Birth of a Bridge (12 page)

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Authors: Maylis de Kerangal

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: Birth of a Bridge
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VERY SOON
there was a port in Coca. Dynamited stone from the canyons east of the city moved forward into the river in compact heaps, forming breakwaters where high-tonnage vessels began anchoring in the beginning of the nineteenth century. These are fitted out in the opulent cities of the estuary and travel upriver for seven days, bringing machines, casks of wine, precious fabrics, health remedies, books, and newspapers, and leave again heavy with bricks and anthracite, cattle, skins, and furs. Traffic intensifies, the river becomes the umbilical cord by which Coca grows fatter and then slims down: technical innovations, moral evolutions, musical revolutions, medical progress, developments in fashion, noise of wars and celebrations, all of this surges back towards it aboard these long phosphorescent ships – they make of it a continental lighthouse, a faraway light burning in the dimness of an immense and wild land where only the edges have been civilized. Also, in 1850, an actual lighthouse is built. Joshua Cripplecrow, mayor of the city at the time (named for the darkness of his hair, nails, and teeth, for his lameness and scheming – he’s a killer) has only this in mind, this is his life’s project. It would be raised at the river guard, where the bed narrows before opening out again towards the south in a rift basin fringed with marshland, and would be crowned with a turning flame beneath a glass cupola: a lookout tower. Soon beacons are placed along the length of the banks, buoys are roped up, a harbourmaster’s cabin is built, a dry dock, dockyards, captains are trained, and today Coca is still the last port upstream on the river. Beyond it, the mangrove creeps forward into the water, the islets in perpetual formation threaten to ground vessels, the map of the riverbed is drawn twice a year, and navigating requires a light, flat-bottomed craft – canoes, dugouts, kayaks; farther still, there are only mossy wooden pontoons floating in front of riverside cabins. At the level of Coca, however, if they’re well manoeuvred, two giant tankers can pass side by side.

AT THE
time the lighthouse was built – let’s go back for a moment – gold was discovered on the western bank: three clean nuggets in the mud, three little flickers that quiver in the sun. Gold, gold! Immediate influx – men, mostly, young guys who are strong, poor, and full of belief. A new wave of migrants reaches Coca following the continental path of the pioneers while another crosses the ocean, comes to skirt the black coasts aboard stinking ships; they advance slowly, very slowly, and find the entrance to the bay – such a narrow passage – a tiny door, the eye of a needle – and it is so moving to suddenly come upon the bay, intact, secret, just by craning your neck the way you’d poke your head curiously through a half-open door, it was such a strong feeling – the ship moors deep in the gulf, a troop disembarks and travels upriver, usually on foot, unknowingly following the path of the young missionary, and then branches off towards Coca. Once they’ve arrived, the newcomers spit into their hands, build boats, rafts, cross to the other bank, transporting what they need to clear the land. There’s traffic, a Frenchman sets up a ferry business, charters a first vessel sixty feet long and deep enough to hold two horses, a dozen men, a few cases of sugar and flour, a barrel of hooch, and twenty barrels of powder. By Jove, it works like a charm.

The guys don’t pull punches, they charge ahead and make a space for themselves. First-come, first-served, that’s the name of the game – you just gotta go for it. They know nothing about this part of the river, nothing about the Native burial grounds parallel to the river, bodies buried with heads towards the ocean and draped in blankets embroidered with shells; they know nothing about the sacred trees, the giant sequoias clustered into cathedrals of foliage, the pines (
Pinus lambertiana
) and the little clay altars with parakeet feathers and clusters of honey mesquite (
Prosopis glandulosa
) burning. They cut, clip, and clear relentlessly, bust through, turn around and dig. They set themselves up and some of them do touch gold – these ones are rare, but they brandish their pebbles, eyes popping, screaming their heads off, a long cry that swells between the trees and thus reactivates the hope machine. Others see them, envy them, tell themselves that they got lucky, and wonder, is luck democratic or are there chosen ones; does fortune smile on just anyone, might she even one day smile on me, just one tiny little smile that would revive in one fell swoop this mass of exhaustion that I call my body.

