Birth of a Bridge Read online

  THEY WEREN’T the only ones to leave. All kinds of people set out in the violet night and converged in the city whose soda pop name jangled like thousands of corrosive little pins in their dry mouths. The want ads that popped up on the web called for cable riggers, ironworkers, welders, concrete form setters, asphalt paving crews, crane operators, scaffolding builders, heavy-lifting contractors, excavators – these skilled workers packed their bags in a single movement, synchronized, a tight manoeuvre, and set off by any means they could. A first wave stuffed themselves into cargo planes chartered by subcontractors who specialized in recruiting skilled labourers – these companies worked fast and with clichéd racism: preferring the strong Turk, the industrious Korean, the aesthetic Tunisian, the Finnish carpenter, the Austrian cabinet maker, and the Kenyan geometrician; avoiding the dancing Greek and the stormy Spaniard, the Japanese hypocrite and the impulsive Slav. The chosen ones, poor terrified guys dealing with their baptism by air, barfed up their guts at the back of the cabin. Others jumped on the backs of freight trains where they were immediately jounced about, asses bouncing on the floor as though on a tatami, and propped themselves up against their bags that knocked together, soon dizzy with noise and dust, heads between their knees because their eyes were tearing. And there were others still who boarded the buses that fill the night highway, those public dangers handled by drivers with bugged-out eyes – lack of sleep, coke – transport for the poor who don’t have three hundred dollars to put down on a used car and so are picked up like stragglers by the street sweeper, that’s why it stinks in here, the velour of the seats soaked with fatigue and cold sweat, a smell of tired feet – we all know that’s the real smell of humanity; these ones wait in miserable little parking lots at the city limits and lift a gloomy arm so the driver will stop, the news of the site had spread like wildfire, and the city already shimmered in a corner of their brains; finally, there were some who arrived on foot, and it seemed that nothing could make them deviate from their path – they headed straight there, like dogs, as though they had followed the scent of a magic rag rubbed against their noses, while still others were simply vagrants, people for whom here or there was the same thing, who had a certain idea of their life and proudly believed that they had a right to adventure.

  A thin-legged Chinese fellow with a profile like a cliff is among these last – his name is Mo Yun. Nine months earlier, a miner among millions of others – miner because his father and mother are miners, miner because he’s nothing else and ’cause to descend to the bottom of the hole is simply to follow the greater movement – he suddenly turns his back on Datong, world capital of slag heaps, violent proletarian hot pot – a real survival instinct, since scampering off from the rut of childhood meant giving his youth a chance; after that, even if it was miserable, wandering has the taste of the potato chosen from among all the rest for its shape and colour, and the smallest radish smells like freedom. Mo crosses Mongolia huddled in the back of a four-by-four with a couple of Russian botanists, and once they’re in the suburbs of Ulan Bator, hops to his feet and turns off to the right, heads straight to the sea, three months of travelling, who knows with what money and especially where he finds the strength, then boards a Dutch container ship and does Vladivostok–Vancouver in fifteen days, fifteen days of darkness at the end of which Mo emerges from his waterproof bulkhead compartment one icy night. The city looks deserted. He heads south at the back of a Greyhound bus, and once he reaches San Francisco, Chinatown, knocks on the door of a scuzzy joint on Grant Avenue, a greasy but profitable dive where one of his uncles exploits him sixteen to eighteen hours a day for four months. It’s there, in the back kitchen, that he first hears talk of the bridge, and he calmly puts down teapots and rice boxes, unties his apron, passes through the restaurant by the central aisle, and pushes open the front door – the customers’ door, the main door – he chooses this one and not another one, the inaugural door, see ya! His brown feet, at present, are thickened with corns, callused, and etched with the wrinkled trace of the world map, he’s seventeen years old and he can see the lights of Coca.

