Birth of a Bridge (11 page)

SIZING UP THE PLACE

WHEN NIGHT COMES OVER THE TERRITORY, COCA takes shape. Darkness suits it, heats it up, drives it mad, delivers it cruel and brutal, sharp edges and an interior disturbed by thousands of rival gleams; night reveals it as an orange, effervescent, vitamin C tablet tossed in a glass of troubled water, a jar of crude oil placed in a sink, a distributor of oxygen, speed, and light.

Then day falls and multiplies its light, abounds its noise, the city doubles its speed, racing tongues rave inside big excited mouths, and this name propagates left and right: Coca! Coca! Coca! The Brand New City! A zone of proliferation with swarms of febrile businessmen, dealers of all kinds, sly teenagers, opium dandies, usurers, ladies of the night, and murderers in wigs. Each week the big coastal newspapers (the first to be enticed by its reputation and fascinated by its rapid growth) publish a hot and nervous image, compare it to a nubile virgin, unpolished and cunning, still a little gawky, look, look at her, her blatant come-on, decked out like a little whore, hand on one sequined hip, ferocious, determined, listen to her calling you, come on in, boys, come see, come taste. They’re exaggerating of course, making a show of it, because columns always have to
sizzle snap pop
, but basically they’re telling it like it is – and sex is definitely one of the main activators of the big global mix, practised in order to abolish differences (or so they tell themselves) – social, physical, and generational – it’s no secret, just driving through Coca at any hour of the day you can feel the frenetic pace of a city doped up on sweat and money, stretched to the limit as though pumped full of Botox, you can measure the formidable Joule effect that’s constantly at work.

Coca promises the high life. People come here from all over, bodies impatient, pockets holding just enough to get by for a few days; constant turnover of people and desires, burning cheeks and boiling pupils, fast streets like centrifugal motors and skyscrapers opening onto a sky that dispenses good fortune: the power of the territory in action. Here you come into contact with everything that makes up the great stew of a city, you hear the spasms of concrete and the violent scansion of hearts immersed in a common turbulence. Yet the secret of this incomparable flow that makes the blood pump harder in the arteries and sweat pearl in the small of the back, this secret is no secret to anyone, it circulates through all possible networks like breaking news: don’t come to Coca unless you’re ready to join the hustle! Don’t lay down roots here, and certainly don’t come for fun or for some rest. Approach it like an ambitious wild beast, breathe deeply and kick open the door, show up without waiting to be announced, without checking in, go ahead and put your plan into action.

AND YET,
it’s still hard to understand how people could have dreamed of setting themselves up in such a dented cleft of the red limestone plateau, at the flat bottom of a valley with asymmetrical sides where jackals and lynx descend at dawn, incisors still gleaming with blood. Yes, it’s hard to understand how starving fanatics, carried forward solely by their mission to give their cult a piece of land, to give their god a cult, to give their deaths a god – how they had managed to cross the enormous continent, to carve through the prairie and the mountains, along the way finding grasses tall enough to feed their animals; how they cleared a path through the forest of cacti encircling the plain – plants with branches sharp as folding razors or machetes – borderlines of barbed wire as tall as a man on horseback; how they strangled rattlesnakes with their bare hands, walked along the canyon floor; how they got around the murky ponds transmuted into frozen lakes in winter, and into sanctuaries for deadly mosquitoes in summer. How they braved the bestial heat and the beggar’s cold. Hunted deer, trapped hares, harpooned carp. Killed Natives. How they dragged their families heaped onto grimy wagons, built houses, raised bison, fattened pigs, fenced in fields of potatoes and corn to feed them all. How many corpses and how many gone mad by the end of the journey? How many horses carved into steaks over primitive fires? How many scalps? Above all, how could they have stayed here, and continued to take wives here, to have children here, to bury their dead here, spring summer fall winter, one year then two then ten, spring summer fall winter, continued to burn brains and put holes in chests, to eviscerate bodies, spring summer fall winter, how did they do it, yes, we wonder in earnest, because to stay here, on this tongue of land flared like a skirt at the river’s edge; to grow up between the high plains and the howling forest; to take root here was, after all, to defy Heaven and all of Creation. It was to claim to call the coyote by name and outwit the grizzly, to drink melted snow till they got the runs, to roast scorpions squatting shoulder to shoulder, to spit out sand and rub flint. They did it, though, these bearded men with hemp twine hair, these women in their bonnets, these fevered children, all of them dirty and deathly afraid, chanting canticles with one hand on the trigger, all of them murderers: they founded a city.