A NECKLACE
of bric-a-brac houses appears in what comes to be known as Edgefront. They’re pitched in the mud overnight according to the rule of the
fait accompli
and stand shoulder to shoulder on a band of earth no wider than a mile but at least twenty long, tacked onto the river’s edge. Families move in, some of them come down from Sacramento off the train that unifies the interior of the territory from then on. They grow gardens, set out rabbit hutches and all kinds of enclosures for chickens and pigs, dusty paths cross-hatch the large strip; women give birth screaming beside basins of boiled water, and soon there are children playing with sticks, building huts and trapping coypu. Calm returns, the great status quo: no one thinks about the Natives anymore, sometimes you can make them out here or there at the far ends of the strip where the sylva touches the river, and some even exchange words with them. But no one goes into the forest anymore except for the fur traders, and these men are wrapped in a cloak of mystery: they’ve trafficked alcohol and weapons, squatted beside leathery shamans to chew hallucinogenic roots, learned their language which includes four vowels and four consonants (the women have only three vowels at their disposition), hunted sable and deer, tamed the blue fox and the whiskered screech owl (
Otus trichopsis
); they’ve tracked that bronze-eyed lynx and played knucklebones with forest men clothed in tunics made from salmon skin and adorned with shells collected from the banks – knucklebones with the debris of skulls, nose cartilage, portions of clavicles, and all kinds of phalanxes – they’ve followed little girls dragging flat dolls with fish eyes all the way back to their huts and done business with their mothers, then have followed these same women into the immense swampy prairies populated with spirits and magic sounds, and while some of them get killed, others have children. Intermediary men, they’ve plumbed the thickness of the brush over a range of at least two hundred miles and when they return, when they emerge from the sticky gangue and blink their eyes, blinded, lips dry and green at the corners, skin livid, the people run towards them, encircle them calmly, welcome them with respect and open arms: they bring rare plants and materia medica, bitter berries and leaves that salivate, more furs, and, more rarely, gold and carnivorous flowers.

A FIRST BRIDGE
was built in 1912, baptized the Golden Bridge. It’s a burly, rustic, but also umbilical and thus ambiguous bridge, as though its primary function was less to de-isolate Coca and aid its expansion to the other bank and more to regulate the flood of poor people who live on the other side from then on, to filter their incursion into the old city and, once night falls, to facilitate the return of those who work in the city’s central neighbourhoods – above all, to prevent them from lingering where what’s prized is order and security.

In the decades that follow, the city sediments, its grid is etched into the ground, its map – airy, diaphanous, still containing numerous enclosures of high grass – unfolds slowly: temples, schools with bells, newborn civic buildings, flour mills, cart makers, stores, hotels and exhibition centres, a small university, a theatre, a few restaurants, several bars and saloons, all this coagulates gently during the prosperous years that follow the First World War. A way of life develops that siphons all space, sucks areas clean, absorbs and neutralizes them, the day-to-day triumphs, while vernacular fictions solidify – those fictions that will populate the city from now on until they’re indistinguishable from it, like a second skin; fictions surrounding Coca’s foundations, risen up
ex nihilo
beneath the infinite sky, extrapolated from the virginity of the New World with this sense of accomplishment of communities held in the palm of God’s hand; but fictions that also bump up against the city’s earthy melancholy, its aphasic silence, as though living there amounted to facing adversity, since humans would never get another chance – there would never be another Earth.

THE RIVER,
this liquid wall, continues to draw a borderline in the heart of the city, fixing more strongly than ever this “other side of the water
,”
this area that excites or repels. So silty, so thick along the banks that the children who swim between two fish traps can’t see their hands beneath the surface, and their feet have completely disappeared into the red sludge where thin black snakes slither past. But it has also become an integral space of life: people work here, circulate here, draw their subsistence from it. There are hundreds of vessels upon the water each day now. Ferries multiply, crossing the river or descending towards the bay, barges trade and transport; in summer simple rafts are poled along to conclude minor deals, and in winter little cargo steamers fight their way through the greyish ice; canoes fish here – and when the salmon come back upstream during spawning season, boats are suddenly packed in shoulder to shoulder and there are shouts from all sides, screams and laughter, because dammit, fish are spurting from the surface, it’s a miraculous draught of fishes, and tonight, it’s a party, a festival, a belly-splitting good time, grilled onions and boiled sea asparagus, crispy potatoes; tonight it’s violins, a ball, prohibition wine pouring forth from barrels, boobs at attention in the cleft of corsets, pricks in hand, in mouths, and sex all you can eat, tonight it’s all-out mayhem – and, racing over the waves like arrows, you can catch sight of loads of Native dugouts.

