic, compare the cost of laying off the troublemakers to that of importing dependable workers, and others imagine the worst – what if this spreads like wildfire and contaminates the whole site? They’re so worked up they don’t even notice night falling like a slipcover over the Héraclès tower, while thousands of miles away, in another latitude, closer to the equator, a winter sun forces its way behind the clouds, bleaching their dirty whites, and they sweat it out in the meeting room, it’s almost twelve o’clock.

  SEATED AT his desk, Diderot scrolls through the reverse schedule for the umpteenth time. Lifting his head to the three others, he suddenly says: okay, we’ll work it out between us. Seamus starts, immediately mistrusting this “us” that stinks of trouble, mafia collusions, secret deals, familial scheming, everything that disgusts him – and he has reason to be mistrustful: Diderot is not on the workers’ side, doesn’t know a thing about a guilty conscience, and if he speaks about an egalitarian “between us,” it’s out of pragmatism, to find the solution that will put everyone back to work the fastest. Seamus resists, demands a proper agreement, an official, signed document, a guarantee: there’s no “us” here, Mr. Diderot, we just want our extra hour. For his part, Mo Yun nods his head and tries to remain invisible, worried that this confrontation might be hiding certain stakes that his rudimentary English could miss, worried it will go to court – and then, he’s certain he’ll be the accused who’s forced into a public confession before ending up in a hole somewhere with a bullet in the back of his head; he thinks back to Datong and all those he saw marching in the People’s Square, dunce caps on their heads and signs on their backs, and although he thinks long and hard he can’t figure out how he could have been noticed, he who always keeps his head down, stammers and trembles – now he looks for a pretext to be able to leave the room while in front of him Sanche holds his breath – his first social conflict can’t just pass by right under his nose, he’s got to really feel the thing. This is when Diderot gets up, massive, swings forward with all his weight to slap his hands down flat on the table – they’re enormous, stretched out like that, fingers spread out from one another, like great paws – and leaning forward, he looks Seamus in the eye, brows raised so high they’re lost in the creases of his forehead. He speaks in a confident tone, without yelling: the balance of power is not in my favour, the site is already behind schedule, we absolutely can’t allow a strike – I deliver on time, I’ve always delivered on time, it’s a question of principle. Sorry, but that’s not my problem, O’Shaughnessy shakes his head and he too leans forward over the table, my problem is a fair wage. He shoots Diderot an inflexible look and remains tense when he answers, the directors will never budge, you’re wasting your time: I propose the following agreement, you can take it or leave it: compensation for the transport time, per worker – twenty-six minutes multiplied by two and multiplied by a hundred – now it’s up to you if you want to enter into a conflict with Pontoverde. Why a hundred? Seamus asks, suspicious, because in a hundred days we will have finished raising these goddamn towers. Diderot gets up to open the window. And what if the work drags on? Seamus’s voice behind him. Diderot whips around: you’ll get nothing more on the salaries, they can wait for weeks, but you guys can’t and neither can I. I’ll talk to the guys, they can decide – Seamus is already getting up from the table and leaves the room holding the written proposal that Sanche, deeply moved, has just handed him.

  TWO HOURS later, while Diderot was calling the board to tell them about the agreement and the amount of the bonus – a done deal that illustrates how his is a regime of exceptions within the consortium and betrays his power – not a single executive bats an eye, you want the work to keep going, right? – the guys on the tower carry Seamus O’Shaughnessy and Mo Yun in victory and snap away at them with their cellphones – Mo Yun in an absolute panic now, agoraphobic and desperate to escape these arms carrying them, these hands touching them – and Sanche applauding what he calls the workers’ victory – swift conflict and baptism by fire in which, in his mind, countless future promises can be seen.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF MARCH, A PONTOVERDE delegation arrives on-site for an official visit commentated by Ralph Waldo himself, a squadron of senior executives with great potential, to which the Boa adds his own contingent of loyalists, as well as some councillors from the opposition who he hopes to neutralize, placing himself at the head of the group – twenty men and three women – and once they all have their hard hats on, this tribe strolls from one end of the site to the other after Diderot has greeted each of them with a handshake and an offer of coffee and cookies in the meeting room of the main building – some are surprised at the destitution of the place, at the insipidity of the coffee, but they approve of the heating system which they study as though they were potential buyers when in truth they’re just dawdling, because outside Coca’s continental climate continues to assert its brutality, a biting cold darned with blizzards stings the cheeks, assaults shoe leather, penetrates gloves: when they leave, they’ll step out backwards.

