Birth of a Bridge Read online

  NOW KATHERINE Thoreau is shuffling along Colfax smoking butt after butt, and when she finally catches sight of the bus she looks at her watch, knows that she’s already late, that the river shuttles will have left. She punches in when the first drops of rain shatter on the ground, then sets out to cross the whole Pontoverde platform to the main building so she can report to management – it’s humiliating to have to go ask a favour, a late slip, like a late-night college girl, like a slacker chick. The place rumbles beneath the volley of rain, ominously emptied of workers. Katherine Thoreau moves forward beneath the downpour, her shabby, non-waterproofed parka quickly saturated and heavy, water running inside, down her chest and her arms, down her neck, her sneakers fill with water and her socks splash around inside. She lowers her head and her hair hangs in front of her face in streaming strands as the water crashes down, she peers ahead through the strands and then concentrates on her feet in order to avoid the little pools forming quickly all around, it’s a long path to the building, it’s long and suddenly seeing the water splashing out from her soles Katherine says to herself, this is it – this is my life, it’s taking on water, it’s leaking out everywhere, it’s all going to shit, Lewis and his bullcrap, the children who worry her, Billie in front of the TV all day beside her dad, Matt who stays out all night and hasn’t smiled in weeks, and Liam who cries every day, she thinks of them and tells herself she’s not gonna be able to hold on much longer – that morning she’d gone to ask the neighbour to check in on the place around lunchtime, the boys would be at school, and her husband was crippled, yeah, an accident at work, she has a little girl and can’t afford yet to put her in daycare, would she be able to go check that everything was okay? And the woman, a matronly black woman with an unbelievable goiter and pink eyes had looked at Katherine sullenly and then said, okay, I’ll go, and without missing a beat had named her price, ten dollars, and Katherine’s eyes had widened, for that price you’ll make lunch for the little one, you’ll change her, and put her down for her nap, and the neighbour had said, okay, and the bargaining was done, but now Katherine was doing the sums: the neighbour’s price was too high – she’d have to change that if she didn’t want to hand over her whole paycheque.

  From very far off, she’d seen the two figures grappling in the mud until one collapsed to the ground and the other fled towards the concrete mixing plant, and Katherine had parted her dripping hair to see better and quickened her step. Now, she bends over Diderot, groggy in the puddle, kneels to take his head in her arms, and says quietly, it’s going to be okay, then screams over her shoulder, help, someone’s hurt! Help! Her voice carries, she turns back to lean over him, murmuring breathe deeply, breathe, the strands of her wet hair skimming Diderot’s face like Chinese paintbrushes, and, tickled a little, he opens his eyes, stammers, who are you? But people are hurtling down the short staircase now, big dry shoes, men armed with rolls of white paper and blankets. In no time at all Diderot is carried to the first-aid trailer and they turn to Katherine asking what was she doing here at this time, for God’s sake, late again, Thoreau?

  THE SITE IS IN FULL SWING. A MUTE UNFOLDING at first, clandestine even – no one in the city could have guessed what was cooking on either side of the river; no one could have suspected what was going to emerge from the ground, except perhaps to get up at dawn and wonder about certain buses hurtling past full of guys squeezed in like sardines, that pass again in the opposite direction at the same speed when night falls; except to get an eyeful of the shuttle traffic on the river. There was no fanfare for the placing of the first stone, no Boa photographed trowel in hand and provisional smile before an audience of dark suits and towering half-naked women on stilts who whisper to one another in a language where the Rs roll over one another headfirst as though they were tumbling to the bottom of a well; there was not a single notice posted on a wall or a telephone pole, in the halls of the subway, nothing, there was no sign. The Boa had taken care to have the immense Pontoverde platform placed south of the city and to forbid any publicity about the work so as not to alert Coca’s inhabitants and users – his electorate, his clients – to the disruption inherent in this kind of construction – the disembowelling of favourite views, dust, noise, heterogeneous pollution, traffic jams, resurgence of carjackings, influx of poverty-stricken populations looking to glean what they can at the margins of the site. The bridge began to impose itself in camouflage: the drilling sites were closed off with plywood hoardings covered in trompe-l’oeil panels designed to seamlessly match the neighbouring buildings, nearly invisible except for the skull inside its red triangle pirating each doorway.

  The percussion of the bulldozers would fuse with the shocks and usual hammerings of the inner city, with the smoke of car motors and the gusts of dust. Lemon-yellow smog soon hovered over the city. The bridge men continued to arrive from all around – they were suddenly in the majority in the bars, where they often left a good quotient of their pay – in this way identical to newcomers who were always looking to buy a round in order to make some contacts, counting on inebriation for business ideas because, dammit, here they were, in the right place at the right time.

