Birth of a Bridge (7 page)

DIDEROT GREETS
them personally, shakes the hand of the team leader for a long moment, a small man with a waxy pallor who he recognizes from projects in the Port of Busan, South Korea, where reinforced seawalls had required powder, he’s very pleased they’re here: internationally renowned divas, the boys from DSC are mostly old minesweeper divers cast aside by the army and who now transfer their experience from one site to another – and their participation comes at a pretty penny – Pontoverde must have stretched the cash, quality doesn’t come cheap.

Their plan: prepare the riverbed for the foundations to come. Knock down the base rock, locate the flaws, then break the crust with explosives – dynamite will be tossed down from the surface in fat steel pilings. The divers will work blind, the waters are murky here, muddy, full of alluvium, they’ll have to be prepared for strong currents, for strange centrifugal swirls and unpredictable draughts from gas escaping, from the resurgence of springs, or from climatic hazards that can swell the water’s rate of flow and speed its course. Diderot warns them of all this in a low voice in the intimacy of the meeting room. Then, he continues, we’ll hammer sheet piles into the bedrock and line them with concrete so that, once sealed and weatherproofed, they will form cofferdams, each of which can contain nine million gallons of water, then we’ll pump out these giant pockets before pouring a hundred cubic yards of concrete into them and they’ll become the indestructible sheaths for the towers to come. A herculean anchoring.

IT TAKES A FULL DAY’S DRIVE ALONG THE LOGGING road and then a walk for several hours along the path to reach the Native village. A pathway furrowed by rains and full of potholes, obscured by huge toppled trees, disappearing at times beneath giant ferns or even the carcass of an animal. This route has its dangers – the risk of being attacked by a carnivorous mammal is high, and the risk of getting lost is even higher. Better to take a motorboat upstream from Coca, then switch over to a dugout and paddle the two days’ journey to the village. To arrive at the end of the day, when the children are swimming in the river, splashing each other playfully, some diving in the waterfalls and others fishing with blowpipes; when the men are strolling and smoking, the women are talking, while the evening air settles with an incredible softness. This is also the time of day when Jacob makes the coffee, spooning grinds and pouring water into a large Italian coffee maker placed on the fire pit in front of his house, and he waits there, for the coffee to heat and for the villagers, his friends, to stop by and drink it with him in white tin mugs.

THIS PARTICULAR
evening, hearing of the construction of a motorway bridge over the river, Jacob is seized by a tremendous fatigue. He swallows his coffee in small sips, his gaze running over the surface of the water, opaque now, and reflecting, through the green canopy, fragments of a spilled-milk sky. In the spring, it will have been twenty years that he’s been coming here, for long stretches at a time; twenty years that he’s been studying this small community besieged by history, and doing its utmost to ignore it. He’s changed a lot, of course – the young intellectual, fresh from Santa Fe, armed with his belief in the power of ideas and determined to describe this precious alveolus of unchangingness with rational transparency, has little in common with the man who, this evening, thinks that a society cannot be deducted from a system, and for whom living here one semester out of two means investing in a different way in his own existence. The matching half of his year plays out in Berkeley. A few men from the community have arrived by now, and are drinking coffee with him, joking around; passing women greet them, their hair smoothed back from their foreheads and held with obsidian combs, their faces wide, cheekbones full, they laugh, hip to hip, one of them pregnant beneath a large white T-shirt emblazoned with the Los Angeles Lakers logo. Jacob lights a cigarette – never could bring himself to smoke anything but lights – he knows perfectly well how intrusive roads are, is aware of the probable degradation of the forest, the planned disappearance of the Natives, and has already been struggling for a long time against nostalgia: he won’t be the herald of an academic ethnography, and he won’t be a pitiful scholar; no, he’d rather die than that. And yet, in this moment – the coffee hour, peaceful hour when fullness is so complete it hurts, like a stone in the belly – when the heart feels squeezed inside the rib cage – he’s thinking only of his life, his life here and now, and his greatest emotion is for this present, wearing thin. His fatigue comes from this. He places his mug down on the white wicker table and goes inside to lie down. He needs to sleep.

