Birth of a Bridge (8 page)

From the top of the three short steps that lead to the door of the building, he asks the guy in front of him, who he takes immediately to be an intruder, you there, what are you doing here? Jacob has come to a standstill at the bottom of the stairs, says flatly, are you the one in charge? His arms rest by his sides but the milky blue of his eyes worries Diderot just as much as the sky that melts now and coughs up rain in big warm drops, what a mess. The one in charge of what? Diderot speaks without aggression but with impatience, and begins to step heavily down the stairs to talk to this guy – but he’s stopped on the second step by Jacob’s hand that comes up against the centre of his chest, the long knotted fingers spread wide over the fabric of the shirt that grates, the palm made metallic by its hardness, are you in charge of this construction site, yes or no? Diderot freezes. His eyes scan Jacob from head to toe, rapidly, without noticing any suspicious bulges where a weapon might be concealed, and he pushes the hand away firmly, begins to step down to the last step, saying yes I am, what’s it to you, and with these words, the hand that was pushed away comes back hard against his stomach, gathered into a fist,
bang
. The blow catches Diderot off guard as does the storm that he hears rumbling far off and he folds over, staggers, then collapses against Jacob, who falls backwards and the two men roll on the ground. They lie there a moment, inert, long enough for the rain to speckle their clothes with dark spots that quickly cluster into a single patch, long enough for the esplanade to become glazed and transform into mucky clay, till finally they make a move to stand up. Diderot turns to his side and uses the ground to press himself up while Jacob, already standing, teeters on skinny legs, the knobs of his ankles protruding under the white cotton of his socks, easily visible beneath pants that are too short. He’s the one looking down on Diderot now, dominating him with his height and a body that’s ten years younger. But in the next second he doesn’t stand so tall – taken by surprise at this primitive move, a punch, a jab straight to the gut, when all he wanted – he’d swear it – was to sit down at a table and discuss the thing with this big man, he seems like a good guy, explain his point of view calmly, show him how this bridge he’s building will bring destruction and extinction, how he’ll be part of tragedy and loss, and how directing this thing makes him a kind of killer. Instead, as though the rain drumming down had harassed his thought, preventing it from forming into a possible sentence, as though the soaked, muddy esplanade had sucked his words deep into the cesspool, he takes a breath and spits,
bastard!
There’s brutality in this hirsute body gripped by violence, in this voice that insults and hurls even though the body is stiff, but it’s a brutality that Diderot doesn’t calculate, suddenly bristling, seized by fury, this nutso better not piss me off too much, is all he thinks to himself. Once he’s up, the pain in his stomach hooks him again, it kills, and this annoys him, he’s the one in charge. Head down he ploughs into Jacob like a bison, like a locomotive, a squall of muscles and fat, the blow is violent, Jacob gasps, suddenly breathless, takes a step back, and once again is flat on his back. The spongy ground welcomes him with a hiss of sludge. Diderot steps forward and stands over him now, enormous, one leg on either side of him, you have two seconds to get lost, two seconds before I call someone. But Jacob, who he thought had been neutralized, down for the count, rears up again, grabs him by the ankles with his two tense hands, pulls him forward, and Diderot falls on his ass again,
splash
. It’s a fight, then. The two men hit each other in succession, one after the other, an interval of a couple of seconds between each clout, a breath between each slap, one after the other they grab each other by the collar with one purple fist while the other gathers into a ball of force, pulling back behind a shoulder and hurtling forward like a projectile against the cheek, hooking the nose, the ear, the brow; they bash each other, both slow and heavy, clumsy, and it’s crazy to see how they resemble each other now, their clothes the same colour because of the mud, eyes blistered, crimson and sweating under the deluge. If you’d been there to see the combat – the bridge against the forest, the economy against nature, movement against immobility – you wouldn’t have known who to cheer for. In the end, Diderot, finished, steps back staggering, turns halfway, but Jacob’s voice behind him holds him still: look at me, asshole. Diderot freezes, hesitates to turn again, turns, you talking to me? Jacob stands, filthy, holding out a knife he just pulled from his sock, shitty little knife that doesn’t scare Diderot but whose blade is rubbed with lemon-yellow sharpening ointment, a thick paste acting on the steel blade like resin on the bow of a violin. You talking to me? Diderot takes a step forward. Yeah, Jacob has lowered his hand and now he states in a formal voice: I demand that the work be stopped – his glottis goes up and down his trachea but his eyes don’t blink. Don’t be ridiculous, Diderot sighs, now get out of here. He shivers, the rain intensifies, and the air cools off. The guys on the site must be wading in this shit, we’ll have to be careful of landslides, risks of rising water levels, he has to go now, pivots to call the guards, he’s back to the bottom of the three steps when he hears a noise at his back again and whips around, exasperated. Brilliance of the blade, a burning in his side, blood that spurts, a thousand candles. Jacob disappears.

