Birth of a Bridge
but, as the seas work in their secret ways
and the planet is porous, it may still be true
to claim all men have bathed in the Ganges
Jorges Luis Borges
Poem of the Fourth Element
IN THE BEGINNING, IT WAS HIM AND THE GROUND. Northern Yakutia, where he worked for three years – Mirny, a diamond mine to crack open beneath the glacial crust, grey, dirty, desperate tundra trashed with old wasted coal and refugee camps, deserted ground bathed in nights of chilblains, sheared eleven months of the year by a skull-splitting blizzard beneath which still sleep great beasts, scattered limbs and giant beautifully curving horns – furred rhinoceros, woolly belugas, and frozen caribou – he imagined them in the evenings while sitting at the hotel bar with a glass of strong translucent alcohol as the same surreptitious hooker lavished him with caresses, all the while pleading for a marriage in Europe, in exchange for loyal services, of course, but never did he touch her, couldn’t, rather have nothing than fuck this woman who didn’t really want him, he left it at that. So – the diamonds of Mirny. They had to dig to find them, break the permafrost with dynamite blasts, bore a Dantesque hole as big as the city itself – you could have tossed in headfirst the fifty-storey apartment buildings that already sprout up all around – and, equipped with headlamps, descend to the farthest depths of the orifice, pickaxe the walls, excavate the earth, branch the galleries into a subterranean arborescence lateralized to the furthest, hardest, darkest extent, reinforce the corridors and put down rails, electrify the mud, and then dig in the glebe, scratch the scree, and sift the guts, keep watch for the marvellous sparkle. Three years.
When his contract was up, he returned to France aboard a rather undemocratic Tupolev – his seat in economy was completely battered, a ball of wire drifting around beneath the fabric of the seatback, piercing it here and there and bruising his ribs – a few contracts later and we find him again as foreman of a site in Dubai with a luxury hotel to conjure from the sand, vertical as an obelisk but secular as a coconut tree, and of glass this time, glass and steel, with elevators like bubbles streaming up and down golden tubes, Carrara marble for the circular lobby where the fountain sounds its deluxe petrodollar
glug
glug
, all this adorned with polished green plants, split-leather couches, and air conditioning. After that, he was on fire, he went everywhere. Football stadium in Chengdu, outbuilding for a gas port in Cumaná, mosque in Casablanca, pipeline in Baku – the men in this city walk fast in their dark gabardine coats that skim the hips, the knots of their ties like tight little fists under hard collars, black hats with three humps, sad eyes and thin moustaches, all of them look like that old crooner Charles Aznavour (he phones his mother to tell her) – water treatment plant north of Saigon, hotel complex for white employees in Djerba, film studios in Bombay, space centre in Baikonur, tunnel under the English Channel, dam in Lagos, shopping mall in Beirut, airport in Reykjavik, lakeside estate in the heart of the jungle.
TELEPORTED THUS
from biotope to biotope, aboard long-haul flights that often end with a little prop plane, he never stays more than eighteen months on a site and never travels, disgusted by exoticism, by its triviality – absolute powers of whites against the vengeful colonization of amoebae, drugs and women docile for Western currency – and lives with very little, usually in an apartment near the site rented by the company – a place this radical is practically a joke, none of the tchotchkes people drag along with them, no photo tacked to the wall, just a few books, CDs, a huge TV with images in Classico colour, and finally a bike, a magnificent machine in carbon fibre, the expensive transporting of which from site to site becomes a contractual clause unique in the history of the company; he buys everything on-site – razor shampoo soap – eats his meals in greasy diners hazed with smoke, twice a week wolfs down an international steak in a hotel restaurant, if there is one; he gets up early, works regular hours, every day a short nap after lunch, and, on days of meteorological grace, mounts his bike for at least thirty miles, wind against his forehead, chest bent low, and pedals as hard as he can; at night he goes out into the streets, walks or sidles, temples cooled and brain alert, learns the local idioms in nightclubs, bordellos, gambling dens (the language of cards as a kind of pidgin English), and in bars. Because a dipsomaniac he is, everyone knows it, and has been for a long time.