  NO ONE saw a thing. In the first weeks, the inhabitants came and went in a city that was just as sparkling and fluid as ever, business was juicy with fat dividends, ice cubes clinked together gently at the bottom of bronze whiskies chin-chin while girls with the corners of their eyes tattooed inhaled speedballs – coke + baking soda – before heading out on the prowl in bras and denim miniskirts in the underground parking lots of big luxury hotels; piles of glitz were poured out and sold by the mile, cosmetics overran window displays, sixteen-year-old kids made a fortune at roulette using a system they unearthed on the internet, the bridge was being built, the bridge men and women didn’t lift their heads anymore, worked huddled over the necessary gestures, each day fulfilling quotas of square yards, cubic yards, and requisite tons on the phasing charts, yes, the bridge rose up, it began from the lowest point, the deepest, a depth that no one in Coca could begin to imagine, it was anchored in holes calibrated to an eighth of an inch that pierced one by one the strata of sedimentation, rested upon the heart in the mille-feuille of memory, was sustained by the darkest, heaviest glebe, a thick paste that sweated its rivulets of archaic juice, dripped plop plop plop, and it echoed as it would in a dungeon, glistened in the beams of headlamps while hard-hatted heads bent down to examine it and then stood again, faces blackened, eyes popping, here we are, here we are, the asshole of the world – this shouted in all the languages, we’re almost there, a little lower, another yard, go on, you can do it, teeth gleaming in the darkness, enamelled like so many fireflies, everyone shouting, walkie-talkies crocheted to their ears, farther, farther, go on, keep going, deeper, farther into the hole, while above, way up above, at the surface of the world, in the dazzling sunlight and the glare of deluxe hi-gloss sedans, there were still high heels clack clack clack, sculpted rubber tires that rasped the asphalt, moving people who went on living life ignorant of everything that was going on.

  BUT IT WAS time to meet, flustered since they’d been caught off guard and losing their heads over the idea that a bridge of such a scale could soon rise up in Coca, panicked at the thought that such a work could change the economy of the city, of the region, and cause their influence to collapse. These are the owners of the four ferryboat companies that cover the Coca–Edgefront routes, sharing the total river transport, and among them, the Marianne – created by a Frenchman when the city was founded, by far the oldest, and which holds the monopoly over Coca–Ocean Bay traffic. The narrowness of the old Golden Bridge, its low capacity, has greatly favoured their development, so much so that at the time when it begins to be dismantled and the Pontoverde work site begins, no less than two hundred boats, from the simplest dory to the largest ferry or speedboat, dither daily on the river, incessant rotations chanted by the sirens, foghorns, or toots of the piston horn that call the latecomers to the dock in time for departure or war
n of potential collisions – and they’re numerous, these shocks, these run-ins of hulls caused by alcohol or a fog, a lover’s daydream, a sudden fatigue, Coca’s maritime tribunal ruling on its lot of crashes each week. According to the registers of the chamber of commerce, the total river activity amounts to a billion dollars each year – including two hundred and fifty million in net profit – and agglomerates more than three thousand jobs; the average crew of a double-ended ferry has five people: a shift manager, a crew foreman, a mechanic, and two mariners – and then there were docking pilots, helmsmen, deckhands, boat builders; providers of fuel, electricity, lifejackets, buoys, barf bags, paper towels; there were fast-food workers, ticketing agents, administrative employees, lawyers, accountants, marketing specialists, and publicists, as well as medical facilities for all these people. This is a very juicy business. A godsend. A business currently under threat by the construction of the new bridge. Six fast lanes, wide and paved like a racing track, will connect the city to the continent, will accord it its place in the communication loop beginning at the bay with the plains highway and ending at the fertile valleys and mining sites far on the other side of the forest.

  SO, ONE evening at the end of October, four limousines brake in synch in front of an Italian restaurant in Edgefront. Four men with dark overcoats that widen their shoulders but cause them to slope down extract themselves heavily from the cars and greet one another on the sidewalk while the vehicles disappear – an unspoken protocol makes them defer to the oldest one among them, a colossal man, white hair gathered in a ponytail at his nape, mirrored glasses, cigarillo, dark jacket with purple satin lining – he’s called the Frenchman, a direct descendant of that other one, male primogeniture – then plunge inside, straight to the table at the back. A fine wine is brought to them while they wait for the meat, but they’ve barely tasted it before the Frenchman strikes the table with a fist – a gold signet ring, big as a walnut, glints there, vaguely aggressive: all right, we’ve gotta take care of this. The other guys lean in towards the middle of the table – from far away it looks like their four heads are touching, collusion of thick foreheads and cunning ears – the propositions fly: corrupt the security commission in order to cause the closure of the site, buy the ecological lobby and launch a smear campaign against the bridge, bribe the trade union and bet on the outbreak of a workers’ strike. The voices accelerate, it’s a question of not letting themselves get fleeced, of giving the Boa a warning, of “settling accounts” with Pontoverde, and now the quartet talks sabotage and workplace accidents, nitroglycerine and trinitrotoluene, the Frenchman whistles angrily between his teeth, striking his index finger against the table, we need guys on-site, a sucker, a Judas, we’ll buy one, sort it out. The three others approve, and the Frenchman leans back in his chair and concludes, good, we’re in agreement, lifts a solemn glass above the table, arm outstretched, a toast to the success of our enterprise, straight away imitated by his three companions, and with their alliance thus sealed, knots his napkin around his neck – a large square of white poplin – and claps his hands for the plates.

