Birth of a Bridge (19 page)

TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF JUNE THEY HAD TO speed things up even more. Diderot stroked his chin in front of calendars and work plans and the insides of his cheeks grew raw with wounds. The men from Pontoverde were harassing him now, daily phone calls, messages saying they’d already exceeded the projected budget and that the only way to not lose money now was to reduce the duration of the last work phase.

The towers were ready, solidly set in the riverbed, powerfully held in their protective concrete sheathing, but no matter how tall and red they were – acrylic paint developed to respect air-quality standards – they were stupid, didn’t signify anything besides the absence of the bridge to come – the main component was missing: the deck that would allow vehicles to cross from Coca to Edgefront.

GOTTA GET
a move on now, gotta get to the other side of the water! This is what you’d hear if you left your ears lying around in the site offices, in the locker rooms, on the jogging paths stretched out along the banks – the runners took advantage to stop for a breather, hands on their hips, red-faced, some of them still bouncing as though possessed by St. Vitus’s dance, and talked about the progress of the work between two panted breaths. But in the end, more than urgency, more than deadlines to meet, it was the imminence of the last phase of the site, that of the forming and the placing of the deck, that excited the bridge men and women, the city’s population and the few columnists from the coast who cast a glance now and then at what was happening in Coca: everything would soon make sense, everything would finally become reality. For Diderot, on the other hand, this last phase was not a completion: it fit into the whole as a brand new experience, and once more it was a matter of plunging ahead, of running the risk, in a single sweep, and the cables incarnated this new situation perfectly.

We’re going to put a phenomenal tension system in place, a magic system of force transmission, we’re going to attain finesse itself! Diderot filters these comments through his teeth while drawing diagrams on the white board, tracing dynamic arrows (→ and
) over capital
F
s, and soon these become slogans called out in a clear voice: the suspension bridge is cutting edge, the cream of the crop of human ingenuity, of problem solving, a matter of distribution of power and mass, the ingenuity of balance, without which there’s only wear and tear, degradation, tugs-of-war, collapses and ugliness. He overflows with ardour, the engineers love it – they recall their years of advanced calculus, the problems and the exams, the experiments on freezing lab benches, the water cold and dirty at the bottom of the sinks, the grey smocks; they see again the halo of their desk lamps on graph paper, this yellow circle cut out in the darkness of their rooms, their mothers’ worried heads around the half-open door, did you figure it out? Almost finished? Go to bed! and the celebration it is to solve the problem in the hollow of the night, the sudden perception of their own naked intelligence when they nab the curve of the suspension bridge, define the famous catenary, the hyperbolic cosine, rub their eyelids once they’ve figured out the formula – and all of them suddenly had the feeling of being in exactly the right place, all of them, including Sanche and Summer who sit in on these meetings side by side and throw each other complicit, mocking glances when Diderot plays the ham.

AND DIDEROT
may well have celebrated the suppleness of a hammock and the lightness of a nest, but this is still about labour. A hell of a job. High technology revisiting the archaic motion of spinners at the distaff, because overall it is a matter of spinning cables exactly as you spin yarn on a spinning wheel, the specialized work of the cable layers who have already been working for several weeks. The plans had two main cables passing through the summit of the two towers like successive mountain crests and linking the structure to each riverbank. So two titanic ropes had to be built, each composed of 27,572 strands of galvanized steel, divided into groups of sixty-one bunches of strands and assembled by twisting them into a helix around a central longitudinal axis. The cablers gather, twist together, and then compress everything to make it round. Once it was built, the enormous strand would be nearly three feet round and one and a half miles long, a lasso that could capture Ursa Major; a journalist from the San Francisco
Chronicle
determines that, laid out end to end, these steel strands could circle the earth three times at the level of the equator, and it is this comparison, this scale of proportion, that will inspire the Boa’s municipal politics from now on. He is jubilant, the fishnet of the bridge is most definitely the net he has used to catch the city, an arachnidan webbing where each knot solidifies his influence and increases the intensity of his desires and ambition; he envisions great celebrations for the inauguration and begins to count down the days.

ONCE AGAIN
the teams that swell with acrobats where the Natives take the lion’s share, once again the international agencies that windmill through their candidate files, driving a specific, calibrated workforce towards Coca, tightrope-walking workers, almighty men who are hard to pin down once they’re there – they run on challenges, confront death with the murky innocence of those for whom working at these heights is a feat as simple as drinking a glass of water or brushing their teeth – but once on-site, they work like gods, cable the bridge accurately – first the two long main cables, then the 250 pairs of vertical hangers, one every 70 feet, each one a hell of a clothespin, and over the weeks they devise an astonishing system of supported steel beams with a total mass of 25,000 tons, and capable of holding, while also stabilizing, a deck that will weigh 150,000 tons.

