Maylis de Kerangal - Birth of a Bridge

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.

ANOTHER WORKER joins the group without being noticed — not a single one among us would have cast an eye on his angular, shifty form, tattooed with a safety pin, a mistreated cat that would take a beating and dream of giving one in return. Soren Cry arrived after six days hitching from Kentucky and the Eastern Coalfields — a ghostly rural zone, scrappy, dismal little hamlets scattered over an area hammered with misery; drugs and alcohol to eradicate the threatening spectres of Cheyenne warriors hidden in the Appalachians; youth who bury their noses in rags soaked with white-spirit or turpentine, hunt squirrels with rifles, organize car rodeos in the mud, empty out cartridges into bottles of beer downed one after the other, light fires in the carcasses of rusty pickups, all this just to get their rocks off a little once night falls; they listen to heavy metal loud enough to burst their eardrums, music like decibels spewed, like death rattles. A quagmire. Kicked out of the army six months earlier for acts of violence against a superior — the colonel was a thirty-three-year-old woman, a technocrat hayseed who had humiliated him in public, treated him like a hillbilly, and spluttered in his face, no doubt because she’d seen too many movies, and something in him had given way. He broke her teeth. Since then he’s been living with his mother, taking one-off jobs, seasonal work, and the rest of the time, nothing, time off fiddling around, playing GameBoy in front of the TV in the condo he shares with this pious, poor, and depressive woman — who he has imagined stabbing to death or strangling countless times, but who he kisses tenderly each night on the temple — and probably he left so he wouldn’t have to kill her.

SO IT’S a multitude that moves towards Coca, while another multitude escorts it, a thick and sonorous stream mixing chicken roasters, dentists, psychologists, hairdressers, pizzaiolos, pawnbrokers, prostitutes, laminators of official documents, television and multimedia device repairmen, public letter writers, T-shirt vendors, makers of laurel lotion to treat calluses and cream to kill lice, priests, and cellphone agents — all of these infiltrate the place, siphoned from the flood that such a site causes, betting on the economic spinoff of the thing and getting ready to collect this collateral manna like the first rain after a dry season, in stainless steel bowls.

AUGUST 30TH, NEARLY NOON. HEADING TOWARDS the Coca airport is a young man at the wheel of a deep-blue Chevrolet Impala — heavy, slow, a clunker. Sanche Alphonse Cameron had rolled down the window to smell the asphalt burning, the freeway is new, fluid, he’s got a full tank of gas and seizes the day, knows that soon he’ll be spending his hours a hundred and fifty feet in the air at the controls of an amazing cab crane and that all this horizontal propulsion will be over.

HE KNOWS the way: ten days earlier it was him landing at this airport where he was welcomed by his own name on a sign held by a large hand, a disproportionate hand, it had seemed to him at the time, with thick and slightly reddened digits, with manicured nails painted magenta, a hand extended from the robust body of Shakira Ourga — her husky voice rolled the R of her surname. Discovering her in entirety once she had extracted herself from the small waiting crowd, Sanche had to be careful not to let his gaze lose its head like an excited kid at the gates of the fairground, because the girl was tall, taller than him by a head, a bizarre body, thin and burly at once, a wide back and slender arms, prominent joints, narrow hips and round breasts held high without a bra beneath a thin camisole with spaghetti straps, long thighs moulded into a pair of jeans, tanned feet in heeled mules. She had picked up his suitcase while smiling at him, a smile as copious as the rest, and a stunned Sanche had followed her back pockets, flecked with glitter, to the metallic sedan that sparkled in the parking lot — the Russian’s beefeater step required him to synchronize his own and he trotted along behind. Cellphone meowing in her bag, she had walked away slowly from the car to raise her voice, furious, rapid delivery, coming back with a red ear and forced smile, and finally, looking over the roof of the car at Sanche, she’d put on a pair of black, monogrammed sunglasses and shouted in a thundering voice, welcome to Coca, the brand new Coca, the most fabulous town of the moment!