Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal Read Free Book Online Page A

to fall into decay, to be torn to shreds. Certain associations, however, are up in arms. Petitions circulate to save the bridge – it’s the soul of our city, a piece of our identity, it holds our memories – deploring the homogenization of cities, all the fast-food joints and clothing-store signs identical from Quito to Vladivostok, specificities of identity caving under capitalist pressure, globalization contaminating the tiniest bit of sidewalk and harmonizing every storefront. The Boa is dumbstruck – he hears but doesn’t understand, doesn’t see the problem, appeals to the desires of youth and modernity: enough! What a drag! What’s wrong with wanting to move forward? And anyway the old bridge is falling into ruin and the river beneath its piers is dark, putrid. Rust wreaks a toxic leprosy on the beams and girders, the wood of the deck is cracking, you can feel it move. The Natives ended up colonizing the little covered stalls lining the bridge deck, tiny little alcoves where they coagulate for entire days, heaped together smoking or half-heartedly selling all kinds of jewellery, charms, pipes, trinkets. Little pieces of crap for little budgets, thinks the Boa: I want it gone.
    SO THE BOA wants his bridge. Not just any arch, not just any viaduct hastily dreamed up but a bridge in the image of the new Coca. He wants something large and functional, he wants at least six lanes – a freeway over the river. He wants a unique creation. Scans his debtors, his acquaintances, expresses his desire but no one sends back the interpretation he’s waiting for. In secret, he grabs a piece of paper and a pen and does some sketches of his own, but no matter how fast he draws his lines, trying to capture a pure form – ridiculous at the moment, and touching: dishevelled, maladroit, and miming the gesture of the artist – he can’t quite get it. One of his councillors cleverly suggests that he launch a contest. Such a subject requires expertise, prestige, an architect whose glorious career will carry the ambitions of the city as high and as far as possible. The Boa sees himself as a Medici, a princely patron in a velvet cape, likes himself even more, and far from taking offence, he accepts that a foreign glory could come to build upon his land, thereby raising his own glory higher.

WAS IT BETTER TO CLUTTER UP THE EARTH RATHER than the sky? Was it best to demonstrate strength, opt for a powerful creation, a combination of massive, heavy pieces like the bridge in Maracaibo? Was it best to choose a transparent, ethereal work, a construction that concentrated the material into only a few elements, an option with finesse, like the Millau Viaduct? Was it best to open a city up or weld two landscapes together, to defer to nature, use its lines, and incorporate the structure into it? The Boa can’t decide, he wants everything. He wants innovation and reference, a flourishing enterprise, beauty, and the world record. A man arrives with the solution. His name is Ralph Waldo, he comes from São Paulo: an architect who is both famous and a mystery. He enters the room for the contest auditions, hands free and calm alongside his body, and describes the form that gathers the areas together: to illustrate the adventure of migration, the ocean, the estuary, the river, and the forest, the vined walkway above gorges and the span that plays above the void, he has chosen a highly technological hammock; to demonstrate suppleness and strength, flexibility and resistance to seismic shifts, he has chosen a nautical web of cables and massive concrete anchorings; to symbolize the ambitious city, he has chosen two steel towers planted in the riverbed, skyscrapers power emitters energy catchers; to evoke the myth, he has chosen red. That is, a suspension bridge of steel and concrete. The architect announces measurements comparable to those of the longest suspension bridges in the world, most of them estuary or ocean channel bridges. Length: 6,200 feet;