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.

VERY SOON there was a port in Coca. Dynamited stone from the canyons east of the city moved forward into the river in compact heaps, forming breakwaters where high-tonnage vessels began anchoring in the beginning of the nineteenth century. These are fitted out in the opulent cities of the estuary and travel upriver for seven days, bringing machines, casks of wine, precious fabrics, health remedies, books, and newspapers, and leave again heavy with bricks and anthracite, cattle, skins, and furs. Traffic intensifies, the river becomes the umbilical cord by which Coca grows fatter and then slims down: technical innovations, moral evolutions, musical revolutions, medical progress, developments in fashion, noise of wars and celebrations, all of this surges back towards it aboard these long phosphorescent ships – they make of it a continental lighthouse, a faraway light burning in the dimness of an immense and wild land where only the edges have been civilized. Also, in 1850, an actual lighthouse is built. Joshua Cripplecrow, mayor of the city at the time (named for the darkness of his hair, nails, and teeth, for his lameness and scheming – he’s a killer) has only this in mind, this is his life’s project. It would be raised at the river guard, where the bed narrows before opening out again towards the south in a rift basin fringed with marshland, and would be crowned with a turning flame beneath a glass cupola: a lookout tower. Soon beacons are placed along the length of the banks, buoys are roped up, a harbourmaster’s cabin is built, a dry dock, dockyards, captains are trained, and today Coca is still the last port upstream on the river. Beyond it, the mangrove creeps forward into the water, the islets in perpetual formation threaten to ground vessels, the map of the riverbed is drawn twice a year, and navigating requires a light, flat-bottomed craft – canoes, dugouts, kayaks; farther still, there are only mossy wooden pontoons floating in front of riverside cabins. At the level of Coca, however, if they’re well manoeuvred, two giant tankers can pass side by side.

AT THE time the lighthouse was built – let’s go back for a moment – gold was discovered on the western bank: three clean nuggets in the mud, three little flickers that quiver in the sun. Gold, gold! Immediate influx – men, mostly, young guys who are strong, poor, and full of belief. A new wave of migrants reaches Coca following the continental path of the pioneers while another crosses the ocean, comes to skirt the black coasts aboard stinking ships; they advance slowly, very slowly, and find the entrance to the bay – such a narrow passage – a tiny door, the eye of a needle – and it is so moving to suddenly come upon the bay, intact, secret, just by craning your neck the way you’d poke your head curiously through a half-open door, it was such a strong feeling – the ship moors deep in the gulf, a troop disembarks and travels upriver, usually on foot, unknowingly following the path of the young missionary, and then branches off towards Coca. Once they’ve arrived, the newcomers spit into their hands, build boats, rafts, cross to the other bank, transporting what they need to clear the land. There’s traffic, a Frenchman sets up a ferry business, charters a first vessel sixty feet long and deep enough to hold two horses, a dozen men, a few cases of sugar and flour, a barrel of hooch, and twenty barrels of powder. By Jove, it works like a charm.

The guys don’t pull punches, they charge ahead and make a space for themselves. First-come, first-served, that’s the name of the game – you just gotta go for it. They know nothing about this part of the river, nothing about the Native burial grounds parallel to the river, bodies buried with heads towards the ocean and draped in blankets embroidered with shells; they know nothing about the sacred trees, the giant sequoias clustered into cathedrals of foliage, the pines (Pinus lambertiana) and the little clay altars with parakeet feathers and clusters of honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) burning. They cut, clip, and clear relentlessly, bust through, turn around and dig. They set themselves up and some of them do touch gold – these ones are rare, but they brandish their pebbles, eyes popping, screaming their heads off, a long cry that swells between the trees and thus reactivates the hope machine. Others see them, envy them, tell themselves that they got lucky, and wonder, is luck democratic or are there chosen ones; does fortune smile on just anyone, might she even one day smile on me, just one tiny little smile that would revive in one fell swoop this mass of exhaustion that I call my body.