  Among those who come to the site are Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, nineteen and twenty years old, red skin, black skin, mixed blood. For the moment they’re squatting against the wall drinking cans of beer in the parking lot of the Coca bus station. They’re out of breath, dazzled, just emerged from the opposite bank, rolled out of the forest after three months bushwhacking in a clandestine gold-panning station that was held up too often by police and ordinary crooks, three months sifting rivulets of a gold-bearing alluvium, necks devoured by parasites, nothing to eat but boiled beans and yucca in all its forms. They split from there and followed the ravines, feet bare inside their sneakers, mud up to their ankles, and sticky clay full of worms squelching between their toes slurp slurp, mosquitoes caught inside their jeans, ticks beneath their waistbands, but they have gold, yeah, a few ounces, a pinch, enough to buy themselves some tequila and a pork chop to cook over twigs snatched from the sickly weeds growing along the sidewalk on Colfax Avenue outside the city limits. In front of them, sitting on the hood of a Mercedes four-by-four, two men in steel-grey suits talk in low voices, put their heads together, then move towards them. They have recruitment forms in hand: a year of work, boys, a salary, health insurance, a pension, and the pride of participating in the creation of a historic landmark, a golden opportunity, the chance of a lifetime. The two boys hold the paper, don’t read it ’cause they can’t even read anymore, exchange a look, sign at the bottom, and receive a summons to appear on September 1st, and there it is, it’s done – they’re in, bridge men.

  WOMEN ARE there too who had to elbow their way in to get a job on the site. There are only a few, but they are there, polish corroded on black nails, mascara swaddling their lashes, the elastic of their panties worn out around blurry waists. They’ve done the calculations and come: the pay is good, especially if you include in advance overtime and compensation of all kinds. Most of these women cleared out of their homes overnight, telling their colleagues at the very last moment, with enough time to offload a plant or a cat into their affable hands, then a quick hug and whoosh, steering clear of beers between gals on the last night, steering clear of promises. Once in Coca, they lobbied Pontoverde’s local hiring office till they were hired, volunteered themselves for the hardest jobs, under-qualification requires it, and signed up for the shittiest hours – weekends, nights. Then they rented a room in one of the motels that abound on Colfax, their rival signs uncoiling thick fluorescent pink or golden-yellow ribbons into the night between the Kmarts, the Safeways, the Trader Joe’s, the Walgreens, the parking lots full of used cars, outlet stores, and all the discount clothing warehouses in the world.

  In one of these motels, the Black Rose, in one of these rooms with succinct furnishings and minimum comfort, one of these women, Katherine Thoreau, uncaps a Coors and smiles. She still has her parka on and a contract swells her breast pocket. None of the people watching TV – a man, two teenagers – looked up when she came in; we might even wonder if they heard her – well, I can confirm it: they heard her plain as day when she pushed open the door and then took a bottle from the fridge. She leans a shoulder against the wall, takes a mouthful straight from the bottle, and then, still smiling, says: I got it! The two boys leap up, yes! The younger one runs over to her, presses his cheek against her belly, and puts his arms around her waist. Katherine buries a hand in his mane, strokes him softly, thoughtful, then lifts her head – don’t you think the TV’s a bit loud? She meets the eyes, serious eyes, of the older one, and repeats, I got it, we’re gonna get through this; the teen nods his head and turns back to the screen. You can’t hear anything besides Larry King’s swinging and brutal, professional voice, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s laugh that displays her big teeth and pointed chin between golden curls, laughter and applause, the program’s credits. Katherine says again, turn it down a little, it’s too loud, it’s gonna give you a headache. She slowly finishes the bottl
e, then lifts the younger one’s head, still pressed against her, smooths her hand across his forehead and whispers, did you guys put Billie to bed? He gives a solemn nod. The man, disabled, immobile in his wheelchair, hasn’t lifted his gaze from the set, hasn’t once looked at his wife.