Reporters show up, cunning guys who want their chance at catching the spectacular image, the girl in a bra and hard hat suntanning on her break, beer in hand, sitting above the void, the guy who lifts his sandwich and looks at the camera, a laughing munchkin under the belled sky, an alignment of shoes in close-up with the river far away beneath, crackled like an oil painting or the glaze on pottery – but this wasn’t the time for monkey business, Diderot was shouting now, absolutely furious, the meters are running, still another few weeks to go, stay focused.

SOON A
footbridge links the Coca bank to the Edgefront bank, a provisory suspension bridge whose line plays in the air like the fibre core of the cable, the interior thread around which the whole work will unfold. On the night it was finished, the workers advanced towards the centre from either side of the bridge, as was the custom, and broke bottles once the teams touched, they couldn’t believe it, the suspension bridge swayed, the wind rumbled under their hard hats, but dammit now you could cross, there were shouts, and finally, each one turned to go back to his side, most of them staggering.

The same night, happy, Georges phones Katherine: come on, let’s go cross it together. His voice gets lost in the silence, from which an answer flows back without conviction, okay. They agree to meet on the Edgefront side in the spot where they left each other last time. Diderot, at the wheel of the Impala, waits for Katherine who finally arrives, walking fast, head down, a nervousness about her that doesn’t seem like her, gets into the car, and without even looking at him orders, let’s go, let’s get out of here! They drive towards the river, and, crossing the old Golden Bridge that’s living out its last days, they reach Coca. You okay? Diderot asks, when Katherine, opening the window, removes herself into the outside. Ashes fly about inside the car, they race towards the site. What’s going on? he insists, showing his badge at the electronic gate and later, standing opposite each other over the hood, he finally discerns Katherine’s face: a dark crescent stretches from cheekbone to brow. He doesn’t say anything but places a hand on her waist and leads her towards the quay. The path seems endless, they walk beneath the bridge and delicately accost the Coca entrance to the footbridge by climbing the banks, high here, and coffered with concrete blocks between which a little rudimentary staircase has been built. Diderot unlocks the double wire-mesh door and here they are stepping forward onto the provisional catwalk. It’s night, their steps resonate on the detachable floor of metallic slats. So, it’s almost done? Katherine asks, and Diderot answers, yeah, it’ll go quickly now, we’ll be finished by mid-August. She doesn’t react, asks him about the placing of the deck concrete, the next step, and Diderot explains, getting technical, two methods were in competition, always the famous controversy of concrete versus steel, and finally the solution of an orthotropic deck made of flat steel with two inches of levelling concrete was chosen, the question of the weight of the deck being a crucial aspect. Katherine, falsely cheerful, nods, she’s elsewhere, Diderot gets frustrated: all right, can you tell me what’s going on? Beneath them, the last ferries slog from one bank to the other, chockablock with laborious silhouettes squeezed in tight. This thing between us is going nowhere. She looks at her feet. Diderot pauses, could have expected anything from this woman, anything except that it could deflate like this, he points to the end of the bridge, actually I had the feeling that we were headed somewhere. Katherine’s face that lights up – he can see it, even in the dark – it’s true, she says, we’re walking towards Edgefront, and that’s home for me. Diderot softens, and so? We can stay a little longer, we can do what we want, right? No, Katherine digs in her heels, I can’t do what I want, I don’t live like that. I know, Diderot shrugs, I know, but she closes herself off, hard, I don’t think you could possibly know. They stand, unmoving. Because of your husband, your kids? He’s aggressive, furious with her in this moment, furious for having uttered these words. She hasn’t moved, says simply, nothing to do with them, I’m free, believe it or not, and I like my life. She takes out a cigarette that Diderot lights for her with a curt gesture, a gust hits the bridge, he doesn’t look at her, leans against the guardrail – fine, so what next? – suddenly in a hurry to be done with her, wanting to avoid murkiness, endless conversations pierced with sticky silences, sad banality, all this while they’re on their bridge, together, dammit, not just anywhere, and suddenly after a long silence he says, taking a gamble, okay, come live with me. She laughs right away, a radiant laugh, bad idea, I’m a piece of work, he feels like he’s finding her again, takes her in his arms out of joy, pulls her to him, I am aware, brushes a thumb over her tumid temple – the day before, she wasn’t able to dodge the metal stapler Lewis had thrown at her face when she was taking Matt’s side, accused by his father of stealing cash, his habit of grabbing objects within his reach and whipping them at her face, but this time Liam had risen up and threatened his father with a knife, I’ll kill you, quickly held back by Matt, and they had shouted, gone ballistic; and after placing a cold cloth on her temple in the microscopic bathroom, Katherine had come back to say to them all, let’s start over, we are not victims; throwing a hard glance at Lewis she’d repeated, there is not a single victim in this room, and later, while she was smoking under the awning outside in a rocking chair about to bust, while Billie was dressing her Barbie for a ball, Lewis had said very calmly that she was free to go, and she had looked him in the eye and shrugged, I know.