A NECKLACE of bric-a-brac houses appears in what comes to be known as Edgefront. They’re pitched in the mud overnight according to the rule of the fait accompli and stand shoulder to shoulder on a band of earth no wider than a mile but at least twenty long, tacked onto the river’s edge. Families move in, some of them come down from Sacramento off the train that unifies the interior of the territory from then on. They grow gardens, set out rabbit hutches and all kinds of enclosures for chickens and pigs, dusty paths cross-hatch the large strip; women give birth screaming beside basins of boiled water, and soon there are children playing with sticks, building huts and trapping coypu. Calm returns, the great status quo: no one thinks about the Natives anymore, sometimes you can make them out here or there at the far ends of the strip where the sylva touches the river, and some even exchange words with them. But no one goes into the forest anymore except for the fur traders, and these men are wrapped in a cloak of mystery: they’ve trafficked alcohol and weapons, squatted beside leathery shamans to chew hallucinogenic roots, learned their language which includes four vowels and four consonants (the women have only three vowels at their disposition), hunted sable and deer, tamed the blue fox and the whiskered screech owl (Otus trichopsis); they’ve tracked that bronze-eyed lynx and played knucklebones with forest men clothed in tunics made from salmon skin and adorned with shells collected from the banks – knucklebones with the debris of skulls, nose cartilage, portions of clavicles, and all kinds of phalanxes – they’ve followed little girls dragging flat dolls with fish eyes all the way back to their huts and done business with their mothers, then have followed these same women into the immense swampy prairies populated with spirits and magic sounds, and while some of them get killed, others have children. Intermediary men, they’ve plumbed the thickness of the brush over a range of at least two hundred miles and when they return, when they emerge from the sticky gangue and blink their eyes, blinded, lips dry and green at the corners, skin livid, the people run towards them, encircle them calmly, welcome them with respect and open arms: they bring rare plants and materia medica, bitter berries and leaves that salivate, more furs, and, more rarely, gold and carnivorous flowers.

A FIRST BRIDGE was built in 1912, baptized the Golden Bridge. It’s a burly, rustic, but also umbilical and thus ambiguous bridge, as though its primary function was less to de-isolate Coca and aid its expansion to the other bank and more to regulate the flood of poor people who live on the other side from then on, to filter their incursion into the old city and, once night falls, to facilitate the return of those who work in the city’s central neighbourhoods – above all, to prevent them from lingering where what’s prized is order and security.

In the decades that follow, the city sediments, its grid is etched into the ground, its map – airy, diaphanous, still containing numerous enclosures of high grass – unfolds slowly: temples, schools with bells, newborn civic buildings, flour mills, cart makers, stores, hotels and exhibition centres, a small university, a theatre, a few restaurants, several bars and saloons, all this coagulates gently during the prosperous years that follow the First World War. A way of life develops that siphons all space, sucks areas clean, absorbs and neutralizes them, the day-to-day triumphs, while vernacular fictions solidify – those fictions that will populate the city from now on until they’re indistinguishable from it, like a second skin; fictions surrounding Coca’s foundations, risen up ex nihilo beneath the infinite sky, extrapolated from the virginity of the New World with this sense of accomplishment of communities held in the palm of God’s hand; but fictions that also bump up against the city’s earthy melancholy, its aphasic silence, as though living there amounted to facing adversity, since humans would never get another chance – there would never be another Earth.