  ANOTHER WORKER joins the group without being noticed – not a single one among us would have cast an eye on his angular, shifty form, tattooed with a safety pin, a mistreated cat that would take a beating and dream of giving one in return. Soren Cry arrived after six days hitching from Kentucky and the Eastern Coalfields – a ghostly rural zone, scrappy, dismal little hamlets scattered over an area hammered with misery; drugs and alcohol to eradicate the threatening spectres of Cheyenne warriors hidden in the Appalachians; youth who bury their noses in rags soaked with white-spirit or turpentine, hunt squirrels with rifles, organize car rodeos in the mud, empty out cartridges into bottles of beer downed one after the other, light fires in the carcasses of rusty pickups, all this just to get their rocks off a little once night falls; they listen to heavy metal loud enough to burst their eardrums, music like decibels spewed, like death rattles. A quagmire. Kicked out of the army six months earlier for acts of violence against a superior – the colonel was a thirty-three-year-old woman, a technocrat hayseed who had humiliated him in public, treated him like a hillbilly, and spluttered in his face, no doubt because she’d seen too many movies, and something in him had given way. He broke her teeth. Since then he’s been living with his mother, taking one-off jobs, seasonal work, and the rest of the time, nothing, time off fiddling around, playing GameBoy in front of the TV in the condo he shares with this pious, poor, and depressive woman – who he has imagined stabbing to death or strangling countless times, but who he kisses tenderly each night on the temple – and probably he left so he wouldn’t have to kill her.

  SO IT’S a multitude that moves towards Coca, while another multitude escorts it, a thick and sonorous stream mixing chicken roasters, dentists, psychologists, hairdressers, pizzaiolos, pawnbrokers, prostitutes, laminators of official documents, television and multimedia device repairmen, public letter writers, T-shirt vendors, makers of laurel lotion to treat calluses and cream to kill lice, priests, and cellphone agents – all of these infiltrate the place, siphoned from the flood that such a site causes, betting on the economic spinoff of the thing and getting ready to collect this collateral manna like the first rain after a dry season, in stainless steel bowls.

  AUGUST 30TH, NEARLY NOON. HEADING TOWARDS the Coca airport is a young man at the wheel of a deep-blue Chevrolet Impala – heavy, slow, a clunker. Sanche Alphonse Cameron had rolled down the window to smell the asphalt burning, the freeway is new, fluid, he’s got a full tank of gas and seizes the day, knows that soon he’ll be spending his hours a hundred and fifty feet in the air at the controls of an amazing cab crane and that all this horizontal propulsion will be over.

  HE KNOWS the way: ten days earlier it was him landing at this airport where he was welcomed by his own name on a sign held by a large hand, a disproportionate hand, it had seemed to him at the time, with thick and slightly reddened digits, with manicured nails painted magenta, a hand extended from the robust body of Shakira Ourga – her husky voice rolled the R of her surname. Discovering her in entirety once she had extracted herself from the small waiting crowd, Sanche had to be careful not to let his gaze lose its head like an excited kid at the gates of the fairground, because the girl was tall, taller than him by a head, a bizarre body, thin and burly at once, a wide back and slender arms, prominent joints, narrow hips and round breasts held high without a bra beneath a thin camisole with spaghetti straps, long thighs moulded into a pair of jeans, tanned feet in heeled mules. She had picked up his suitcase while smiling at him, a smile as copious as the rest, and a stunned Sanche had followed her back pockets, flecked with glitter, to the metallic sedan that sparkled in the parking lot – the Russian’s beefeater step required him to synchronize his own and he trotted along behind. Cellphone meowing in her bag, she had walked away slowly from the car to raise her voice, furious, rapid delivery, coming back with a red ear and forced smile, and finally, looking over the roof of the car at Sanche, she’d put on a pair of black, monogrammed sunglasses and shouted in a thundering voice, welcome to Coca, the brand new Coca, the most fabulous town of the moment!

  SANCHE HEADS for the access ramps, double helixes of concrete that hover around the airport terminal, looks at his watch, he’s perfectly on time, drives the Chevrolet to the parking lot – seventh level underground, the walls seep – and when he returns to the light of day lifts his eyes towards the sky, cobalt-blue surface at this hour, hard, absolutely clean, an immense doorway: he’s come to pick up the man who, at this very moment, is flying above the territory of Coca in business class: Georges Diderot.

