Birth of a Bridge Page 6

  He likes it in this technological enclave where his small size no longer causes him grief, since he is now a hundred and fifty-six feet four inches tall, since he is massive; he’s comfortable in this paradoxical chamber that incorporates him into limitless space, while each movement is controlled to an eighth of an inch, in front of this dashboard that endows the tips of his fingers with an insane amount of power since each thrust of the joystick is a matter of precision, minutia, vigilance; he feels at home in this cramped room where, eight hours a day, the exemplary nature of Imperial units is proven, a system that calibrates space in relation to the human body, in relation to the foot, indeed, to his abdomen, to the jut of his nose like an eagle’s beak, to his long slender feet and his baby giraffe’s eyelashes. From up in the crane cab, Sanche casts a panopticon eye on the site and surroundings – this confers upon him a new sense of power from an ideal distance. He is the solitary epicentre of a landscape in motion, untouchable and cut off, he is the king of the world.

  And yet, in the beginning, he lived on Earth like everyone else, and more precisely in Dunkirk – proletarian concrete, harbour industry, family tourism, cool cheeks and wind on your forehead, dunes and light beers – where he was born in the municipal hospital one Sunday in November 1978, the sole offspring in a late brood. It was a miracle: no one would have bet a cent on his mother, forty-two years old; she herself had long since stopped lighting candles to the Virgin, rubbing her belly with castor oil, or wearing red undergarments – she herself had stopped believing. The baby had barely uttered his primal cry and even though he presented a skinny little body accompanied by a disturbing face – flattened forehead, wrinkled yellowish skin, two black marbles that never blinked – he was already praised to the skies. He was the first and the last child, beauty itself and love personified. Amen, amen. But the father – what did he have to say? Nothing, precisely; he lay the stones of his dry silhouette against the counter of a seedy bar and kept quiet, dumbfounded by his paternity and even more flabbergasted by his wife – a girl from Alentejo who he met in a parish youth group and who had never had anything but conjugal attentions for him, an unvarying assortment of heavy meals, starched shirts, submissive nods of her head, and dominical sex – he remains prostrate, like the reckless driver caught by the patrol and stripped of a chunk of cash. He is no longer the master of his house: strengthened by her child, his wife has become a different woman, she radiates new strength. Rules the house, holds the purse strings, decides on the priorities, sings out loud. An end to the trembling hands and the little voice that begged for grocery money at the beginning of the week, an end to the sad evenings waiting for her old man, an end to shame and regrets. Life’s course now hinges on a single axis: the child will be dressed like a prince, housed like a master, fed like a prelate: they’ll bleed themselves dry. The father drives heavy loads between Dunkirk and Rotterdam or Paris, he’s often absent, so the mother has free rein. Accumulates as many hours as she can to bulk up her wad: in the morning, housekeeping in the offices of the port, at noon the cafeteria of a private school downtown – she feeds her boy there before lunch is served, keeping aside the best pieces of meat for him, pinching the best fruit, doubling the portions – and in the evening takes care of the two little daughters of a bourgeois couple next door, children she observes with interest, and bases his education on them. She brushes Sanche’s hair till it shines, drives him to the library, speaks to him in fine French. Enrols him in the same classical dance classes that the young neighbours go to – he is a little prince in white tights, held up as an example. Sanche is a frail, solitary, and precise child; clothed in ruffled wimples and royal-blue velvet knickers, he bounces around the living room. The father can’t stand it, yells at his wife, you’re making him into a little faggot, so he drags the child to the stadium on his Sundays off, Sanche is happy to please his father but catches a chill in the bleachers, a cold and an earache: the couple quarrels. At eleven years old, when people ask what he wants to do when he grows up, Sanche hesitates solemnly between a conductor and an archaeologist, ambitions that junior high erodes inescapably, that high school (private schools, his mother knows other housekeepers there) strives to tame: the boy is a good student, he needs a real job, why not the construction industry? With this direction, the boy keeps mum, the father is satisfied, the mother desolate. One morning she buttons up her black silk dress, belts her Alcantara coat with the rabbit-fur collar, and goes to deliver three determined knocks on the principal’s door: her son is Portuguese, does that mean he has to become a mason? Well-argued protestation and cold anger shaded with the suspicion of racism: they’re keeping us down. The two-faced principal reassures her, construction presents a Pleiades of occupations – positive impact of the word Pleiades on the mother who sees sparkling brilliance, and perhaps even a little bit of heaven – and finally, after obtaining a bachelor of technology, the crane reconciles everyone, tall and flamboyant, a centrepiece. Operating one requires superior qualifications, an eagle eye (a vision that resists glare and perceives relief), a fine ear (auditory acuity in a noisy environment is tested before getting a job), and the cold blood of a marksman. The becalmed mother accepts the crane, and sees in it an aristocratic position, one where you stay clean, sheltered, detached, with dry feet, high above the mass of workers who swarm below with their hands in the muck, sees it as a good position that could possibly come with middle-management status, while the father slips a word in Sanche’s ear, you’ll be cushy, free, no boss on your back, and adds as he puts an arm around his shoulders, complicit for the first time: like me in my truck.