AND THEY
were not mistaken. The place was worth the blood and the sweat and the crevasses of tears, the putrid lumps, the mad chilblains cleaving their pale feet: the valley is five miles wide, spread between the plateaus and the giant swathes of brush, flat as a palm, and edged by a river on its western side. A harsh but steadfast climate, developing predictably solstice after solstice – music paper, the scansion of their lives, the carrier of their days, monotony which closes on a final note of death; scorching summers liquefied into storms with electric skies and hailstones like Ping-Pong balls, radiant autumns, icy winters, sovereign springs, sweetness finally, the sweetness of a clearing, a thousand nuances of green, horses strolling in the prairie, youth and the strength of the reeds, tartness of the air, and rumbling of the water. And there are these violent winds from the east, carrying loess gathered on the plateaus – this permeates the ground, seeds the valley, fattens the cattle like cream on butter. Arriving here, the men who were still able had knelt on the ground and brought a pinch of earth to their mouths, tasting it with a click of their tongues – because that’s what you do – then had risen, weathervaned around, thrown their hats in the air and shouted, we’re here! This is it, goddammit we made it, we made it – in any case they didn’t have a choice anymore, it was here or never, the horses were fevered, the children had stopped speaking, the women’s bellies were covered with eczema, and they themselves were going mad.

IN THE EARLY
days, Coca curls up in turtle position. The pioneers are alone in the world, terrified, convinced of their superiority, propped up by their belief that they have been chosen. They settle in, they colonize. They proceed methodically, like the Greeks: mark out the territory, build the sanctuary, trace lines in the earth, put up gates, houses, share the arable land. They don’t see the old Spanish mission thirty miles to the south – so regularly destroyed by Indian raids, dysentery, and fevers that only some thirty members are left, and you should see the state of these guys – not one of them would be able to tell the story of that January morning, two hundred years earlier, when three forty-ton caravels with tough black hulls and sails worn threadbare pierced the ocean fog, approached the coast, unloaded priests and soldiers, powder, chalices, pots, barrels, bibles, and censers; not one of them would be able to tell this story: the men had barely placed one foot on the ground before they did exactly what they had come to do – they scattered here and there all along the coast, put up camps encircled by low stone walls between which the ringing of heavy Catholic bells could soon be heard, the spearhead and the backbone of evangelization, cultivated, hunted, sang, baptized everything they came across, Scriptures in one hand and musket in the other – and then began to die of isolation, they literally die, hang or drown themselves, bungling their entrails with grain alcohol; and not one of them would be able to imagine the twenty-year-old Franciscan monk, wild-eyed kid with a capuchin face (the monkey) who, sometime around 1630, went inland following the eastern bank of the river with twenty men behind him, and who, after seven weeks of walking, threw together a hasty altar in a prairie at the foot of the limestone plateau and celebrated the Eucharist, the river mirroring a wooden crucifix: mission accomplished, you are the children of God, you have arrived in Santa Maria de Coca.

COCA LAYS
low behind its palisades, its enclosures, its pigsties, and its corrals. It doesn’t have the same expansionist rage of other cities on the continent, born in more or less the same way, and never sets foot on the opposite bank, on the other side of the water, where the bulging forest hatches heretical and cannibalistic tribes. Conversely, it works to preserve its perimeters, to consolidate its circumference: a burrow of a city clenched around its assets – weapons, flocks, oppressed women – this is what it is. A hole. A cluster of rough and blunt individuals bustle around, working like dogs by day and growing fearful once night has fallen – because night in Coca is the night at the bottom of a well, a double layer of darkness where fear turbines, because night is in the sky but it is also in those who never lift their heads and limit their world to their own feet and their own stomachs – and so they kill, dance, copulate and rape, steeped in alcohol to the roots of their hair, and finally collapse onto straw mattresses that stink of sweat and humid hay. Who, in the morning, stagger out onto the doorstep in boxers or undershirts, hirsute hair and pasty breath, one or two dogs at their heels, and piss legs spread eyes blinking, point their guns at the riverbanks, target otters or any other half-witted mammal frisking about in the clarity of dawn,
bang! bang!
and, having shaken off the dust, go back inside the house to demand their coffee with a sullen groan. Pure rednecks, say the few travellers who risk coming to Coca by water, armed themselves, pistol barrels stuffed to the brim.

