Birth of a Bridge (9 page)

THE BIRDS. THEY SHOW UP EN MASSE IN MID-November. Suddenly the sky seems immensely vast and inhabited, flapping; the least flutter of a wing seems to swell it from within like an inflatable mattress, the smallest winged creature’s passage – including bats, dragonflies, or the bee-killing Asian hornet
Vespa velutina
– intensifies it. Propagation to infinity. One morning you lift the blinds and the birds are there, at rest, floating on the river or scattered over the marshes downstream from the city. Hundreds of dark spots float on the milky water like shadow puppets, hundreds of round heads and beaks mingle in one great clamour. Watching them, you begin to count the number of miles travelled, you recite to yourself the craziest distances – seven thousand miles in one go for the bar-tailed godwit or forty thousand miles in six months for the sooty shearwater; you try hard to identify them, to recognize and name the types of flight and formation, recalling that most of them have followed precise flight corridors all the way from Alaska and also migrate at night, taking their bearings from the stars, the map of the sky unfurled wide inside their tiny brains, their sense of direction more rigorous, more mathematical than a GPS – and researchers at MIT in Boston, in Vancouver, and in the Atacama Desert study the birds for this, baffled and fascinated; it’s moving to think that even the most solitary, most asocial among them has migrated in a group, as though survival depended on finding a collective solution, and you ask yourself again what would we look like, after sketching such lines in the sky, after gliding on thermal currents so high up, sometimes even thirty-three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, piercing the stratosphere, our feathers knitting the cumulonimbus together, outrunning cold and hunger, spending half our reserves of fat in the slog – and at that moment, you tell yourself that a ruby-throated hummingbird is only three inches long and can cross the Gulf of Mexico in one shot – amazing, truly, that they are so precise and punctual: often it’s the same post in the same field where they alight, on the same balcony at the same window, and the children who recognize them charge outside in pyjamas to bring them bread crumbs, rushing, goosebumps prickling their skin, slippers getting muddy but they don’t care, and they turn back towards the house and shout it’s him, he’s here, he came back! They prepare a nest of cotton, straw, and twigs, a shelter complete with pantry and reservoir: a lesson in things.

IN COCA,
ornithologists are on the alert. Their binoculars scan the sky or level at the nesting areas: they observe, count, inspect, tag, and untag – wouldn’t be good to miss the newborns; they hold their breath, ready to brandish the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, international treaty ratified in Bonn in 1979 – ready to brandish it, because this year there’s the construction site on the river, and even if the cranes provide new perches for the breathless birds to stop, the experts would already bet that the ecosystem has been disturbed. They’re worried. A delegation alerts the people in charge at the mayor’s office: the degradation of wetlands compromises nesting, threatens the species; a study on the wild swans south of Baku has just proven that the pollution of natural habitats around the Caspian Sea, which forces migrating birds to mix with domestic species, increases the spread of avian flu. These men aren’t kidding around, not at all, and the mayor’s office makes the mistake of ignoring them, turning up its nose at their duds – lumberjack shirts over white tees, clean jeans belted high over their middle, yellow Timberlands, baseball caps, large cases for cellphones clipped to their belts and Siamese twinned to their thighs, Swarovski binoculars around their necks: it’s a mistake to take them for idiots, to make them hang around the deserted halls for hours and then smoke them out with speedy interviews where they’re told that the site’s ecological standards are draconian and make up 17.8 percent of the total cost of the work; it’s a mistake because they’re already getting organized. The first findings vindicate them and they attack – forty-eight hours later the International Court of Justice decrees, after a rapid hearing, that work on the Coca bridge must be stopped during the birds’ nesting period. Three weeks. At least three, three weeks gone. The ornithologists in Coca can breathe again, while back at head office the financial directors of Pontoverde choke on the calculations of what this farce will cost them, aghast to learn that birds so small, so light, little flyspecks of nature, could slow down their superstar construction site; and the communications directors, proving exemplary in terms of their reaction time, immediately come up with a snap campaign – Pontoverde, ecology is our mandate, Pontoverde for your kids – and demand that the teams in Coca send them photos of kids petting birds under the guidance of the bridge’s engineers, smiling at the camera, hard hats on their heads, the company logo clearly visible above their eyes.