Diderot and Thoreau have started walking again, you scared me, Diderot says quietly when they reach Edgefront, and Katherine answers I was scared too.

BETWEEN MARKET AND COLFAX THERE’S California Street, parallel track that’s narrower, high concentration at its midpoint – at the level of city hall – of pubs, bowling alleys, bars – all of them large rooms with giant screens placed high against fake mahogany panelling, always the same dimness with a cherry shine. Sanche heads into this area around one o’clock in the morning on the nights when he works. He pushes open the door of La Scala or Sugar Falls, finds the rung of a barstool he can stand on, periscoping his neck around the room, and then, spotting the table, joins Seamus and Mo, two or three others – sometimes even Summer. He’s waited all day for this moment.

BEER, WOMEN,
a jukebox – paradise! It was in these terms that Seamus took possession of the table the first time they came in, only a few hours after the workers’ vote in favour of the bonus; that was almost three months ago already, and Sanche sidling in behind him had admired his virile nonchalance, the sexual authority that emanated from his body; people moved out of Seamus’s way, a barely perceptible step backwards that showed the effect of his aura, and in these overpopulated places, no one would think of picking a fight with him; many were they who, on the contrary (like Sanche), would have liked to share his table – baptized “the Irishman’s tabl
e”
at the end of one night even though there was another always tagging along now, and that was Mo.

Sanche rushes to the table, zigzags through the full and humid room, among the streaming foreheads, mouths moistened with alcohol and crazy allegations, he comes the way you’d throw yourself headfirst into the pirate’s treasure chest to touch the gold, to make your skin glow with the gleam of precious stones and feel their sharp edges against the flesh of your thumbs, he has stomach cramps, a painful abdomen from impatience and apprehension, and he’s barely completed the rounds of greeting, heart lifted and pumping hard in his chest, before he pulls out a chair and sits down, already observing those around him, crazily exulted to be in their company, uprooted, plucked and placed among these heads that are totally unique in the world, to be beside their callused feet, Seamus, the fox character from children’s books, fuzzy cheeks, long thick yellow nails, hard skin, one of his grandparents having disembarked in New York around 1850 – the Irish famine, human corpses rotting in piles in the hollows of embankments, hamlets that empty out and are abandoned – no education, no talent, no money – migrates towards the north with a rudimentary compass in his stomach, looking for enough to live on, subsistence, that’s all, not a destiny or even a new beginning just something to eat and drink, something to take shelter under, and something to clothe himself in, to occupy the strength of his arms, and then the scattering of a lineage, genealogical absences, empty spaces in the forms, names noted wrongly sediment in their misprints; and at the end, this head, on the alert, this something hirsute and irreducible, and these feet that will soon be on the road again, well versed in the acceptance of loss, definitively eccentric: and glued to his side, clever Mo, who’s obsessed by the screen like a possible space of isolation in this plurality of places and paths, a sphere of relaxation where he can unwind a little, release his effort; a woman undulates there, hair swelled by an artificial breeze and skin rounded within the confines of a bikini, she’s very blonde, in perfect health, he stares at her, imperturbable, ready to duck out at any second, to veer elsewhere, on a new line segment, a new tangent, why not Africa; and sometimes, but more rarely, convinced by Sanche to rejoin the table at the cost of long minutes of telephone negotiations, there’s Summer, with her ponytail trapped in a triple elastic twist, Summer with her cold feet who gets drunk methodically – who comes there to get drunk, doesn’t quite know what to do with herself when she’s not working – flushes when teased and called “Miss Concrete
,”
ebbs back in her chair when Seamus brings his scarred face towards her and shows her the black interior of his mouth, stop it, she says without smiling but soon it’s she who sways forward seeking that same mouth that scares her, an oscillation that makes her dizzier than the alcohol and saws away at the invisible tether that joins her to her country of birth, this cord stretched to the limit that Sanche had cut brutally, with a gesture that was even more sudden than the process to accomplish it had been slow.

