Birth of a Bridge

by Maylis de Kerangal

  SOON A footbridge links the Coca bank to the Edgefront bank, a provisory suspension bridge whose line plays in the air like the fibre core of the cable, the interior thread around which the whole work will unfold. On the night it was finished, the workers advanced towards the centre from either side of the bridge, as was the custom, and broke bottles once the teams touched, they couldn’t believe it, the suspension bridge swayed, the wind rumbled under their hard hats, but dammit now you could cross, there were shouts, and finally, each one turned to go back to his side, most of them staggering.

  The same night, happy, Georges phones Katherine: come on, let’s go cross it together. His voice gets lost in the silence, from which an answer flows back without conviction, okay. They agree to meet on the Edgefront side in the spot where they left each other last time. Diderot, at the wheel of the Impala, waits for Katherine who finally arrives, walking fast, head down, a nervousness about her that doesn’t seem like her, gets into the car, and without even looking at him orders, let’s go, let’s get out of here! They drive towards the river, and, crossing the old Golden Bridge that’s living out its last days, they reach Coca. You okay? Diderot asks, when Katherine, opening the window, removes herself into the outside. Ashes fly about inside the car, they race towards the site. What’s going on? he insists, showing his badge at the electronic gate and later, standing opposite each other over the hood, he finally discerns Katherine’s face: a dark crescent stretches from cheekbone to brow. He doesn’t say anything but places a hand on her waist and leads her towards the quay. The path seems endless, they walk beneath the bridge and delicately accost the Coca entrance to the footbridge by climbing the banks, high here, and coffered with concrete blocks between which a little rudimentary staircase has been built. Diderot unlocks the double wire-mesh door and here they are stepping forward onto the provisional catwalk. It’s night, their steps resonate on the detachable floor of metallic slats. So, it’s almost done? Katherine asks, and Diderot answers, yeah, it’ll go quickly now, we’ll be finished by mid-August. She doesn’t react, asks him about the placing of the deck concrete, the next step, and Diderot explains, getting technical, two methods were in competition, always the famous controversy of concrete versus steel, and finally the solution of an orthotropic deck made of flat steel with two inches of levelling concrete was chosen, the question of the weight of the deck being a crucial aspect. Katherine, falsely cheerful, nods, she’s elsewhere, Diderot gets frustrated: all right, can you tell me what’s going on? Beneath them, the last ferries slog from one bank to the other, chockablock with laborious silhouettes squeezed in tight. This thing between us is going nowhere. She looks at her feet. Diderot pauses, could have expected anything from this woman, anything except that it could deflate like this, he points to the end of the bridge, actually I had the feeling that we were headed somewhere. Katherine’s face that lights up – he can see it, even in the dark – it’s true, she says, we’re walking towards Edgefront, and that’s home for me. Diderot softens, and so? We can stay a little longer, we can do what we want, right? No, Katherine digs in her heels, I can’t do what I want, I don’t live like that. I know, Diderot shrugs, I know, but she closes herself off, hard, I don’t think you could possibly know. They stand, unmoving. Because of your husband, your kids? He’s aggressive, furious with her in this moment, furious for having uttered these words. She hasn’t moved, says simply, nothing to do with them, I’m free, believe it or not, and I like my life. She takes out a cigarette that Diderot lights for her with a curt gesture, a gust hits the bridge, he doesn’t look at her, leans against the guardrail – fine, so what next? – suddenly in a hurry to be done with her, wanting to avoid murkiness, endless conversations pierced with sticky silences, sad banality, all this while they’re on their bridge, together, dammit, not just anywhere, and suddenly after a long silence he says, taking a gamble, okay, come live with me. She laughs right away, a radiant laugh, bad idea, I’m a piece of work, he feels like he’s finding her again, takes her in his arms out of joy, pulls her to him, I am aware, brushes a thumb over her tumid temple – the day before, she wasn’t able to dodge the metal stapler Lewis had thrown at her face when she was taking Matt’s side, accused by his father of stealing cash, his habit of grabbing objects within his reach and whipping them at her face, but this time Liam had risen up and threatened his father with a knife, I’ll kill you, quickly held back by Matt, and they had shouted, gone ballistic; and after placing a cold cloth on her temple in the microscopic bathroom, Katherine had come back to say to them all, let’s start over, we are not victims; throwing a hard glance at Lewis she’d repeated, there is not a single victim in this room, and later, while she was smoking under the awning outside in a rocking chair about to bust, while Billie was dressing her Barbie for a ball, Lewis had said very calmly that she was free to go, and she had looked him in the eye and shrugged, I know.