  Sanche suffers from neither vertigo nor the difficulty of working alone in a small space; he has a sense of balance and of responsibilities, a sense of safety – cranes are dangerous – and last but not least he’s blessed with an incredible capacity for concentration: he’s found his place. He learns to drive and operate cranes – lattice boom truck cranes, crawler cranes, telescopic cranes of all tonnages – he takes the related training courses for drillers, for equipment managers – he heads a team of thirty people on the site of a tunnel in Luxembourg – and goes overseas, Nouakchott, Mauritania, where he oversees loading and unloading operations between boats and the oil-rig drilling platform. It’s here that he meets the man who introduces him to politics, and who he listens to at first simply in order to beat the boredom that comes when the breaks are long, when weariness takes over from fatigue. The man works on the rig, he’s Portuguese like Sanche, took refuge in France during Salazar’s wars. Over a couple of sleepless nights, while the warm and salty ocean air corrodes their skin just as it oxidizes the steel ladders, he introduces Sanche into a new immensity that echoes like a cathedral: the Revolution. His voice captivates the crane operator at first, black flow exploding everything in its passage – fuel like the oil they’ve come to extract off the coast of Africa. Words spin in the atmosphere, high-powered lassos able to capture the substance of thoughts, with a flick of the wrist capable of bringing to mind recalcitrant concepts that seem rather outmoded in this early twenty-first century. Sanche is drawn to the theory immediately, sees clarity in it, and power; he pronounces certain words for the first time, words like peoples, dialectic, collective, alienation, emancipation, words like capital and oppression, expressions like historical materialism or enlightened avant-garde of the working class, he turns them over on his tongue to feel their weight, their thickness, to appropriate them, as though these magical terms were the revelators of the world’s logic, of its form, its mechanism, its flows, and its future. He takes all he can from this, it’s a good warm-up, this is what he tells the man over their last handshake at dawn one morning in November, when the ardour of the all-night discussion has dried out both their mouths. After that, he returns to France, and his jobs are back to back without any time off; he becomes one of the best files in the temp agency that manages his career. And now: the bridge.

  IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF THE BRIDGE, THE FIRST morning. Polaroid dawn. Black
s that lighten and whites that get darker, progressive pigmentation of all the greens – fluorescent, emerald, pistachio, olive, forest, lime, turquoise, Wrigley’s Doublemint, spinach and malachite, chartreuse and mint cream – becoming fixed on the retina, and the river is there, supple, calm folds, long fluorescent grasses stretching out on the surface, thickets drift, as do cans and bottles: the water is milky and dirty.

