Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal

Author:Maylis de Kerangal [de Kerangal, Maylis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-88922-890-0
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2014-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

A THIRD LANDSCAPE

WINTER GOES ON FOREVER, A SHEATH OF GLASS. Cold corsets the city. Oxidizes perspectives, clarifies sounds, detaches each gesture, and in all of this the sky plays an exaggerated part. On the river – bleached ashen like the rest – people are at work and the bridge expands. Near the enormous columns that are now like the two indestructible ankles of this whole story, there are now long concrete seawalls reinforcing the banks. Steel is unloaded onto them, carried by rail to the Pontoverde platform, and then transported here aboard barges equipped with icebreakers.

It’s phase two of the site, we’re switching over to height, colonizing the sky. Diderot, in fine form, lifts his glass to no one in particular during a gathering on the work site, New Year’s resolutions formulated by the skin of their teeth on December 31st, mulled wine served in translucent plastic glasses that immediately melt a little – but we know that his glass holds only Coca-Cola. In other words, Diderot’s voice smacks, we’re finished with the holes, the excavators, and the explosions, terminado the digging and the blasting of the ground, heads underwater and feet in the abyss, eardrums shaken by dynamite and the pressure of underwater chambers, the mud and the mire, done with the dredger – Verlaine packed his bag three days before Christmas – the time has come for cranes and arrows, the time of welders, rock bolters, the time of skilled labourers. We begin the raising of the towers: the Coca tower and the Edgefront tower, seven hundred and fifty feet high. Cheers! Shouts fuse together over the esplanade, and one voice distinguishes itself from the hubbub – a vaguely nasal timbre, probably that of Buddy Loo: seven hundred and fifty feet, yeah, kinda like the Empire State Building, eh – an assertion that’s corrected right away by Summer Diamantis – the Empire is taller, ours will be more like the Tour Montparnasse, and she’s barely finished her sentence when Sanche’s voice sounds in her ear, Diamantis, there’s not a single person here who knows the Tour Montparnasse, and without answering him, she migrates towards the wine.

THE WORKERS drink, pace, and comment, glasses in hand, we’re gonna have to climb up there, gonna have to do it, with a mix of impatience and anxiety unbridled by the alcohol. Sanche Alphonse Cameron swallows a smile, arms crossed over his chest, puts on an innocent face: his time has come, and he knows it. Four months overseeing vehicle maintenance was enough for him – now he’s going to gain some altitude. The Coca and Edgefront towers will be identical, each one composed of two immense steel piers placed thirty yards apart; these will be solidly anchored to a concrete foundation and then innervated to each other via crosspiece supports, sorts of gangways that will also serve as platforms to hoist people and materials. The piers themselves will be composed of prefabricated steel girders, bolted one to the other all the way up – requiring a rhythm of twenty-five girders per worker per day, the guys have been informed.

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