  Diderot and Thoreau have started walking again, you scared me, Diderot says quietly when they reach Edgefront, and Katherine answers I was scared too.

  BETWEEN MARKET AND COLFAX THERE’S California Street, parallel track that’s narrower, high concentration at its midpoint – at the level of city hall – of pubs, bowling alleys, bars – all of them large rooms with giant screens placed high against fake mahogany panelling, always the same dimness with a cherry shine. Sanche heads into this area around one o’clock in the morning on the nights when he works. He pushes open the door of La Scala or Sugar Falls, finds the rung of a barstool he can stand on, periscoping his neck around the room, and then, spotting the table, joins Seamus and Mo, two or three others – sometimes even Summer. He’s waited all day for this moment.

  BEER, WOMEN, a jukebox – paradise! It was in these terms that Seamus took possession of the table the first time they came in, only a few hours after the workers’ vote in favour of the bonus; that was almost three months ago already, and Sanche sidling in behind him had admired his virile nonchalance, the sexual authority that emanated from his body; people moved out of Seamus’s way, a barely perceptible step backwards that showed the effect of his aura, and in these overpopulated places, no one would think of picking a fight with him; many were they who, on the contrary (like Sanche), would have liked to share his table – baptized “the Irishman’s table” at the end of one night even though there was another always tagging along now, and that was Mo.

  Sanche rushes to the table, zigzags through the full and humid room, among the streaming foreheads, mouths moistened with alcohol and crazy allegations, he comes the way you’d throw yourself headfirst into the pirate’s treasure chest to touch the gold, to make your skin glow with the gleam of precious stones and feel their sharp edges against the flesh of your thumbs, he has stomach cramps, a painful abdomen from impatience and apprehension, and he’s barely completed the rounds of greeting, heart lifted and pumping hard in his chest, before he pulls out a chair and sits down, already observing those around him, crazily exulted to be in their company, uprooted, plucked and placed among these heads that are totally unique in the world, to be beside their callused feet, Seamus, the fox character from children’s books, fuzzy cheeks, long thick yellow nails, hard skin, one of his grandparents having disembarked in New York around 1850 – the Irish famine, human corpses rotting in piles in the hollows of embankments, hamlets that empty out and are abandoned – no education, no talent, no money – migrates towards the north with a rudimentary compass in his stomach, looking for enough to live on, subsistence, that’s all, not a destiny or even a new beginning just something to eat and drink, something to take shelter under, and something to clothe himself in, to occupy the strength of his arms, and then the scattering of a lineage, genealogical absences, empty spaces in the forms, names noted wrongly sediment in their misprints; and at the end, this head, on the alert, this something hirsute and irreducible, and these feet that will soon be on the road again, well versed in the acceptance of loss, definitively eccentric: and glued to his side, clever Mo, who’s obsessed by
the screen like a possible space of isolation in this plurality of places and paths, a sphere of relaxation where he can unwind a little, release his effort; a woman undulates there, hair swelled by an artificial breeze and skin rounded within the confines of a bikini, she’s very blonde, in perfect health, he stares at her, imperturbable, ready to duck out at any second, to veer elsewhere, on a new line segment, a new tangent, why not Africa; and sometimes, but more rarely, convinced by Sanche to rejoin the table at the cost of long minutes of telephone negotiations, there’s Summer, with her ponytail trapped in a triple elastic twist, Summer with her cold feet who gets drunk methodically – who comes there to get drunk, doesn’t quite know what to do with herself when she’s not working – flushes when teased and called “Miss Concrete,” ebbs back in her chair when Seamus brings his scarred face towards her and shows her the black interior of his mouth, stop it, she says without smiling but soon it’s she who sways forward seeking that same mouth that scares her, an oscillation that makes her dizzier than the alcohol and saws away at the invisible tether that joins her to her country of birth, this cord stretched to the limit that Sanche had cut brutally, with a gesture that was even more sudden than the process to accomplish it had been slow.