  Diderot has walked around the perimeter of the Pontoverde platform which is his domain from now on, a surface of two square miles, cleared out, asphalted, open to the river via a long empty quay and striated with rails that link hangars, workshops, maintenance and repair shops, team facilities, engineering offices, cafeterias, and locker rooms. And now he’s smoking a Lusitania. In profile he really does have a big nose, a prominent chest; his Ray-Bans are pushed up on his forehead and his shirt is untucked, he’s ready to go, he’s exactly in his element, and at the bottom of his pocket his hand taps a secret tempo. It’s the peak hour, the hour before all hands on deck, the hour of silence before battle, and the moment the skier stands poised at the top of a steep run – evaluate the slope before launching forward, visualize the route, go over the difficulties, the turns, the bumps, the hollows, the patch of black ice just after the twelfth gate, take note of possible acceleration zones, the exact flexion of the knees needed to jump and then glide on the last curve, the exact thrust of the chest, balance of the head, position of the arms – the hour of meteorological worry, and Diderot has his preferences, knows what he needs: continental climate, dry and rough winters, hot summers. For a man like him, there’s nothing worse than rain, wind, and storms – nothing worse than mud.

  ON THE OTHER side of the gates, the men are already waiting. The newcomers and the local workforce, silent types with hair in side parts, cigarettes dangling, clean hands, and lunch boxes tucked under their arms, guys in tracksuits, baseball caps front to back, visors at the neck or a hood hanging between the shoulder blades, young guys with cheap sneakers, a handful of women – but it’s confirmed that there are no kids there, contrary to the rumour and the alerts from international organizations. Among them, in priority, are Natives aggregated in groups of three or four, solid, with closed faces, hired in large numbers since they’re immune to vertigo and used to the climate, to parasites, familiar with the terrain because they’re at home – the Boa had ordered their presence on-site, a neutralizing strategy. Of what awaits them, they know little. The unemployed Natives who had applied had asked about the qualifications to emphasize – which ones? And the hiring agent, the one who typed the names into the computer before handing over magnetic ID badges that allow them access to the site when swiped through the time clock, had pinched his biceps: qualifications, my darling, involve three things: muscle, muscle, and more muscle. No one had laughed, and everyone had showed up.

  When the doors open, they move forward onto the site like a Roman tortoise. There are nearly eight hundred of them. Mo Yun is there, ready, a clean T-shirt over his hollow chest and miner’s glasses around his neck, he looks all around him, trying to imitate those who surround him – only knows the words that ricochet off of kitchen sinks – and floats in the crowd like he floats in his blue-collar overalls nabbed at a thrift store for fifty cents, standing on tiptoe, head back so he can breathe more easily, so light that the human mass lifts him from the ground and moves him, so thin that he’s carried along by the crowd, and among others by Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, who force their way forward a few feet from him, don’t want to let themselves be pushed around, outdistanced – the day before they had been able to sell part of their loot at a cruddy apartment in the Church district, a woman had weighed the gold on an electronic scale while a Doberman licked her feet, and once they’d pocketed the thin wad they immediately blew it all at the arcades, got all excited drinking warm beers at the consoles, laughing like kids with their hands on the joysticks, then went to catch the ferry to Edgefront when night had fallen, once their pockets were scraped down to the last quarter, and there, on the other bank, they had bummed around looking for some digs, some little squat where they could sleep, and without really knowing it, disoriented, they had walked towards the forest, that same forest that had held them like a fishing basket, the same one they had fled – and farther back, at the rear of the multitude, Katherine Thoreau moves forward, cellphone to her ear, tells her sons to buckle the little one well in her stroller if they go out along Colfax and reminds them to read, not to stay slumped in front of the TV all day, not to fight. And brushing past her without seeing her, Soren Cry, suspicious, hooded eyes, shady complexion, switchblade like a comb in the back pocket of his jeans.

