Birth of a Bridge Read online

  IN COCA, what is now called the Dubai Trip creates a buzz. Its influence can be measured in the feverish urbanism that seizes the city. From then on the Boa is crystal clear about the single goal for his city council: put an end to three centuries of conservative prudence, once and for all get rid of the stranglehold of old money that reigns in the affluent downtown neighbourhoods, cut down the dynasties of the Cripplecrows and the Sandlesses that have been rubbing shoulders incestuously for the past two centuries, between satin sheets and plumes of cigar smoke – rather than being leaders of the city, they are masters over it. He wants to be done with their erudite conceit, their culture, their archives, too much Europe here, too much Europe, he repeats this time and again, heavy identity, sticky traditions: it stinks of death! He gets to work busting open the city centre, breaking its hard pit, its historical pit, pulverizing its meaning and scattering it to the periphery. The old buildings and bourgeois neighbourhoods, traces of the origins and symbol of the pioneers’ values – physical courage, a spirit of conquest, work, piety, monogamy, and all other qualities that glorify rootedness – are removed to museums: dust is what suits them best, sneers the Boa, his action is oriented elsewhere, out of range of patrimony, far from all the old fictions that begat the city plan. I’m going to air out all that. I’m going to free the city and put it on the world map. An era of grand manoeuvres follows, in which manila envelopes circulate containing wads of new bills that crinkle like biscuits.

  In less than three months, the Boa manages to have Coca declared a free-trade zone by the Senate and twinned with Dubai; obtains, from the state bank – now under control of his own investment company – a loan at a low fixed rate for a large-scale city planning venture, and grants the municipality a lease of fifty years for each main facility. His private collusions in municipal projects alarm his shrewdest and most servile collaborators alike, but not one of them says a word and everyone knows why: the Boa presides over a fortress built on insider influence and he controls all the entrances and all the elevators, he is strong, rich, and not too concerned about the price one has to pay in order to remain in the good graces of the city’s respected institutions and organizations. Anywhere he can, he uses the tactics of the carnivorous reptiles he’s hunted since he was a child, and deploys such discreet strategies that only those who have a darkness to match his own can detect the long-term predatory power – these rare few, rendered speechless and weak, run for their lives – and then, buoyed up as he is by microscopic advantages that accumulate and activate one another, with the icy brutality that is his trademark, the Boa shifts without warning into attack mode and strikes. Those who might have tried to stand in his way are publicly mocked, dried up, simple-minded, sad. They don’t understand anything about the ways of the world. He’s sorry, but he eliminates them – what else do you expect, really, what do you want me to do? The implacable machine that’s running now at full throttle slowly suffocates them. After all, isn’t the Boa acting for the good of the city? Doesn’t he put himself entirely – himself, his companies, his screens, his men, his dogs – at the service of his fellow citizens? He has ideas for Coca – he was elected and he’s a man who keeps his promises: he is John the benefactor.

  FROM THEN on, he commands the territory by ukase, walking slowly around the huge maquette of the city he’s had installed in the middle of his office – a general on a campaign planning strategies, that’s what he makes you think of – chest leaning over his scaled-down model, hands crossed behind his back, examining a portion of cardboard and then suddenly grabbing a wand and ordering an internet city here, a media city there, a shopping centre here – a maze of malls paved with porphyry and adorned with fountains and cappuccino kiosks – a multi-purpose stadium here, a skating rink in the shape of a flying saucer there, an underground multiplex with fifty rooms, a cinder track on the roof of a row of low-rise buildings, a casino under a glass bell. He wants transparency, plastic and polypropylene, rubber and melamine, all things provisional, consumable, disposable: everything must be mobile, light, convertible, and flexible. Supercharged, he devotes himself to the manipulation of giant Meccano that he reconfigures daily, intoxicated by the infinite scope of new formal possibilities, by the hubs he draws, by the work sites he carves out, by the activity centres he defines and positions on the map. He has only one idea left in mind: to pull Coca out of the provincial anonymity where it has been sleeping peacefully and convert it to the global economy. He wants to build the city of the third millennium, polyphonic and omnivorous, doped up on novelty, shaped for satisfaction, for pleasure, for the experience of consumption.