THE NATIVES
do finally show themselves. At last. One fine day they come out of the woods and move closer to see, flow into the bushes without even rustling the leaves, and suddenly rise, immense. They’re here, standing near the huts, armed with lances and naked. They breathe like people. Terrorized themselves, they cause great fear, heavy rifles are pointed at them, stay where you are, don’t take a step, don’t make a move. They don’t understand a word. Well, we warned them. Shots are fired, bodies crumple, everyone leaps into action, and then nothing – little groans among the tall grasses and the scent of gunpowder. After that, the settlers are scared: they don’t like us, they seem cruel, they eat human flesh and drink blood hot from the carotids, like a spout flowing straight into their bestial mouths. What if they come back? Scouts are sent into the woods to locate them, to evaluate their numbers, and to scope out their strength, the dying mission even sends emissaries to give them a chance to finally learn that all men are brothers in the eyes of God. Rare are those who return safe and sound from these expeditions: posts planted at regular intervals appear along the length of the river, at the forest’s edge, exhibiting mutilated bodies that attract bronze-eyed lynx (
Felis tigris cocaensis
), speckled hummingbirds, and electric-blue snakes. At night, people barricade themselves inside wretched little huts, weep with terror, twist their mouths, stroke their chins, and finally give up on risking their necks to cross the water, to clear out the forest any more. In Coca, the river does its job – it composes, it separates – and the years pass.

Because yes, there is this river that excites it, caresses its side. Long golden cobra lazing and wild, lying curved like a trigger across an entire continent. Three thousand miles. Deep in these parts, and the fords impossible to find even though scouts on horseback have been sent out on the banks to plumb the riverbed, deep and yet also wide – at least a mile – wide enough that you can see storms roll in from the high seas, and strong, the dark and rapid waters pleated by a powerful current. It’s always drawn as a little frozen torrent grown to a lazy giant in the middle, where it touches Coca, and then as a managed national river, canalized for commerce between the city and the sea. People like this gushing of crystalline waters that deepen in colour, opacify, and then grow cloudy with motor oil, disgustingly polluted in certain bends, before mixing with the salty water of the ocean in the gulf. Okay. But the problem is that we don’t know where the animal comes from, its source is a mystery, no one has ever been able to pinpoint the precise location, not the GPS coordinates, it’s an uncanny thing, and has been the same story since the city’s beginnings, not the young Franciscan monk with his hooded monkey face and his expeditionary body devoured by anguish and mosquitoes, not the young aces of the first convoys, not the geologists and the hydrologists from London, Boston, Decazeville, and Lons-le-Saunier who would take up residence in Coca between 1866 and 1925, travelling upriver for months – the last ones to come play the detectives, tell the story of the fire at the Pernod factory in Pontarlier in 1901: the zealous employee who emptied barrels of absinthe one by one into the Doubs to avoid an explosion, the wide river that was instantly alcoholized; the soldiers at the riverside garrison who filled their helmets and drank, who burst into guffaws, splashing into the water to quench their thirst, letting it flow down their chins, spatter on their beards, coats unbuttoned, a miracle, Jesus descended into the valley; and the following day, nine miles away, another river is contaminated, its waters turned opalescent green, the fishermen are pissed off, this better not mess up the trout; and this is how it is discovered that the Loue River, believed until then to be autonomous, original, is in fact a resurgence of the Doubs – astounding the profession – a first colouration in the history of hydrology – no one has found the river’s source, no solitary adventurer, no reality-show hero tossed into the forest from a garish helicopter equipped with infrared cameras; all of them eventually turned back, got lost, tumbled wounded into a ravine, or got tangled in thick vines and fluorescent ferns, backed away from the enormous waterfalls that suddenly rise up three hundred miles to the north, liquid walls whose most minor trickle would shatter the strongest steel-hulled boat; and finally all agreed to establish that there was not just one source, but many, and that they would come back later – and later never came.