  All of them reach the workers’ facilities after beeping their sesame at the front gate, and once they get to the locker room, take possession of the metal locker where they hang their clothes and grab their hard hats, mandatory since the construction of the Hoover Dam in Colorado and then the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in the mid-1930s. They settle in and groups form instinctively: those who speak the same language, those who travelled here together, those who come from the same town – including the guys from Detroit, who were driven out of the city when the car factories closed down, twenty of them, young, a fearsome gang, it’s as though a chain riveting their working strength to mechanized procedures had broken clean and liberated their gestures, so they take up space in the locker room, take big steps and windmill their arms, talk loud – and finally those who found themselves side by side in front of the gates and offered one another a light for their smokes. The Natives also gather together in a corner of the room, they’re grey beneath the neon lights, slow, chests tattooed with foliage from shoulder blades to waists, they speak together in low voices. And then the siren sounds – now it’s time to go.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HUGE WASTELAND THAT borders the river, a man shouts in a port voice, Anchorage One, Anchorage Two, and so on until Anchorage Six. Men jump from shuttle boats that have carried them along the river to here, move forward on the quay built roughly against the edge of the bank, and form small teams that walk towards the end of the work site where two enormous stationary machines sparkle in the sun.

  ANCHORAGE. ANCHOR the bridge. Dig to ensure solid foundations for the structure: two holes in the riverbed to plant the piers that will hold up the towers, and another hole on each bank – thirty million cubic yards of concrete will be poured before the cables are placed.

  Tackle the bridge from below, then, start from where it’s darkest, dirtiest, most elementary, begin in reverse, advance by receding, start by subtracting, digging, emptying, smashing. Work like a dog. We are dogs, this is what Diderot thinks as he docks in the Zodiac and it hits him once again that in order to create a work, to erect it before the eyes of the world, to make it rise up from the ground, you have to first stick your head into the dirt and the depths of the ground. And Mo Yun, who’s wiping his precious glasses on the fabric of his overalls, says exactly the same thing to himself, because he’s one of those who thinks first about the hole before evaluating the structure. He remembers that there were not always mines in Datong, they didn’t just appear one fine morning as though issued from a divine breath, chasms nearly seven hundred feet deep buttressed like cathedrals, complete with open-wire cages to carry men and mine-cart tracks down, no, these gigantic caverns had to be built, and one day, walking between his parents in the red mud that coated the city streets as soon as the first rains came, an idea had seized him, alarmed him, and with his feet sunk in the ground of the People’s Square (transformed into a thick and viscous wading pool), he had asked his parents: what was here before? What was here, even before Datong shone as a first-class industrial city of the People’s Republic? The man and woman, of the same height and wiry build, had frowned, and then remembered, as through a haze, emerging for a moment from the coma of labour – yes, they had known the city when it was still covered in green, the suburbs where miserable little troglodyte hovels had proliferated, the skinny fowl and the l
ittle grey pig, they had known the ground when it was intact, but were sincerely puzzled by their son’s question, because that was a long, long time ago; it was another time, a time before the Revolution – in other words, before the light of Reason had shone across the country; that was the prehistory of humanity and they lowered their eyes chastely, surprised, it’s true, they had been among those who had built the tool that rendered them useful, that had made them into agents of Progress, with their own hands they had made the iron cage that had thrown them below, they had dug the holes.

  Mo looks at the field and looks at the men, fear sweeps the ground out from under him, his head spins, and he has to fight the urge to run away. Before him, the excavators warm up their motors and set themselves in motion, slowly, mechanical mastodons capable of digging a hole the size of a football field and eighty feet deep in a single day. His eyes widen and he stifles a cry, he thinks he recognizes them; they’ve travelled all the way from the open-pit mines, all the way from Datong, from the crucible of black mud that he’d left behind. They’ve found him here, crossed the ocean and come up the river at a high price, in dismantled pieces they’ve come to remind him. The men assembled are admiring them, ah, the heavy artillery of Pontoverde, while Mo is seized by a nightmare, stunned, no longer hearing the foreman who harangues them as though they’re an army heading into combat – boys, we’re attacking the anchorage phase, we’ve got a bridge to build, a bridge that will be the most beautiful bridge in the world – Mo panics, tucks his head down between his shoulders, and moves forward to dissolve into the Anchorage Five team.