  THE FIRST part was a regular exchange, although it had been agreed upon, that lasted all autumn, it was letters along with telephone calls, his mother – and his father behind her – invariably soliciting positive responses to questions he doesn’t care about – are you eating well? Are you well respected? Have you written to Augusta? Are you putting money aside? – questions, questions, always questions. As though their common language couldn’t break free from the regime of the interrogator, asking signified a reminder of his mother’s hard-earned right, her enduring right to be informed about his life, to possess him; and replying signified similarly the proof of his filial love. Soon, Sanche – who knows their conversation inside and out before even picking up the handset, and can’t stand being forced into this positivity – grows aggressive, he mocks them, he tells them off but always runs into this wall called his mother’s radical worry, this frenzied bias she has towards him. It comes to a head in December: despite his efforts to talk to his parents about the site and the people he’s meeting here – it was Christmas Day – here he is again irrevocably driven into the ever narrower and more pitiable groove of reassurance. His jaw locks, he hangs up, and never picks up again – too stirred up to compose the phrase that would express, without harshness, the tiniest bit of the violent pleasure he feels living here, far from her, far from them. He feels remorse, has a guilty conscience – reading their name in the messages on his cellphone; his chest is suddenly compressed upon finding a letter or a package in his mailbox, his saliva gets heavier, he sweats, horrified – but doesn’t regret a thing. Something has been broken. That’s life, he sometimes thinks, during the daily commute home.

  One day in March, however, someone comes to get him in the locker room while Seamus is talking to him about a site where he’ll probably go after Coca, a uranium mine in Canada, and Sanche, vexed, follows the messenger back towards the administrative offices, who is it? The guy answers, I don’t know, it’s a woman, and Sanche logically assumes that it must be the owner of his studio apartment who has pursued him all the way to his workplace, some story about a water leak that has nothing to do with him, he scowls, the messenger says into the handset, here he is, and then Sanche holds the phone and recognizes, crystal clear, as though uttered from just a step away, the voice of his mother: Sanche, is that you? Sanche freezes, doesn’t answer. His mother is here. She came all the way here. The ground opens beneath his feet, chasm of claustrophobic Sundays and the viscosity of lace doilies on the television, the voice repeats, Sanche? Sanche, it’s me, it’s Mom, is that you? Once again he’ll have to answer yes – yes, Mom, yes it’s me – but Sanche doesn’t want any more questions, doesn’t want to say yes anymore, so he says without trembling, no, it’s not me, but the voice attacks again, at once stronger and more fragile, Sanche? Sanche is that you? and Sanche catching his breath one last time says very distinctly, bringing his mouth close to the receiver and almost in spite of himself modulating a definitive voice, no, no, ma’am, no, I don’t know you, cuts off the communication with his index finger, slowly hangs up the receiver, turns, and now goes charging down the hallway banging into others as he does, hurtles down the small stairway, crosses the work site, running till he’s breathless towards the locker rooms, running with all his might, nothing is more urgent in this precise instant than catching up with Seamus, and Mo, and the other guys from the site, and when he sees their silhouettes getting ready to leave the platform, he speeds up even more till he gets to the bus and mixes in with them, very agitated, his brain like a full tank on a boat that pitches and heaves, a tank of methane or gas, a highly flammable tank in any case, and from that moment on he’s full of a new intuition that something extraordinary is going to happen to him now, is going to transpire, here, in a few days or a few seconds: right now nothing is irrevocable because he has no link to anyone anymore – everything is within his reach.

  WHAT HAPPENS to him, what comes into arm’s reach with the return of the good weather, could very well be Shakira, for example; she too is a night owl, she too has powerful feet and a befitting body, rushing through the city like a snowball, each day growing thicker and more friable than the day before. When she arrives one May night at La Scala or at Sugar Falls, she doesn’t need to climb onto the rung of a chair to see who’s there, all she needs to do is throw a quick glance around the room to untangle the aggregated silhouettes, and in the middle she recognizes Sanche, remembers the airport and the dip in the river – he’s not the one she’s looking for and who she’d like to kill at this moment, but his table offers a target to aim for so she heads there. Sanche nearly falls off his chair when he sees her coming towards him, like the lid of the treasure chest lifting slowly: here it is, the pirate’s gold.

  SUMMER WALKS TOWARDS THE QUAY AT A GOOD clip, full dawn, brilliant skin, cool nape, optimistic girl overflowing with verve, this day is mine and I dance for it blah blah blah, she’s steady, goes without rushing, crosses intersections on the diagonal so as not to deviate from her initial idea: today I will cross to the other side of the water.