THE BOA
gets the news instantly, informed by a call from his chief of staff while he’s on his way back from an official visit to Dubai – where the birds are more discreet, it seems to him. And of course he explodes. How is it that no compromise with these cocksucking ornithologists was possible? Couldn’t we have just promised to finance new studies, new tagging campaigns, new binoculars as powerful as astronomical telescopes, new computers? Forehead glued to the bay window of his gigantic office, he watches the birds floating gently on the river for a long time, then suddenly turns and shouts: and the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, isn’t there a single asshole here who thought of that? Is dealing with these ballbreakers more than you can handle? Acres of marshland in exchange for ecological tolerance on the site of my bridge, isn’t it in you to think of a thing like that? He collapses into a large leather armchair and loosens his tie. One of the Boa’s secretaries, believing things have cooled off – stupid kid – starts talking, assuring him that he knows about the bill that was approved by U.S. Congress in 1934, popularly known as the Duck Stamp Act, but the risk with that was that hunters in Coca would just see it as an additional tax. The Boa stares so hard at him that the young man’s voice shrinks and chokes till he’s silent. He says, you, get out of here, leans his head back in his chair, and casts his gaze out the window, far, the farthest possible distance away, into the agitated sky.

THE SAME
sky that Diderot examines while he’s out smoking a Lusitania – sick of pacing like a lion in its cage in the meeting room, satellite phone to his ear to mollify the bigwigs at head office who bray like donkeys, furious, the birds, what bullshit, what a fucking pain, we’ve gotta get rid of them, take care of it, Diderot. The situation worries him. Three weeks is a long time. The guys will go bumming around in the city, and the ones who began by hooting about this fowl situation, rubbing their hands together – two or three days to score some cash, to knock about in the city, or play hooky, time off on this kind of site is nothing to scoff at – will soon be disoriented, bodies unoccupied and heads heavy with this idleness, they’ll sleep in, laze around till the middle of the day in greasy barbecue joints, or they’ll sit clicking away, eyeballs swollen in internet cafés from taking in so many onscreen promises of sex, pussies, tits and ass, half-open mouths, and if there’s a glimpse of tongue all the better, they’ll click furiously, most of them geographical bachelors from the universal contingent of mobile workers, and, come evening, the same ones will sweat it out in streets along the river, no pay yet, no cash really to burn, they’ll end up cracking, turning the mattress over to go get drunk or find something that’ll get them high, ’cause it sucks here, we’re doing dick all, and while some get depressed others’ll split in double time, and there you go – a shitshow. Diderot chews the insides of his cheeks and paces up and down, three weeks of forced loafing around means much more than a delay to make up: it breaks the site’s mechanism, interrupts the flow of energy, wrecks the work rhythm. It will be more difficult, afterwards, to reactivate everything; it will be heavier, slower, more painful, like starting to run again after stopping, all the muscles cooled down.

A FORMATION
of Arctic tern flies off and nosedives over the river. The bird in the lead suddenly leaves its position, exhausted, and repositions itself at the end of the line. Diderot too feels exhausted: his bandaged side hurts him, a piercing pain bores into him whenever he speeds up his movements and it condemns him to a rigid chest – he moves like an old man, with small steps, torso leaning stiffly forward, and since he’s only mobile from the neck up, his cervical vertebrae clang against one another: looking up has become a torture. Whispers fly that he’s paying for his stubbornness with this – in the days that followed the attack, he’d kept working with the help of morphine injections, without taking a rest or even the time to press charges – he seemed to be redoubling his ardour in order to stop thinking about his wound, and people press their lips together saying pedantically, he’s repressing, not a good sign, but hold back from speaking to him about his convalescence, because he doesn’t engage anyone in conversation anymore and turbines around like a madman, the whites of his eyes growing more and more yellow, his sweat more and more bitter and his words more and more rare. Mad – he gets that way at night sometimes when the bells pass over his pallet and ring out,
bastard, bastard!
and he wakes up, breathing hard, the back of his neck on fire, legs heavy; he gets up, distraught, and goes to take a swig of alcohol straight from the bottle, any kind, exaggeratedly, but without any pleasure in being drunk, only hoping to go back to sleep like a log and never managing to before dawn: he’s losing ground.