WE MIGHT
ask how Jacob got wind of the story of a bridge in Coca – we could imagine the murmur of the construction site travelling all the way to him, slipped between the scales of a fugitive trout, hidden beneath the wings of a junco or perched on the petiole of a hardworking ant that made its way right to the heart of the massif via some network of underground tunnels. But really it was just men, always the same ones, who’d come upstream from Coca – people like you and me – bringing the news. These guys trade with the villages of the “interior
,”
know how to reach them without danger, branching off into one arm of the river, then another narrower one, and another still, following a path that only they know in the aquatic labyrinth that webs the forest. It’s they who, among other things, bring Jacob his bricks of coffee and his cartons of smokes. And this evening, like every other time, they docked their boat in front of the village houses, unloaded bundles of clothes and blankets, cases of canned goods, batteries, a television and two radios, then went like everyone else over to Jacob, who’d seen them coming and held out mugs to them, lifting a hand in the air – hey guys, come on over, come over here. There are three of them – two brawny guys and a teenager with an orange cap, and they come, shaking hands with “the professo
r”
– that’s what they call Jacob – then the two older ones give instructions for the transaction, quantities that Jacob translates using categories like
a little
,
a bit more
, and
a lot
, and the Natives start bringing out the baskets – baskets of a rare beauty, woven baskets whose round bellies depict the cosmos, very high-quality baskets. This is when the young one with the orange cap starts talking about the bridge in Coca – soon we won’t be coming anymore, it won’t be worth it, we’ll load up a truck and all this will be done in a day’s work, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! He has his hands in his pockets, concludes by saying that’ll be faster, huh, we won’t have to sleep outside anymore, and he smiles while kicking at the pine cones that carpet the ground; and Jacob, who has been watching the coffee maker, turns, looks him deep in the eyes and asks softly, controlling his surprise and feigning nonchalance, oh yeah, is that right, they’re building a bridge in Coca? The boy takes the bait and goes on, yeah, an awesome thing, six lanes they say, it’ll give us some breathing room, they’ve already started, they’re planning it out, you’ve gotta see it! Jacob hands him a metal box while a few yards away the men load the baskets into the boat, careful to cover them with plastic tarps, sugar? He speaks so sharply that the boy jumps and takes his hat off quickly, his hair’s ginger, as orange as the fabric of his hat, he splutters, yes, two cubes, and when Jacob hands him his cup, he takes it in one hand, holding it against his chest like a man, and squares his shoulders. The men have finished loading. One of them looks at his watch – a ridiculous gesture in these parts – and says, time to hit the road, let’s go. They want to stop for the night in another village, shaking the professor’s and the Natives’ hands – the youngest doesn’t dare look at Jacob, vaguely aware of having said too much, of having been the bird of ill omen – and hop into their boat that rocks gently. The kids see them off, shouting between branches or clinging onto the hull; the men in the boat don’t pay them any attention, occupied with manoeuvring the boat out, and finally the kids wade back towards the banks, and it seems then that the trees bow down towards the river, that the long grasses draw in along the banks, supple as elastic, and once again it’s the village that smokes, calm that hums in the forest gangue, this infinitely dilated realm at the heart of nature, this little pocket of time: the cleft of life that Jacob has chosen.

THE NIGHT
is far along when Jacob leaves his house and walks the length of the river, getting farther and farther from the village. The blackness is thick, dense, saturated with matter and noise, and Jacob uses his ears to navigate. The starlight barely passes through the canopy – too many zigzags, too many ricochets to perform – but when it does penetrate, there are shinings soft as paraffin that touch a stone, a leaf, a point of water, providing shadows to Jacob’s body, a third dimension; in other words, something with which to construct space, something to help him move forward. At the base of a tree, cold and damp, is a dugout. Jacob unties it, pulls it to the water, climbs in. He pushes off from the bank with the end of his paddle and soon he’s floating through the wood. Though he knows the way, he’s never left the forest at night, alone – a sensitive operation, similar to astronauts’ excursions into space, when excitement and terror combine deep within the same gut.

SLOWLY, JACOB
glides through the humid woods, alert, on his guard. Knows he should turn when the sound of the water rises – a sign he’s coming close to a stronger, faster current. It would be a mistake to trust the regularity of his movements, the care he takes not to hit the surface of the water too violently, precisely to avoid a slap and the clamour that might prevent him from hearing – even for a second – the murmur of the massif; a mistake to trust the precision of his movements, his buttocks contracted inside the boat, his chest held straight, his face open, and his eyes that work to tear through the aniline night – it would be a mistake to trust all this because it’s a fever that makes him do it. A black fever, sprung from anger, a suffocation of bile.

THOUGH HE
never managed to find sleep that night, he had at first stretched out on his back in bed, completely still, eyes closed – then turned on his side, changing tactics, but the face of the red-headed kid, announcing the construction of the bridge, kept coming back to him wide and vivid as a screen, disproportionate, then a shot of his feet, his hands in his pockets as he kicks at the pine cones, or laughing at the kids who see them off from the water waist deep when they’re about to leave, tapping their knuckles to make them let go when they hang on to the edge of the boat; and Jacob hears him repeat that expression like a fatal omen,
in two shakes of a lamb’s tail
; and when he finally got up, wanting to grab his book, the jinx of dizziness washed over him, he swayed, his legs turned to jelly, he was sweating like crazy – and we should specify that what poured out of him and trickled down his body was nothing like the liquid he secretes in the sweat lodge when he’s invited, no, this was venom, a bitter, animal liquid, concentrate of spite and rancour. Once he felt steady, Jacob remained upright for a long time, stiff as a stake in the middle of his house and suddenly – like a match struck – prey to the explosion of his will, he got dressed and left.