  In less than twenty minutes she reaches the banks: the sky is suddenly wide, flared like a basin, the clamour breaks through, and the light whitens. Summer reaches the dock, there, a vending machine, she buys a bottle of water and empties it in one gulp, elbow raised to vertical, she’s sweating, takes her place in the short line of people waiting to buy a ticket for the journey, and once the price of the crossing is settled, goes down the steel gangway, jumps into the barge, and, following the wave of people boarding, finds herself in a large room, clammy and sonorous, the windows are dirty, the ceiling low, the odour heavy. Most of the people who boarded with her have spread out along the benches and settled themselves against the walls, chin to chest and arms folded into pillows, eyes soon closed, they worked the night shift in bars, hotels, casinos, gambling dens, and nightclubs in the city, and will soon collapse into unmade beds, shivering, shirts bunched up at the foot of the bed – dirty collars, ties knotted still, just loosened and pulled over their heads, cuff unbuttoned with weary hands.

  THE SIREN bawls, the ferry jolts sideways from the dock, and Summer gets up, strolls along the benches, those who aren’t sleeping cast hostile glances towards her; she reaches the upper deck, looks for an observation post, finds one at the prow in front of a pickup full of worn-out tires, two guys – Natives, stocky, wide-brimmed black felt hats, turquoise jewellery – smoke cigarettes and parley in low voices, indifferent to the deafening motors, indifferent to the odour of rot – wood, fish, fruit – that clings to the hull. Summer wants to take advantage of the view for the less than twenty minutes it takes to cross from one bank to the other. At this hour, the river is mauve, languid, large and oily folds, no reflection. She looks at the city as it softly
grows distant, revealing itself whole as it shrinks, leaning over the greyish eddies that coagulate and dissolve against the hull, while before her, in an opposite movement, the forest rises, rises, huge and black, devouring space. At the exact moment when she passes the median of the river, suddenly close to nothing, far from everything, her heart tightens, tears rise to her eyes in a handful of seconds; the smell of fuel, she thinks as she closes her eyes, it stinks, it’s going to give me a headache, and suddenly breathless, she nearly falls over backwards. An immense fear. She knows the one. It’s Sunday on the Porte Dorée lake, at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes. Late afternoon. She’s five years old. There are four of them in the boat. Her father, her mother, her brother, and her. It’s the end of winter and it’s a sunny cold. They’re rowing. They pass temples, grottos, mills, rotundas. The light on the water is magnificent. Her mother has reflections of gold on her face and she closes her eyes smiling above her shawl. It’s her father who’s in action. He leans forward, back, to the rhythm of his legs bending and unbending, the oars held firmly in the ring of the oarlocks. They move slowly. They glide over the lake. Little splashes fly into the air while the water creases here and there against the boat. Everything seems easy, beautiful. There is soft laughter in the air. The perfect postcard of a happy family. The boat is named Marianne, like her mother. They were glad to get this one, it’s a sign, honey, said her father as he held out his hand to his wife to step in. The Marianne is red edged with blue, slathered with thick paint that shows the trace of the brush and the drips solidified along the planking. Suddenly her father stands up, right in the middle of the lake. The boat rocks abruptly, her mother lets out a cry, her father bursts out laughing and grabs her little brother by the waist. He lifts him and holds him out over the lake. Her mother opens her eyes huge and stammers, what are you doing, stop. Her father laughs, he’s playing, don’t be so silly. The boat pitches in fits and starts. The little boy gesticulates, his thin ankles and his shoes with laces kick in the void, his father heaves him back and forth above the water as though he were going to throw him in. The little girl is petrified, clinging to her mother who’s screaming now, screaming at her father that he’s crazy, while he stands there, before them, immense, legs spread wide in the bottom of the boat. He laughs, opening his mouth wide. Then an oar slips from the oarlock and falls into the lake. Her father puts the little one down carelessly, swears, shit, then leans over the water and stretches out his arm but the oar is out of reach. The piece of wood floats for a moment on the surface, then disappears. Silently, they head back towards the wharf. The sun has set and it’s cold. Everything is sombre. On the banks, the naked trees bend frozen branches towards them. Her mother wraps the little boy in her arms and silently holds back her tears. Her father is out of breath trying to make the boat move with only one oar. He grows tired. The little girl is worried they’ll never get there. Once they’re back on land, her mother bursts into sobs and stammers incomprehensible words. Her father sighs, the evening is a disaster.