Free Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal

site and surroundings – this confers upon him a new sense of power from an ideal distance. He is the solitary epicentre of a landscape in motion, untouchable and cut off, he is the king of the world.
    And yet, in the beginning, he lived on Earth like everyone else, and more precisely in Dunkirk – proletarian concrete, harbour industry, family tourism, cool cheeks and wind on your forehead, dunes and light beers – where he was born in the municipal hospital one Sunday in November 1978, the sole offspring in a late brood. It was a miracle: no one would have bet a cent on his mother, forty-two years old; she herself had long since stopped lighting candles to the Virgin, rubbing her belly with castor oil, or wearing red undergarments – she herself had stopped believing. The baby had barely uttered his primal cry and even though he presented a skinny little body accompanied by a disturbing face – flattened forehead, wrinkled yellowish skin, two black marbles that never blinked – he was already praised to the skies. He was the first and the last child, beauty itself and love personified. Amen, amen. But the father – what did he have to say? Nothing, precisely; he lay the stones of his dry silhouette against the counter of a seedy bar and kept quiet, dumbfounded by his paternity and even more flabbergasted by his wife – a girl from Alentejo who he met in a parish youth group and who had never had anything but conjugal attentions for him, an unvarying assortment of heavy meals, starched shirts, submissive nods of her head, and dominical sex – he remains prostrate, like the reckless driver caught by the patrol and stripped of a chunk of cash. He is no longer the master of his house: strengthened by her child, his wife has become a different woman, she radiates new strength. Rules the house, holds the purse strings, decides on the priorities, sings out loud. An end to the trembling hands and the little voice that begged for grocery money at the beginning of the week, an end to the sad evenings waiting for her old man, an end to shame and regrets. Life’s course now hinges on a single axis: the child will be dressed like a prince, housed like a master, fed like a prelate: they’ll bleed themselves dry. The father drives heavy loads between Dunkirk and Rotterdam or Paris, he’s often absent, so the mother has free rein. Accumulates as many hours as she can to bulk up her wad: in the morning, housekeeping in the offices of the port, at noon the cafeteria of a private school downtown – she feeds her boy there before lunch is served, keeping aside the best pieces of meat for him, pinching the best fruit, doubling the portions – and in the evening takes care of the two little daughters of a bourgeois couple next door, children she observes with interest, and bases his education on them. She brushes Sanche’s hair till it shines, drives him to the library, speaks to him in fine French. Enrols him in the same classical dance classes that the young neighbours go to – he is a little prince in white tights, held up as an example. Sanche is a frail, solitary, and precise child; clothed in ruffled wimples and royal-blue velvet knickers, he bounces around the living room. The father can’t stand it, yells at his wife, you’re making him into a little faggot, so he drags the child to the stadium on his Sundays off, Sanche is happy to please his father but catches a chill in the bleachers, a cold and an earache: the couple quarrels. At eleven years old, when people ask what he wants to do when he grows up, Sanche hesitates solemnly between a conductor and an archaeologist, ambitions that junior high erodes inescapably, that high school (private schools, his mother knows other housekeepers there) strives to tame: the boy is a good student, he needs a real job, why not the construction industry? With this direction, the boy keeps mum, the father is satisfied, the mother desolate. One morning she buttons up her black silk