  THE PLANE begins its descent, fifty miles away. Passengers roll their necks and look at their watches, they’re hungry, the flight attendant walks slowly up the aisle, impeccable, banana chignon and flesh-coloured hose, casts quick lateral glances to verify seatbelts and the angle of seat backs, and sways her hips so gently that she calms the most aerophobic passengers, who always grow more tense during the landing. Georges Diderot crushes his profile against the double focal of the window, salivating, trembling: the theatre of operations. Here we are! he whispers into his burning hands cupped around his mouth. Two immense and Siamese regions are welded to each other via a serpentine seam below, and from this height it’s a wildly powerful blueprint. Diderot squints his eyes, his heart beats stronger, he’s touched to the core.

  TWELVE THOUSAND feet. The earth’s surface sharpens its binary partition: to the east, a clear stretch, chalky ceruse pulling at the pale yellow, dry stubble strewn with needles that converge in a metallic cluster; to the west, a dark mountain range, black moss with emerald highlights, dense, irregular. Ten thousand feet: the white zone vibrates, crackles, thousands of scattered splints sparkle while the black zone remains impenetrable, perfectly closed. Eight thousand feet. A frontline comes into view, organizing the two sides, against which they rub or slide like two tectonic plates along a fault line: the river. Diderot’s smile is a smile of complicity. Five thousand feet. Track the course of the river now as it vertebrates space, articulates it, breathes into it, a movement that gives it life. Three thousand feet. Watch from this sovereign height the river’s chromatic variations – red clayish brick all along the banks, dark and brown and then purplish blue at the midpoint of the bed, turquoise shadows at the edge of mangroves and white tongues in the hollows of the bends – an incision of colour in the middle of this space cleaved into black and white. Two thousand feet. Rapidly scan the ground that complexifies, there’s a tug-of-war below, a battle, disjuncture: a topography of confrontation and tension in relief, you’ll have to be careful. One thousand feet. Lean your head back and breathe widely, close your eyes, what is the job of the site? Bringing these two landscapes together – there, that’s the site, that’s the story: electric sintering, reconciliation, fluidizing of powers, elaboration of a relationship, this is what there is to do, this is the job, this is what’s waiting for me. Oh Lord!

  Later, at the very instant that the belly of the plane caressed the surface of the water before the asphalt of the runway, Diderot trembled violently, rapid spasms running under his skin, he shook his head. People cast worried or irritated glances his way. It was like seeing a large horse snorting at the back of its stall, digging in the straw with a hoof and demanding the outside, light and the prairie – but the truth is, it was just a shiver of joy and terror.

  HERE HE is now crossing the concourse of the airport, Diderot, you can’t miss him: he’s not that tall but he’s strong, dolichocephalic head and chest like a coffer, square wrists, long calm legs, tanned close-shaven face, rotted teeth, white hair swept back and crowned with tinted Ray-Bans, and always this air of having just arrived from very far away, from the confines of space with the wind of the plains at his back – Astana, Kazakhstan: th
e presidential palace unveiled three days earlier was a replica of the White House – Diderot had delivered the work on time to the local dictator and had gotten violently drunk the same evening with a young chess master just returned from Berlin. Sanche parts the crowd, heading to meet him, extended hand exaggeratedly firm, and takes it all in: the aviator jacket, the diver’s watch, the white shirt with the collar turned up, the soft loafers, the clean jeans belted at the waist, and the folded newspaper under his arm, the red leather sports bag inside which a number of objects jostle in rhythm: laptop, high-power Maglite, tape measure, change of white shirt, underwear, a few packs of Lusitanias, thick wad of cash, and, protected inside a thick three-ringed binder, a half-size set of plans for the bridge to be built. Greetings, handshakes in the middle of the wave of travellers. Diderot, says Diderot, and Sanche responds, Sanche Alphonse Cameron – his full name, since Sanche Cameron smells too much of that little Spanish follower and Sanche is only five foot three – whereas Alphonse, standing right in the middle with the A in the shape of a mountain, this gives him a few more inches: Alphonse, a royal name in Spain, is his symbolic high heel.