Free Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal Page A

dress, belts her Alcantara coat with the rabbit-fur collar, and goes to deliver three determined knocks on the principal’s door: her son is Portuguese, does that mean he has to become a mason? Well-argued protestation and cold anger shaded with the suspicion of racism: they’re keeping us down. The two-faced principal reassures her, construction presents a Pleiades of occupations – positive impact of the word Pleiades on the mother who sees sparkling brilliance, and perhaps even a little bit of heaven – and finally, after obtaining a bachelor of technology, the crane reconciles everyone, tall and flamboyant, a centrepiece. Operating one requires superior qualifications, an eagle eye (a vision that resists glare and perceives relief), a fine ear (auditory acuity in a noisy environment is tested before getting a job), and the cold blood of a marksman. The becalmed mother accepts the crane, and sees in it an aristocratic position, one where you stay clean, sheltered, detached, with dry feet, high above the mass of workers who swarm below with their hands in the muck, sees it as a good position that could possibly come with middle-management status, while the father slips a word in Sanche’s ear, you’ll be cushy, free, no boss on your back, and adds as he puts an arm around his shoulders, complicit for the first time: like me in my truck.
    Sanche suffers from neither vertigo nor the difficulty of working alone in a small space; he has a sense of balance and of responsibilities, a sense of safety – cranes are dangerous – and last but not least he’s blessed with an incredible capacity for concentration: he’s found his place. He learns to drive and operate cranes – lattice boom truck cranes, crawler cranes, telescopic cranes of all tonnages – he takes the related training courses for drillers, for equipment managers – he heads a team of thirty people on the site of a tunnel in Luxembourg – and goes overseas, Nouakchott, Mauritania, where he oversees loading and unloading operations between boats and the oil-rig drilling platform. It’s here that he meets the man who introduces him to politics, and who he listens to at first simply in order to beat the boredom that comes when the breaks are long, when weariness takes over from fatigue. The man works on the rig, he’s Portuguese like Sanche, took refuge in France during Salazar’s wars. Over a couple of sleepless nights, while the warm and salty ocean air corrodes their skin just as it oxidizes the steel ladders, he introduces Sanche into a new immensity that echoes like a cathedral: the Revolution. His voice captivates the crane operator at first, black flow exploding everything in its passage – fuel like the oil they’ve come to extract off the coast of Africa. Words spin in the atmosphere, high-powered lassos able to capture the substance of thoughts, with a flick of the wrist capable of bringing to mind recalcitrant concepts that seem rather outmoded in this early twenty-first century. Sanche is drawn to the theory immediately, sees clarity in it, and power; he pronounces certain words for the first time, words like peoples , dialectic , collective , alienation , emancipation , words like capital and oppression , expressions like historical materialism or enlightened avant-garde of the working class , he turns them over on his tongue to feel their weight, their thickness, to appropriate them, as though these magical terms were the revelators of the world’s logic, of its form, its mechanism, its flows, and its future. He takes all he can from this, it’s a good warm-up, this is what he tells the man over their last handshake at dawn one morning in November, when the ardour of the all-night discussion has dried out both their mouths. After that, he returns to France, and his jobs are back to back without any time off; he becomes one of the best files in the temp agency that manages his career. And now: the bridge.

IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF THE