TWENTY YEARS
of this regimen would have had the hide of anyone, each new site requiring that he adapt himself – real conversions, climatic, dermatologic, dietary, phonologic, not to mention new patterns of daily life that bring about hitherto unknown acts – but his hide, on the contrary, reinvented itself, grew stronger, became expansionist; and some nights, going home alone after the last team had left, he would place himself in front of the map of the world pinned to his office wall, arms spread, skin and pupils equally dilated; and in a handsome lateral movement from Easter Island to Japan, his eyes would slowly inventory all his work sites on the surface of the globe. Each site to come jostled against the preceding ones like you jostle your hips in a fast salsa, and hybridized with them, thus activating the entirety of his experience, this experience contained within him that was sought after the world over. Yet, though his continually displaced body didn’t get used up faster than a sedentary one (one defined by daily hour-long migrations), his mouth was a scene of upheaval: every language spoken on-site and easily picked up came to intimately shake up his French – a French that was already quite disturbed – so much so that he sometimes found himself at sixes and sevens in the short letters he wrote to his mother. All in all, twenty years of this regimen was nothing to him, didn’t even count.
PEOPLE WANT
to find out what he’s made of, they ring him round. They describe him by turns as an engineer without a homeland, a mercenary of concrete and a patient clearer of tropical forests, an ex-convict, a gambler in rehab, a suicidal businessman who smokes opiates in the evenings beneath the frangipani trees or lets his gaze wander out over the Mongolian steppe, a chilled bottle between his knees; they call him the laconic cowboy, from nowhere, bent on his mission without a single wasted gesture and ready to do anything for the bonus – ah, there they were touching on something, a fragment of truth at least, a vague nuance, and they laughed at it – and likely he was all these men, simultaneously, successively; likely he was plural, drawing upon an assortment of variable dispositions, passing through life with a hook, crocheting it on all sides. They would have liked to find out that he was searching for himself, mysterious, passionate; they speculated on a gnawing secret estrangement that sent him running, pictured some regret, some abandonment, a betrayal, or better yet the ghost of a woman who had stayed behind in the city, with another man no doubt, who he had to flee – this woman exists, in fact, and is nothing like a ghost: she’s alive and well, and lives with another man; he sees her sometimes when he’s passing through France – they meet in Paris, she arrives on time, hair in her face eyes shining pockets full, and there they are, they’re back, and wend their way through the city, bodies disjointed but hearts in tune, talk all night long in a bar somewhere, beer after beer making them slowly drunk so that they kiss at the moment when the sun rises, they’re inside love, then, caressing each other’s bodies, carried away, and then they separate, calm, king and queen, time doesn’t exist, it’s pure invention, and turn away from each other with such trust that the whole world murmurs thank you. People said being alone to such an extent, no one does that; they said it was a waste, unhealthy in the long run, a man like that, a force of nature; they imagined women deep within the consulates, beautiful women, innocent women, devoted women; they imagined young people, they imagined lice, an original sin, an origin at least, some intimate flaw from his childhood; they whispered that he was broken, at heart – though at the heart of what, no one knew. Plus he hardly ever went back to France (what about his mother? He must have a mother since he writes to her, doesn’t he think of her, then?) – he flew over the country with a charged silence, kept only the nationality inscribed on his passport, a sagely padded bank account, a taste for conversation and for a certain amount of comfort, and he never missed watching the Tour de France. People would have liked to know that he was seized by an inward experience, isolated, vulnerable even – that would have been so simple, so much easier to believe – a man as solid and deep as he was, with such a brutal passion for alcohol, is always hiding something; they would have liked it if he didn’t know how to love, if he were incapable of it, if he worked like a dog in order to forget. They would have liked it if he were melancholic.