  THE BIRDS. THEY SHOW UP EN MASSE IN MID-November. Suddenly the sky seems immensely vast and inhabited, flapping; the least flutter of a wing seems to swell it from within like an inflatable mattress, the smallest winged creature’s passage – including bats, dragonflies, or the bee-killing Asian hornet Vespa velutina – intensifies it. Propagation to infinity. One morning you lift the blinds and the birds are there, at rest, floating on the river or scattered over the marshes downstream from the city. Hundreds of dark spots float on the milky water like shadow puppets, hundreds of round heads and beaks mingle in one great clamour. Watching them, you begin to count the number of miles travelled, you recite to yourself the craziest distances – seven thousand miles in one go for the bar-tailed godwit or forty thousand miles in six months for the sooty shearwater; you try hard to identify them, to recognize and name the types of flight and formation, recalling that most of them have followed precise flight corridors all the way from Alaska and also migrate at night, taking their bearings from the stars, the map of the sky unfurled wide inside their tiny brains, their sense of direction more rigorous, more mathematical than a GPS – and researchers at MIT in Boston, in Vancouver, and in the Atacama Desert study the birds for this, baffled and fascinated; it’s moving to think that even the most solitary, most asocial among them has migrated in a group, as though survival depended on finding a collective solution, and you ask yourself again what would we look like, after sketching such lines in the sky, after gliding on thermal currents so high up, sometimes even thirty-three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, piercing the stratosphere, our feathers knitting the cumulonimbus together, outrunning cold and hunger, spending half our reserves of fat in the slog – and at that moment, you tell yourself that a ruby-throated hummingbird is only three inches long and can cross the Gulf of Mexico in one shot – amazing, truly, that they are so precise and punctual: often it’s the same post in the same field where they alight, on the same balcony at the same window, and the children who recognize them charge outside in pyjamas to bring them bread crumbs, rushing, goosebumps prickling their skin, slippers getting muddy but they don’t care, and they turn back towards the house and shout it’s him, he’s here, he came back! They prepare a nest of cotton, straw, and twigs, a shelter complete with pantry and reservoir: a lesson in things.

  IN COCA, ornithologists are on the alert. Their binoculars scan the sky or level at the nesting areas: they observe, count, inspect, tag, and untag – wouldn’t be good to miss the newborns; they hold their breath, ready to brandish the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, international treaty ratified in Bonn in 1979 – ready to brandish it, because this year there’s the construction site on the river, and even if the cranes provide new perches for the breathless birds to stop, the experts would already bet that the ecosystem has been disturbed. They’re worried. A delegation alerts the people in charge at the mayor’s office: the degradation of wetlands compromises nesting, threatens the species; a study on the wild swans south of Baku has just proven that the pollution of natural habitats around the Caspian Sea, which forces migrating birds to mix with domestic species, increases the spread of avian flu. These men aren’t kidding around, not at all, and the mayor’s office makes the mistake of ignoring them, turning up its nose at their duds – lumberjack shirts over white tees, clean jeans belted high over their middle, yellow Timberlands, baseball caps, large cases for cellphones clipped to their belts and Siamese twinned to their thighs, Swarovski binoculars around their necks: it’s a mistake to take them for idiots, to make them hang around the deserted halls for hours and then smoke them out with speedy interviews where they’re told that the site’s ecological standards are draconian and make up 17.8 percent of the total cost of the work; it’s a mistake because they’re already getting organized. The first findings vindicate them and they attack – forty-eight hours later the International Court of Justice decrees, after a rapid hearing, that work on the Coca bridge must be stopped during the birds’ nesting period. Three weeks. At least three, three weeks gone. The ornithologists in Coca can breathe again, while back at head office the financial directors of Pontoverde choke on the calculations of what this farce will cost them, aghast to learn that birds so small, so light, little flyspecks of nature, could slow down their superstar construction site; and the communications directors, proving exemplary in terms of their reaction time, immediately come up with a snap campaign – Pontoverde, ecology is our mandate, Pontoverde for your kids – and demand that the teams in Coca send them photos of kids petting birds under the guidance of the bridge’s engineers, smiling at the camera, hard hats on their heads, the company logo clearly visible above their eyes.