  AND YET there’s something that wounds his pride: isolated as it is, Coca’s energy is rationed and dependent upon the coastal cities. The investors have fled for this very reason – it’s impossible to squeeze development out of a stingy little dump with a tight-assed population where spending is watched so closely. Moreover, the oil tankers that supply the city and its few industrial sites only come grudgingly up the river to the storage tanks downstream – the Boa sees condescension in this – isn’t he paying them cash, for Christ’s sake? He fulminates, mulls things over – alone at first, because he’s convinced that his people are incapable of coming up with a single idea. One evening a documentary on biofuel is on TV. It’s a revelation – he’s hooked by the subject and proceeds to study it in depth. Corn grows abundantly in the valley, and Coca has thousands of acres of preserves – the high red plains and the forest, whose edges could be cleared out, plus the interior of the massif if the Natives “play the game” – just don’t screw us over, that’s all I ask of them – this is how the Boa talks to himself. At the end of a brisk council meeting held at the beginning of March, he decides to convert the city to ethanol. An independent port will be constructed upstream at the oxbow in the river, a terminal with the capacity to hold ships of all tonnages and the corollary refineries. Fuelled thus, the city will export the surplus of energy to the coast, reverse the trend and shine at the forefront of global eco strategies. Coca, the green city! The Boa rubs his hands together, delighted with his coup, he’s done well. Now he just needs a bridge. A bridge by which they can enter the forest and reach the fertile valleys southeast of the mountain range, a bridge to connect the city to Ocean Bay.

  The old Golden Bridge is in the crosshairs. The thing is narrow, it strangles traffic, causing irritation, middle fingers brandished through car windows, slowing the pace and putting business in peril. It doesn’t suffice. The Boa can’t even look at it anymore without flying into a rage. I want to be finished with the slow, the old, the broken down. I want it destroyed. I want it tossed in the trash, the rubbish; I want it to fall into decay, to be torn to shreds. Certain associations, however, are up in arms. Petitions circulate to save the bridge – it’s the soul of our city, a piece of our identity, it holds our memories – deploring the homogenization of cities, all the fast-food joints and clothing-store signs identical from Quito to Vladivostok, specificities of identity caving under capitalist pressure, globalization contaminating the tiniest bit of sidewalk and harmonizing every storefront. The Boa is dumbstruck – he hears but doesn’t understand, doesn’t see the problem, appeals to the desires of youth and modernity: enough! What a drag! What’s wrong with wanting to move forward? And anyway the old bridge is falling into ruin and the river beneath its piers is dark, putrid. Rust wreaks a toxic leprosy on the beams and girders, the wood of the deck is cracking, you can feel it move. The Natives ended up colonizing the little covered stalls lining the bridge deck, tiny little alcoves where they coagulate for entire days, heaped together smoking or half-heartedly selling all kinds of jewellery, charms, pipes, trinkets. Little pieces of crap for little budgets, thinks the Boa: I want it gone.

  SO THE BOA wants his bridge. Not just any arch, not just any viaduct hastily dreamed up but a bridge in the image of the new Coca. He wants something large and functional, he wants at least six lanes – a freeway over the river. He wants a unique creation. S
cans his debtors, his acquaintances, expresses his desire but no one sends back the interpretation he’s waiting for. In secret, he grabs a piece of paper and a pen and does some sketches of his own, but no matter how fast he draws his lines, trying to capture a pure form – ridiculous at the moment, and touching: dishevelled, maladroit, and miming the gesture of the artist – he can’t quite get it. One of his councillors cleverly suggests that he launch a contest. Such a subject requires expertise, prestige, an architect whose glorious career will carry the ambitions of the city as high and as far as possible. The Boa sees himself as a Medici, a princely patron in a velvet cape, likes himself even more, and far from taking offence, he accepts that a foreign glory could come to build upon his land, thereby raising his own glory higher.

  WAS IT BETTER TO CLUTTER UP THE EARTH RATHER than the sky? Was it best to demonstrate strength, opt for a powerful creation, a combination of massive, heavy pieces like the bridge in Maracaibo? Was it best to choose a transparent, ethereal work, a construction that concentrated the material into only a few elements, an option with finesse, like the Millau Viaduct? Was it best to open a city up or weld two landscapes together, to defer to nature, use its lines, and incorporate the structure into it? The Boa can’t decide, he wants everything. He wants innovation and reference, a flourishing enterprise, beauty, and the world record. A man arrives with the solution. His name is Ralph Waldo, he comes from São Paulo: an architect who is both famous and a mystery. He enters the room for the contest auditions, hands free and calm alongside his body, and describes the form that gathers the areas together: to illustrate the adventure of migration, the ocean, the estuary, the river, and the forest, the vined walkway above gorges and the span that plays above the void, he has chosen a highly technological hammock; to demonstrate suppleness and strength, flexibility and resistance to seismic shifts, he has chosen a nautical web of cables and massive concrete anchorings; to symbolize the ambitious city, he has chosen two steel towers planted in the riverbed, skyscrapers power emitters energy catchers; to evoke the myth, he has chosen red. That is, a suspension bridge of steel and concrete. The architect announces measurements comparable to those of the longest suspension bridges in the world, most of them estuary or ocean channel bridges. Length: 6,200 feet; centre suspension span: 4,100 feet; width: 100 feet; height of the deck above the water: 230 feet; height of the towers: 750 feet. A delusion of grandeur, like an enormous desire contained within a very small body. Just the presence of the bridge in the heart of Coca, Waldo assures them, will make the city seem bigger, more open, and more prosperous – a simple trick of proportions in relation to the harmonics of the space, the perception of a crossing greater than that of a bridge, an optical singularity.

