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

to start a new life. Rationality, then, pragmatism, you’re big enough, you’re seven now, my darling, my darling, she murmured, and also the little girl was so much like her father, didn’t need anyone, so brave and other suspicious caresses on top of her head. Thus Summer stayed with the ex-husband who had asked for it – since he’d fallen into an admirably regimented and quite sincere polygamy. So you’re stuck with me, then, he said to her the night they found themselves alone at the kitchen table before a Pyrex dish in which a shepherd’s pie was getting cold. From then on, it was Saint-Raphaël during school holidays, her mother didn’t ask much of her. Neither did her father, in his own way. The little girl was left in peace. At least we’d like to believe that. Would she have had to be born as a boy in order to be chosen by her mother? Would she then have had to replace, for her father, the pudgy little male carried off to the French Riviera? We can see that she brought herself up as a boy, or rather how she imagined a boy should be raised, which led her to consider optional and even random phases as mandatory. She equipped herself in such a way as to compensate for the lacking maternal touch: soccer and video games, comic books and sci-fi novels, math, physics, and industrial design. Always dressed the same – jeans, a jacket, not many colours, hair in a ponytail – she learned to take apart a moped motor and then put it back together; during parties she took her place by the stereo and DJed rather than lining up against the wall at the first bars of a slow song, drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney – Marlboros, you guessed it – cowboy for cowboy, she’s an expert on westerns, unbeatable on questions of all the Rios and all the Rivers, which will end up being very useful, as we’ll see. Tough, concise, indefatigable, dry-eyed girl of steel – someone you could count on, in short, someone you didn’t have to baby – how’s it going, big girl? What are you thinking about? It was so obvious, so clumsy, that no one saw through her strongman poses, this outrageous sham – especially her father, caught up in a multiplex harem from which he struggled to extricate himself, and who congratulated himself each day for this child who asked so little of him, didn’t make demands, wasn’t into drama, never cried; a girl, finally, who was so little like a girl is what he thought, watching from the window as she left through the garden gate, a good little soldier, yes, how lucky he was. We can understand how Summer, encouraged in this way, began to see kids her age as lesser beings. She hastened to escape their obsession with love, their interminable confessions, their masochistic laments, the acidulous fragility they put on so willingly in order to seduce. In so doing deprived herself of their skin, their laughter, their nocturnal complicities, their solidarity – foolishly deprived herself of their sweetness. And decided for herself, at thirteen years old, one day when she let herself be felt up at the movies by a boy who she liked but who didn’t care about her one bit, she knew it – he kneaded her breasts shamelessly, slid his hand up between her thighs, and scraped the roof of her mouth with a harsh tongue – decided that love, okay, fine, but let’s not get carried away. Not at any price. Thus deciding something for herself, to do it for the rest of her life without glutting herself on hogwash like the heart has its reasons blah blah blah – love allowing us to make all kinds of stupid moves, to lose our time, to surrender our skin, to clash and wound the better to devour each other immediately after, to scream in stairwells, to call each other at all hours of the night, to drive drunk through the hostile countryside, ’cause that’s how it happens, that’s the only way – yes, for a girl so young to judge love like this, coldly, clear-eyed, was certainly surprising. She zigzagged