  FOR DIDEROT, these visits are nothing but a big pain in the ass – people will scrutinize his way of doing things, will ask questions, will wait to catch him out: this business of the transit bonus is still fresh in their minds, a fait accompli that he has not yet been forgiven for; Héraclès had had to convince the other parties that make up Pontoverde (Blackoak Inc. and Green Shiva Co.) to pull out their pocketbooks, which prejudiced people against him; and the South Asians, among others, had taken malicious pleasure in mocking these screw-ups, threatening to send in inspectors.

  The delegation is invited to come quickly to the site because now there’s something to see – the towers – and they get moving. The Natives, warm inside appropriate clothing – thick canvas, fur mitts, fur-lined waterproof boots – stand out from the rest, relaxed, movements loose and smiles on their lips. The executive directors of the consortium, on the other hand, collate their active lightweight shells, bottle-green or sea-blue jackets with corduroy collars, waterproof but not very warm, which they wear on family sailing regattas in the summer offshore from Trinité-sur-Mer in France; they blow on their hands, stamp the ground with their trekking shoes, letting fall a fine clay powder stuck to their soles since Easter hikes on the Pyrenean slopes, when they went valiantly from shelter to shelter with a walking stick in hand, pulling a recalcitrant horde of kids behind them who beg for a Coke each time they stop, never lifting their eyes to admire the sublime peaks, the mountain sheep, and the unparalleled beauty of the wildflowers. These ones had just boarded the rapid shuttles splitting through the squall and already their extremities were red, especially their noses; their lips turned practically the colour of eggplants, the circles under their eyes deepened, retracting them into the back of their sockets – but not one of them dares to speak about the glacial temperature – virility will not allow it, and after all, the guys on the bridge work outside all the time.

  WHEN THE large river shuttle comes into view of the bridge towers, a few men whistle, suggesting that the site is much further along than they would have thought, and, reassured, grimace their contentment. It’s all taking shape, one of the Héraclès legal counsel concludes. The towers are indeed impressive already, slender and vigorous, flagpoles without any fanfare besides their scarlet verticality. Since their elevation progresses at a constant rhythm, the joke is that they are building themselves, as though their form, their shape is only the consequence of a congenital movement – as though they are actually developing from the inside. But behind the steel walls, it’s an insane mechanics that proliferates upward, a labyrinth of box girders where workers could get lost looking for th
e one they were working on the day before; it’s the din of welders echoed, multiplied, boring into eardrums amid the smell of hot metal, it’s the explosive atmosphere of a blast-off.

  But for Coca’s inhabitants, the most striking thing has less to do with the towers’ construction than with their sudden presence in the city. An event that affects time as much as it does space. A split. We can never go back. From now on, never and always would come up in office conversation, in hallways and lobbies, and the higher the towers grew, the more thoroughly something was erased, relegated to the past – and all the more swallowed up, all the more lost since this past was so close and intimate, that much more irretrievable since this past was just yesterday, it was the city “before the towers” that would soon be the city “before the bridge.” Something had died, and so what did it matter, the idea of progress attached to the work, what did modernity matter and the need to get with the times, thinking about it dealt a wicked blow.

  Getting used to these red metal towers wasn’t easy – nothing in their shape or their material helped them to blend into the landscape, to infiltrate it gently. They tripped up the gaze, these superstructures, while at the same time – a paradox that provoked hours of discussion – they stood with a disconcerting simplicity, nearly enigmatic, like elements of a decor that had been waiting in the wings and whose hour had finally come to appear onstage, rising up in exactly the spot where two crosses on the ground had marked their places, sure, incontestable. They rose from the water and the inhabitants oscillated, lost souls without any points of reference anymore, and many were those who urgently set about recounting anecdotes that traced the story of their lives against that of the area, scanning backwards across the urban temporality to unearth lost pathways; tongues came unknotted and spoke of meeting places that don’t exist anymore, travel times that have been shortened, walks that have become dangerous, ferry routes that have disappeared, and the subject of horses came up often; then they would blink in the direction of the bridge, and in a grand gesture of appetence they would suddenly argue that really, it was as though these towers had always been there, or at least as though we’d always been waiting for them, and that they had only come to occupy a designated space already carved out for them, and wasn’t it all so strange.