When he gets back to the building, he heads to the meeting room where they’re waiting for him. The news precedes him. The team leaders are tense: so what’s happening, are we stopping work? We’re stopping all this because of a few warblers? For how long? After that it’s not gonna come cheap when we have to play catch-up! One of the engineers plays the smartass, exclaims in a loud voice, well, I’d like it too if they protected my reproductive zone! The room laughs. Diderot waits for things to calm down, coldly announces that the site is shutting down for three weeks, and then he leaves the room.

FLOCKING ABOUT
the different sites, the workers are assembled on the esplanade and the team leaders line up in front of them. One of them clears his throat and announces the temporary halt to the work. Three weeks of vacation, guys. There’re birds reproducing and we can’t bother ’em, that’s how it is, guys, that’s nature. Stirring in the crowd, a hubbub, heads turning and necks outstretched as though the bodies were suddenly looking for air to breathe – some oxygen that wouldn’t lie; shoulders undulate, hands fidget nervously inside pockets – and some close into tight fists that soon swell crimson – legs shake, or pace: the air quickly grows tense over the site. And are we gonna be paid? First question to fly. With a worried look the team leaders evade this, they don’t know, hazard doubtful orders – take advantage of it to get some rest, to visit the region, to stay with family, or to find yourselves a girlfriend, huh? There are tons of good-looking girls around, eh, whaddya say? But the guys laugh bitterly, nice try: why not say thanks while we’re at it, thanks, boss, why not congratulate ourselves and give ourselves a pat on the back, isn’t life great? What proof do we have that the site will start up again, why don’t we get paid, at least? It’s one of the guys from Detroit who speaks up, a guy with an emaciated face, dry skin marred by old acne scars and red patches, blond hair tapering to a rat-tail at the back of his neck. His eyes are very pale, almost white. He’s suspicious, says he knows these grand speeches by heart, I’ll tell you, I’m not gonna get fucked over twice, and the others behind him nod their heads in approval, yeah, yeah, we’re sick of being had. We want our money now, we want it right now or we pass the buck, we ditch this place for good. His voice carries across the entire work site, cavernous and broken, a violent shake of his head punctuates the end of each sentence and he brandishes a smoke-stained index finger at the team leaders, the nail bitten to the quick and ringed with hangnails. The leaders confer with a look, one of them turns to Summer, we’ve got to send word to Diderot, tell him shit’s hitting the fan, they want their dough, then he says aloud, very calmly, okay guys, you gotta be reasonable – we can’t guarantee that you’ll get your pay today but we’ll do our utmost. How much is that? The worker from Detroit doesn’t let it go – back there, thousands like him had been taken for a ride, kept in the factories with false promises while everything fell apart, and when General Motors began laying off men in groups of ten thousand, it was too late, it was all over, he’s the one who closed the shop and since then has been kicking himself for not leaving before the breakdown, there were fewer guys hung out to dry then and his references were good, he would have got more dinero and been able to get back on his feet faster, and probably would have been able to keep his wife, too, who’d left to go back to her parents’ place with their little girl after the house was seized one Sunday morning, the day of their anniversary, the house and the television, the well-equipped and pretty little kitchen, the three-seater couch, the barbecue, her exercise bike and his fishing rod, the kid’s electronic karaoke machine; the truck sent by the bank was parked right in front of the garage and it sucked up their life from the inside, swallowed everything. It didn’t stop. You couldn’t see anything from the outside but you could hear the sound of furniture and things being heaped carelessly behind the tarps, pushed, piled, and for sure there was breakage, it was like a giant vacuum cleaner that emptied the house, emptied out their life. His wife had watched it all, straight-backed and silent, and then once the seal was on the door, had thrown a big suitcase into the trunk of their beige Rover, buckled the little one into the back seat, and turned towards him, glacial, you’ll at least let me keep the car? How much is your utmost? he asks again, yelling this time. Summer has taken her place in the ranks again with a message from Diderot: we’ll pay them. Once the guys hear the news, some of them form a line to get their cash – among them Katherine Thoreau, Soren Cry, Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, and the Natives – while the others head for the locker rooms, at a loss. Summer and Sanche are side by side: what about us? Will we be paid or not? It’s Sanche who speaks, see-sawing back and forth from his heels to his toes. Yes, everyone, Summer smiles, everyone will get their cash and meet again in three weeks.