Because yes, the Natives are here now. Set up at the edges of the forest, their dwellings thicken the border and send up smoke between the branches, a milky-white veil against the black of the woods. People say they were drawn like magnets to Coca because of the bartering on the river, the sparkle of electric lights, and the bitterness of the beer, that they want to read the newspapers, speak several languages, and go to the movies, that they do what they have to in order to follow the path of progress, that they’ve chosen to evolve. People like to say that they were attracted to the city simply because it was much warmer than their gloomy woods and that the tiniest room with a concrete floor is superior to the dirt floors of their mouldy huts. People like to say that the city was simply desirable, and so they desired it – just like we desire it when we’re fifteen and live far from everything, bundled away in the country, in a backwoods town where the church bells keep time, stuck in the bleak countryside dying of boredom, where you sleep with chickens because, shit, there’s nothing else to do, though what you’d really like is to bust your eardrums and let loose on the dance floor, or at least watch it rave the whole night long. More rarely, people imagine that they’re refugees, and that it’s actually fear, violence, and hunger that have pushed them here, huddled together, on edge and lost.

The truth is that the status quo had gone on for too long and the first lumberjacks ended up making their way to the forest. They were newcomers to Coca themselves, guys from the interior, from Montana and Nebraska, but also Europeans, giants with flaxen hair, Slovaks, Germans, Poles; they had short and gnarled arms, empty bellies; they knew how to do the job already and kept costs low for a downtown boss. We know that they would begin gently at first, choosing the youngest trunks, spacing out the cuts, two guys at work while three or four others kept a lookout, and then they’d haul the trunk together, one behind the other, clearing out narrow corridors through the forest as they passed like veins that they would use again the next time they came back to work – all this so as not to leave a trace, so as not to break the implicit pact that had governed life in the area for so long: they poached Native land in silence. But, little by little, becoming bolder, they shrank the space between cuts, began to set traps themselves, and sometimes even got so close to the villages that they mistook domestic livestock for wild game and grabbed them shamelessly. Then they rapidly tightened their hold on the forest, turned the pressure on the tribes up a notch: encampments were set on fire in order to gain territory, animals poisoned with sulphuric acid, girls were abused – a little seven-year-old Native girl was raped and strangled, found floating in the river, body swollen like a wineskin. Still no roads but forest channels that would become a netting of paths in a few years’ time for lumber vehicles. So the Natives got scared, and while some of them plunged farther into the immense forest, following the game – their sustenance – others, desperate, walked all the way to Coca. It was a surprise to see them turn up like that – some were even disappointed – so this is what the Natives look like? These are the people who gave the territory its name, who terrorized the early settlers? These are the noble warriors who walk with God at their backs and the plain beneath their feet? Feathered, quivers full of arrows, proud gazes and agile bodies racing through the deep forests, they were objects of fascination and fear – the caricature was helpful for illustrating an enemy worthy of the courage it takes to hunt him; a sexual fantasy for well-dressed women, an aesthetic model for all those nostalgic for the noble savage who would be glad to bring one back to their conferences – fattened up, cloistered in the vapours of rubbing alcohol, chewing rotten tobacco from morning till night and getting swindled by kids – bear’s teeth for coppers – it was crap, and no one gave a shit.

A SECOND
wave of immigration happened in the 1950s. Although isolated, Coca continued to attract new populations that need to be housed – families driven from the coasts where life has become too expensive, where work is scarce; modest and working families besotted with detached houses and nature, poor folk seeking to remake themselves, lost souls seized by the dream of the West, that stubborn myth that colonizes their minds. They speculate on land to be divided into lots, take over the pasture land, conquer the fields; little by little the tractors are put away and gas stations pop up, wagons are soon replaced by pickup trucks and Fords – and some real property swindles go down. A few roads are rapidly outfitted with motels, fringed with restaurants that serve cheap meat, with bowling alleys and supermarkets, with warehouses. At night, neon signs trace the outline of girls in pink garters, stetsons on their heads, mugs of beer in hand. Because – funny thing – the more the city modernizes, the more people turn to the clichés of the past to attract regulars – in other words, the fewer real horses, the more rodeos there are – in freshly done-up arenas plastered with giant ads, and so people pay their share. The descendants of the pioneers stick together, fold inward reflexively and cement a violent aristocracy whose financial dominance is based in the major areas, or what’s left of them – they keep close ties with the police, the courts, and the banks, and the most intuitive ones team up with the unscrupulous wheeler-dealers who operate here. Violence itself changes shape. Where there used to be brutal brawls, settling of accounts and ordinary vendetta, now there’s petty crime, drug trafficking, women traded like horses, and sexual crimes. Now there’s racketeering, deportation, extortion, and usury; now they use intimidation in order to take their pound of flesh.

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