BUT THOSE
who had known him on the sites choked to hear this nonsense: fantasies of old ladies, cringe-worthy poems, sugary little clichés. They toppled this cardboard cut-out with a few shrugs and mocking glances, because they had actually seen him at work, had rubbed shoulders with the guy. They said: okay, it’s true, time is nothing to him, that which passes, that which flies, all that is nothing to him, doesn’t slip past or cause adherences or brackish fog – and is it precisely because we are alone in time, alone and losing at every turn, noses buried in our losses, in the sloshing bacillary liquids at the bottom of the bucket, in the tatters of sadness sewn to our fingertips like old bandages that must finally be torn off with our teeth? – he’s not immune, true, but he doesn’t think about it, isn’t interested, hardly has the luxury to, and couldn’t care less about origins, about history, has mixed his blood, thinks about death every day like everyone else and that’s all there is to it. They said: his time is counted in snaps of the fingers –
uno! dos! tres! vámonos!
– and here, they joined the action to the word, miming a starting signal that was already headed for the finish line, the goal, delivery of a work whose deadline penned in scarlet ink at the bottom of the work order lays out days according to a careful plan, according to a duly calculated phasing, according to contracts and seasons – the rainy season especially, and the nesting season – that one is never in his favour, as we’ll see. They said: his time is the present, it’s now or never, do it right, deal with the situation at hand, that’s his only moral and a lifetime’s work, it’s as simple as that. And also: he’s a hands-on kind of fellow, a grassroots man, that’s his element – he would even say so himself, eyes half-closed, cigarette dangling, mocking, would add without batting an eye that’s where the adventure is, that’s where the risks are, that’s where my body is alive – and with these words, he would beat his chest with two closed fists like a gorilla in a tropical forest – but sometimes, all joking aside, he would lift his head and say stormily, the thing I abominate is a utopia, a tidy little system, the quixotic jewel floating above the earth
blah blah blah
, it’s too closed, always too miniature, and so well oiled, it’s bad shit, take it from me, there’s nothing for me in that, there’s nothing there that interests me, nothing that gets me hard. My name is Georges Diderot and what I like is working with the real, juggling the parameters, being on the ground, all up in the face of things, that’s where I’m complete.
HE TAKES
control of zones, excavates fields, occupies ground, raises up buildings, feeds himself with the multiple, the loquacious, the sonorous, with all the motley clutter and odours of skin, with the crowds in the megacities, with revolutionary unrest, with ovations in the stadiums, with the jubilation of carnivals, of processions, with the gentleness of wild animals watching the construction sites through forests of bamboo, with open-air cinemas at the edge of villages – the screen stretched into the night sky, those hours when spaces fit one inside the other and time plays within them – and with the barking of dogs at a bend in the road. Always outside, concentrating, empirical, disbelieving: the inner experience is never within, he says, laughing when those who are disappointed by his triviality badger him for more inwardness and more depth, it’s not a folding inward, it’s a tearing apart, and I like to tear it up.
WALKING IN THE VIOLET NIGHT
ON AUGUST 15, 2007,THE NEW YORK TIMES announced in its business section the construction of a bridge in Coca, a three-line newsflash in twelve-point lower case that slid by without attracting anything more than a few raised eyebrows – people thought: finally there will be some jobs; or: here we go, they’re off again with a policy of major construction projects, nothing more. But the engineering firms that had taken a blow during the economic crisis began to ramp up: their teams set to work researching, securing contacts within the companies that had sealed the deal, planting moles within them, all so they might place themselves in the ranking, in a good position – to provide workers, machines, raw materials, services of all kinds. But it was already too late – the die had been cast and the agreements sealed. These agreements were the result of a complicated and delicate selection process that, although expedited, still took two years to materialize in the form of official signatures at the bottom of contracts at least a hundred and fifty pages long. A series of phases that resembled a hurdles race: September 2005, Coca’s city council launches an international call for applications; February 2006, five companies make the shortlist and the call for bids is sent out; December 20, 2006, the bids are submitted; April 15, 2007, two companies are chosen as finalists; June 1, 2007, the name of the winner is announced by the president of the CNCB (Commission for the New Coca Bridge): Pontoverde – a consortium of companies from France (Héraclès Group), the United States (Blackoak Inc.), and India (Green Shiva Co.) – is the lucky winner.