THE FIRST
part was a regular exchange, although it had been agreed upon, that lasted all autumn, it was letters along with telephone calls, his mother – and his father behind her – invariably soliciting positive responses to questions he doesn’t care about – are you eating well? Are you well respected? Have you written to Augusta? Are you putting money aside? – questions, questions, always questions. As though their common language couldn’t break free from the regime of the interrogator, asking signified a reminder of his mother’s hard-earned right, her enduring right to be informed about his life, to possess him; and replying signified similarly the proof of his filial love. Soon, Sanche – who knows their conversation inside and out before even picking up the handset, and can’t stand being forced into this positivity – grows aggressive, he mocks them, he tells them off but always runs into this wall called his mother’s radical worry, this frenzied bias she has towards him. It comes to a head in December: despite his efforts to talk to his parents about the site and the people he’s meeting here – it was Christmas Day – here he is again irrevocably driven into the ever narrower and more pitiable groove of reassurance. His jaw locks, he hangs up, and never picks up again – too stirred up to compose the phrase that would express, without harshness, the tiniest bit of the violent pleasure he feels living here, far from her, far from them. He feels remorse, has a guilty conscience – reading their name in the messages on his cellphone; his chest is suddenly compressed upon finding a letter or a package in his mailbox, his saliva gets heavier, he sweats, horrified – but doesn’t regret a thing. Something has been broken. That’s life, he sometimes thinks, during the daily commute home.

One day in March, however, someone comes to get him in the locker room while Seamus is talking to him about a site where he’ll probably go after Coca, a uranium mine in Canada, and Sanche, vexed, follows the messenger back towards the administrative offices, who is it? The guy answers, I don’t know, it’s a woman, and Sanche logically assumes that it must be the owner of his studio apartment who has pursued him all the way to his workplace, some story about a water leak that has nothing to do with him, he scowls, the messenger says into the handset, here he is, and then Sanche holds the phone and recognizes, crystal clear, as though uttered from just a step away, the voice of his mother: Sanche, is that you? Sanche freezes, doesn’t answer. His mother is here. She came all the way here. The ground opens beneath his feet, chasm of claustrophobic Sundays and the viscosity of lace doilies on the television, the voice repeats, Sanche? Sanche, it’s me, it’s Mom, is that you? Once again he’ll have to answer yes – yes, Mom, yes it’s me – but Sanche doesn’t want any more questions, doesn’t want to say yes anymore, so he says without trembling, no, it’s not me, but the voice attacks again, at once stronger and more fragile, Sanche? Sanche is that you? and Sanche catching his breath one last time says very distinctly, bringing his mouth close to the receiver and almost in spite of himself modulating a definitive voice, no, no, ma’am, no, I don’t know you, cuts off the communication with his index finger, slowly hangs up the receiver, turns, and now goes charging down the hallway banging into others as he does, hurtles down the small stairway, crosses the work site, running till he’s breathless towards the locker rooms, running with all his might, nothing is more urgent in this precise instant than catching up with Seamus, and Mo, and the other guys from the site, and when he sees their silhouettes getting ready to leave the platform, he speeds up even more till he gets to the bus and mixes in with them, very agitated, his brain like a full tank on a boat that pitches and heaves, a tank of methane or gas, a highly flammable tank in any case, and from that moment on he’s full of a new intuition that something extraordinary is going to happen to him now, is going to transpire, here, in a few days or a few seconds: right now nothing is irrevocable because he has no link to anyone anymore – everything is within his reach.

WHAT HAPPENS
to him, what comes into arm’s reach with the return of the good weather, could very well be Shakira, for example; she too is a night owl, she too has powerful feet and a befitting body, rushing through the city like a snowball, each day growing thicker and more friable than the day before. When she arrives one May night at La Scala or at Sugar Falls, she doesn’t need to climb onto the rung of a chair to see who’s there, all she needs to do is throw a quick glance around the room to untangle the aggregated silhouettes, and in the middle she recognizes Sanche, remembers the airport and the dip in the river – he’s not the one she’s looking for and who she’d like to kill at this moment, but his table offers a target to aim for so she heads there. Sanche nearly falls off his chair when he sees her coming towards him, like the lid of the treasure chest lifting slowly: here it is, the pirate’s gold.