JACOB ROWS
for another day and another night in the visceral forest. He cleaves the peat moss, parts the mangrove, dodges the waterfalls. Fever and anger serve as fuel and fact and he speeds along, drinking nothing but resinous alcohol from a plastic flask, not eating or smoking, he twists in the rapids, surfs the current; by day catching glimpses of deer, wild boar, but not a lynx in sight; bumping into a group of students rafting who are whooping it up so loudly they hardly notice him, narrowing his eyes at a few Natives gathering stones from the shore, men from other villages, holding his breath at night, when the shadows lengthen poisonous, absolutely inhuman, when he feels he’ll suffocate, succumbing to the nocturnal beauty, fascinated, eyes rolling back, lips dry, the desire to scream strangling his larynx. He doesn’t sleep. He’s gathered the tension in his body as though condensing material into a cannonball – he holds himself slightly forward, concentrating on capturing the smallest flux in the water that could speed his course and carry him forward effortlessly, focused on loosening the energies around him, on recycling his anguish and agitation into each of his gestures, and strangely his exhaustion vitrifies his fury, keeps it intact.

AT DAWN
on the second day, when the buildings of Coca rise up suddenly perpendicular to the surface of the water, it’s a different man who paddles out of the woods, a man beside himself. The sun rises, ricochets off glass and steel facades, iridesces the shimmering rainbows of hydrocarbon slicks that ring the waters, and the triangular plates of metal festooning the edges of the dugout – like a set of open jaws – sparkle in the light.

Catching a glimpse of the dugout as they pass, drivers speeding along the banks at this early hour widen their eyes in the rear-view mirrors, slowing dangerously, and later, arriving at their offices, head towards the tower windows to watch the guy’s progression, call one another over, check it out, there’s a strange one down there, see him? And, upon waking, riverside residents raise the window blinds and end up going out onto their balconies. It’s not the dugout that shocks them, no, there are lots of those around here – rather, it’s seeing him, this livid man who rows with his back straight as a rod, his black tie like an Ottoman sabre across his chest over the white shirt, the dark velvet scholarly jacket, the white socks peeking out of moccasins – where’d this guy come from?

COMING UPON
the anchorage sites on both sides of the river, and struck by the enormousness of their surface area and the multitude of machines, Jacob slows, holds the paddle horizontal and throws his head back, throat taut as a bow; he floats slowly on the calm water, minuscule wavelets explode softly against the hull – a freeway over the river, six lanes, the sky is the colour of votives.

He takes a long breath and sets off again, with great strokes of the paddle in the river,
splash splash
, sounds that punctuate his progress, and finally passes the river shuttles, pot-bellied as teapots, armoured with divers and workers who move lively over the anchorage sites, their wake lifting the dugout that pitches, vacillates; sprayed, Jacob reawakens and suddenly spots a large stretch beside the bank that sparkles, silvery, and goes closer to see better. Dead fish float in the dozens, thrown up from the depths by the explosions, their eyes open and staring. Anger seizes him again, exhaustion leaves his body, he glides along beside the stinking, macabre pool, lips pressed together so as not to scream, and each stroke of the paddle injects him with new energy to carry on. Soon he comes in sight of the long quay of the Pontoverde platform, where silhouettes cram together onboard a final shuttle like the ones he passed earlier – same colours, same initials. Here it is, he thinks, suddenly rowing like mad.

He moors his dugout under the concrete mixing plant, beside the wasteland, and drags himself out of the hull. The sky has turned grey from the coal. He clambers up the bank, clinging to handholds, then pulls himself up straight – and surprisingly, he doesn’t faint. He’s hungry, thirsty, wants a coffee. Summer Diamantis, who at this moment is walking towards her batch plant after the daily site meeting, frowns at the sight of this vaguely disturbed form, crumpled clothes and bare head, and turns as she’s passing with a mechanical torsion – who’s this guy without a hard hat? – yet doesn’t slow her step – what’s occupying her mind at the moment are the latest concrete mixing trials. So much so that Jacob is able to walk the entire length of the esplanade with a confident stride, right up to the main building, without being stopped. The rain begins to fall. This is when Diderot pushes open the door, anxious about the sky.