PUDDLES HAVE
formed now, spread out over the surface of the large Pontoverde platform, fairly large and fairly deep pools, these are the ones making the rain sound, making its splat oppressive. One of them stars outward at the base of the three steps of the main building– men’s boots had pressed into the ground in this very spot, their heavy soles marking the ground – and it’s here that Diderot lies, his eyes on the sky. No one has come out yet to see what’s happening outside – can it possibly be true that they haven’t heard the brawl? Can it possibly be true that, polarized in front of computer screens where forecasts of bad weather appear, and holding their breath as they contemplate disturbances, they’ve gone deaf? Barely three minutes have passed since the end of the scrap and Diderot’s losing blood – his shirt has blossomed red-violet over his stomach, and is dripping scarlet into the puddle; he doesn’t try to extract himself from the mud, doesn’t make a move, relaxed now, calm, and his consciousness, floating in the vague indentations of the sky, repatriates large bells above his forehead that ring out:
bastard
, bastard!

THE SAME
word that Katherine Thoreau yelled with her fist raised at the bus driver after he started driving again while she was hammering on the door, hey, open the door, please, hey! But the little man paid no attention, didn’t look at her: this wasn’t a bus stop, it was a traffic light, a red one, at the edge of a seedy intersection on Colfax. A disaster for Katherine, who puckers her lips as she looks at her watch now and flies into a panic: if she’s not there on time to punch in, if she misses the river shuttles to the sites once again, she’ll take a wage penalty, or even lose her job, for sure, shit, shit. In a rage, she kicks the hydro pole standing there, winces, turns, catches sight of a figure reflected in the glass of a motorcycle dealership, a full-length silhouette, Katherine observes it and then goes nearer: a pretty woman still, forty or maybe a little older, tall, a fuchsia parka too thin to keep the winter out enwraps her abdomen and reveals it heavy – breasts and belly – without much of a waist anymore; acid-wash jeans hug thin legs cushioned by a pair of dirty sneakers, thick brown hair at the roots lightens to flavescent at the shoulders, reddish straw clogged with badly maintained curls, her nails are bitten to the quick and the skin of her hands is dry and lined, a little gold chain with a heart pendant is her only piece of jewellery; it’s not that she’s ugly, or dirty, no – you can see that this is the kind of woman who only owns one bra but who washes her underwear in the sink, the kind of woman who soaps herself vigorously, tongue pressed between her lips – it’s just that when you see her, you sense poverty. Katherine Thoreau stares at her reflection, she’s tired, her eyes adhere, wrinkles deepen in her reddened skin and give her a sad look but she doesn’t think she looks half-bad in the mirrored glass, she’s not done for, with a few dollars, a haircut, wrinkle creams, and some rest, she could still have appeal; but at seven in the morning, she grits her teeth to keep going, to hold on and not get the hell out of here leaving them behind to fend for themselves, the four of them, her depressive husband, her demanding boys, her little girl who’s teething. The night had taken a bad turn: at three in the morning when she couldn’t take it anymore, she got up from the sofa bed to turn off the TV that Lewis’s eyes were glued to,
I
at least have to sleep if I want to be able to work tomorrow she said in a syrupy voice, a voice that humiliated her husband because, brandishing an ashtray, he suddenly spat out, dammit! I don’t want you to go back to that fucking site, all those guys checking out your ass, I know that’s why you do it, to get them hard, I know it, you think I’m stupid but you better watch it, I’m warning you, and Kate, stunned, thinking of her days – hard hat on her head, visor down over her nose and crammed into a machine for ten hours in a row clearing out the backfill in the anchorage hole, the abominable racket that leaves her dazed when the evening siren finally sounds – had laughed a superior laugh, which conveyed to Lewis his impotence – she might just as well have called him a loser, asked him how he thought he would do it, practically, to stop her from going to work – a laugh that she stretched out with a contemptuous smile, okay sure, I’ll stop going, later guys, I quit, but tell me if you’re not a complete idiot how you think we’d manage? What would we live on? She was planted with her hands on her hips in her polyester housecoat and couldn’t dodge the ashtray when it was thrown against her temple,
bang
, let out a scream that she quickly stifled with a hand to her open mouth because at that moment Matt, her oldest boy, had pushed open the front door and he was drunk, everyone had bellowed insults, and the younger boy, Liam, suddenly appearing in his pyjamas in the middle of the living room had, as usual, thrown himself sobbing against his mother, and the electric atmosphere had not failed to wake the littlest one, it’s true that they were all on edge and squeezed like sardines into this shitty condo. Later, when they were lying down again on the sofa bed, the little one between them with her soother in her mouth, Katherine had said firmly to Lewis, say you’re sorry, and he’d mumbled sorry then taken her hand across the child, and they held each other like that in the darkness until sleep overtook them.

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
R
s 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 warn 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 account
s”
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.