The competition had involved an infernal number of hours and had placed hundreds of people around the world under immense pressure. There was excitement and there was damage. The engineers worked fifteen hours a day and the rest of the time had their BlackBerries or iPhones glued to their ears, shoved under the pillow at night, sound turned up when they were in the shower or sweating it out at squash or tennis, vibrate setting on high when they went to the movies, though very few of them went to the movies ’cause they couldn’t think about anything but that fucking bridge, that fucking proposal, they grew obsessed, excepted themselves from daily life. The weeks slid past, the children grew distant, the houses got filthy, and soon they weren’t touching any other bodies besides their own. There was overtime, depression, there were miscarriages and divorces, sexual encounters in workplace cubicles, but it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t playful, just opportunity making the thief, and the inability to resist the promise of pleasure when your neck seizes and your eyes are scorched after twelve hours in front of Excel spreadsheets, sudden fever transmuted into quick coitus, a little haphazard, and finally, even though they were excruciatingly disappointed by the announcement of the winner, the ones who lost were somewhat relieved: they had aged, they were exhausted, broken down, dead tired, not a drop of juice left except the tears of fatigue they let spill once alone in the car on the way home from work, when the radio played a rock song, something saturated with youth and the desire to let loose, “Go Your Own Wa
y”
by Fleetwood Mac or anything by the Beach Boys, and after nightfall when they were pulling into the garage, they didn’t get out right away but stayed instead in the darkness, headlights off, hands on the wheel, and suddenly imagined letting everything go, selling the house, paying off the credit cards
hup
, let’s go, everyone barefoot into the car, we’re heading to California.
THE OTHERS
– the ones who worked for Pontoverde – went home victorious that night, re-energized, they had a bridge to build, their healthy bodies personified progress, their own hands would place a stone, they relished this coup shaped like fate, sure of themselves now as main characters in the world play. They too lingered in their vehicles, engines off, eyes riveted to a dried laurel leaf on the windshield and arms crossed over their chests, seat leaned back, and they too sat silently thinking about their coming expatriation; weighing their careers that were suddenly accelerated because they knew how to nod at an opportunity; counting the points they would rack up before going back to head office to occupy a superior position, which would include overseeing the reorganization of whatever department they would now be in charge of; and also reflecting on a potential move with the family, or imagining themselves relocated and single, commuting during school vacations – they too were suddenly ready to go, but this wasn’t a joyride, wasn’t dropping out, not really a vacation; now they had to gear themselves up to talk to their wives, to tell them the news; and some wives would puff up their chests with happiness and pride, they were good companions, their husbands were successful, had stature, and they would daydream themselves into a near future where they were spoiled by the company, served by local maids, a villa with a pool, yes, at the very least, two cars, a gardener, and a full-time nanny who was also a devoted cook, brilliant! Already they were laughing and going to wake up the kids, ready for the sweet leap up the social ladder; others, dismayed, would tidy the kitchen nervously in silence, and finally turn an anguished face towards their husbands because, dear, what are we going to do about school for the older ones, about my sick parents, about the little one’s speech therapist? These wives would need to be reassured, promised that they would have their say in all this, the whole thing had to be toned down, they had to be made to understand that their husbands were counting on them; while finally there was a handful of others, these ones the toughest by far, who would light up a smoke once the washing machine was on, and then,
whoosh
, they’d spin around to face their husband, butts pressed against the sink and faces lit strangely by the overhead light, unreal and yet marmoreal, like Marlene Dietrich, an ambiguous shading that made them enigmatic, abominably distant, and these ones would smile and conclude in a sardonic voice, I’m very happy for you, dear, but what’s my place in all this? These ones would hold tight to their jobs, they would need to be convinced, pressured, until finally one night their foot consents once again to creep beneath the sheets and caress the foot of the man stretched out next to them; their husbands would have to use cunning until they made this little gesture, this caress of the skin, a subtle sign of agreement that would grant their husbands the world – and these latter could then silently triumph, lying on their backs perfectly still. Then, once the family’s departure date was set, restlessness would set in. They would still need to cancel the lease, the phone, and the electricity, find storage – and then sort out this mess, the kids’ messes and their own, broken toys, outgrown clothes, piles of old magazines, chipped vases, faded photographs, everything in the dross; go to the doctor, say goodbye to friends and family, and finally pack their bags and head to Coca. And this is exactly what they did late August, early September.
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 bottle, 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.