  GIVE ME THE PLANS AND I’LL BUILD YOU WHAT YOU want, whatever it is, even a bridge to hell – Diderot’s smoking in his office on the twentieth floor of the Héraclès tower, La Défense district, Paris, in front of the bay window, a black mass backlit against the baby-blue pane, large-format man overlooking a confetti capital electrified by Friday night departures – give me the plans, goddammit, the plans, that’s all I need.

  THE CHAIRMAN and CEO of Héraclès, interrupted in his flummeries, stepped back and smiled, flinging a folder onto the table, and at the blunt sound of cardboard against the wood – a smack that echoed in the room like a starter’s gun – Diderot took an enormous breath, inflating his rib cage exaggeratedly, and furtively lowered his eyelids: it was happening, the site was his. He didn’t turn around right away towards the messenger, rather savoured the good news: he wouldn’t end on the construction of a new wing in some famous private museum, the addition on a nuclear power plant, or the digging of an umpteenth ultramodern parking lot in a provincial city, no, the men from Comex (the board of execs at Héraclès) were giving him a bridge to close his career, a coronation, managerial shenanigans – he would keep his mouth shut, contain his disgust, would let them come congratulate him, pat him on the shoulder, conclusive slaps that would make him want to smash his fist into their hypocritical faces, but he wouldn’t do anything, would take what he could get, a bridge, would mime docile pride and, as for the rest, the crown and the cajoling, that would all be postmarked return to sender: all he cared about was the work to be done. Of course they would talk within the company, gossip about him getting the field marshal’s baton, Héraclès owes you a lot, thank you my friend, and the young engineers who had rushed into the ranks at the announcement of the opening of the site would have no trouble grumbling in the hallways ’cause, shit, Georges Diderot may have been a legend, but he’s old now, his management methods are frankly not clean cut and he’s not from the inner circle – not a young jackal from the famous École Polytechnique (the X) with ants in his pants, not a showman from the prestigious engineering school les Mines or head of the class at the ParisTech, not a supersonic brain lubricated with force diagrams, functions with multiple variables, derivatives, strength-of-material analyses, Euclidean spaces, and Fourier series. Diderot’s was a complex career, difficult to follow, more lateral than vertical, hybridized to the extreme with all kinds of skills, a mix of freelance star and in-house engineer come in through the back door and ended up reigning over Comex, a guy who smokes in the elevator, who calls janitors and CEOs alike by their first name.

  WHEN DIDEROT finally turned around, the man who he ironically called the Grand Chief was in the doorway of his office, and with a raise of his eyebrows indicated the folder, you’ve got some reading to do. Inside the mundane cover were the results of the first surveys done by geotechnicians in Coca and the specifications for the work. Seated at his desk, Diderot flipped through the surveys – which were ordered in reverse.

  On the first sheets, he recognized his language, he was at home. Measurements, tables, graphs – these results gave a precise illustration of data from probes recently placed on the ground in Coca, homing devices armed with little explosive charges whose deflagrations were analyzed – noise and propagation of shock waves – in order to understand the reality of the material, its internal morphology, the content of its constitution, its potential. For Diderot, these notes held something terribly moving: it was like reading what reverberates from the little taps of the white cane that the blind person makes against the ground simply in order to walk upon it – but here they had to construct their own white canes, so that they could be trusted – invent them and then manipulate them with care so that they hit the ground correctly, with clean, sharp little taps. This was the perceptible, tender description of a gigantic trial and error and it contained exactly what he loved – this resembled real life.

  NIGHT HAD long since fallen and the tower emptied out when he finally took a look at the quantitatives, numbers that lined themselves up or lay themselves out in columns over several pages. Numbers that speak only of themselves, the young ones (formerly moles running through the corridors of graceless high schools) would have said; numbers that have to be coaxed to speak, Diderot would have retorted, rubbing his hands together. These measurements involved other things besides themselves, a certain temporality, an organization of the work. A million cubic yards of concrete. Eighty thousand tons of steel. Eighty thousand miles of cable. Diderot absorbed these figures without letting himself be impressed, whispered them to himself, and quickly translated and prolonged their meaning: planning the construction of an on-site concrete mixing plant and anticipating the delivery of its components – cement, gravel, water, sand – foreseeing the steel supplies, coordinating their transport to Coca, and above all, once they reached the Pontoverde platform, having them brought to the bridge site beside the river. There would be quarrels among the engineers – the partisans of the land route would argue for the construction of pathways – roads or rails – that would avoid lengthy and expensive load changes, since the metal would be loaded at its production sites in the steel factories of Blackoak Inc. in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and unloaded directly at the foot of the bridge piers; while those partisans of
the marine route would argue for the smoothness and convenience of floating barges that would migrate along the river, and these latter, Diderot among them, would win out.