THE RIVER, this liquid wall, continues to draw a borderline in the heart of the city, fixing more strongly than ever this “other side of the water,” this area that excites or repels. So silty, so thick along the banks that the children who swim between two fish traps can’t see their hands beneath the surface, and their feet have completely disappeared into the red sludge where thin black snakes slither past. But it has also become an integral space of life: people work here, circulate here, draw their subsistence from it. There are hundreds of vessels upon the water each day now. Ferries multiply, crossing the river or descending towards the bay, barges trade and transport; in summer simple rafts are poled along to conclude minor deals, and in winter little cargo steamers fight their way through the greyish ice; canoes fish here – and when the salmon come back upstream during spawning season, boats are suddenly packed in shoulder to shoulder and there are shouts from all sides, screams and laughter, because dammit, fish are spurting from the surface, it’s a miraculous draught of fishes, and tonight, it’s a party, a festival, a belly-splitting good time, grilled onions and boiled sea asparagus, crispy potatoes; tonight it’s violins, a ball, prohibition wine pouring forth from barrels, boobs at attention in the cleft of corsets, pricks in hand, in mouths, and sex all you can eat, tonight it’s all-out mayhem – and, racing over the waves like arrows, you can catch sight of loads of Native dugouts.

Because yes, the Natives are here now. Set up at the edges of the forest, their dwellings thicken the border and send up smoke between the branches, a milky-white veil against the black of the woods. People say they were drawn like magnets to Coca because of the bartering on the river, the sparkle of electric lights, and the bitterness of the beer, that they want to read the newspapers, speak several languages, and go to the movies, that they do what they have to in order to follow the path of progress, that they’ve chosen to evolve. People like to say that they were attracted to the city simply because it was much warmer than their gloomy woods and that the tiniest room with a concrete floor is superior to the dirt floors of their mouldy huts. People like to say that the city was simply desirable, and so they desired it – just like we desire it when we’re fifteen and live far from everything, bundled away in the country, in a backwoods town where the church bells keep time, stuck in the bleak countryside dying of boredom, where you sleep with chickens because, shit, there’s nothing else to do, though what you’d really like is to bust your eardrums and let loose on the dance floor, or at least watch it rave the whole night long. More rarely, people imagine that they’re refugees, and that it’s actually fear, violence, and hunger that have pushed them here, huddled together, on edge and lost.

The truth is that the status quo had gone on for too long and the first lumberjacks ended up making their way to the forest. They were newcomers to Coca themselves, guys from the interior, from Montana and Nebraska, but also Europeans, giants with flaxen hair, Slovaks, Germans, Poles; they had short and gnarled arms, empty bellies; they knew how to do the job already and kept costs low for a downtown boss. We know that they would begin gently at first, choosing the youngest trunks, spacing out the cuts, two guys at work while three or four others kept a lookout, and then they’d haul the trunk together, one behind the other, clearing out narrow corridors through the forest as they passed like veins that they would use again the next time they came back to work – all this so as not to leave a trace, so as not to break the implicit pact that had governed life in the area for so long: they poached Native land in silence. But, little by little, becoming bolder, they shrank the space between cuts, began to set traps themselves, and sometimes even got so close to the villages that they mistook domestic livestock for wild game and grabbed them shamelessly. Then they rapidly tightened their hold on the forest, turned the pressure on the tribes up a notch: encampments were set on fire in order to gain territory, animals poisoned with sulphuric acid, girls were abused – a little seven-year-old Native girl was raped and strangled, found floating in the river, body swollen like a wineskin. Still no roads but forest channels that would become a netting of paths in a few years’ time for lumber vehicles. So the Natives got scared, and while some of them plunged farther into the immense forest, following the game – their sustenance – others, desperate, walked all the way to Coca. It was a surprise to see them turn up like that – some were even disappointed – so this is what the Natives look like? These are the people who gave the territory its name, who terrorized the early settlers? These are the noble warriors who walk with God at their backs and the plain beneath their feet? Feathered, quivers full of arrows, proud gazes and agile bodies racing through the deep forests, they were objects of fascination and fear – the caricature was helpful for illustrating an enemy worthy of the courage it takes to hunt him; a sexual fantasy for well-dressed women, an aesthetic model for all those nostalgic for the noble savage who would be glad to bring one back to their conferences – fattened up, cloistered in the vapours of rubbing alcohol, chewing rotten tobacco from morning till night and getting swindled by kids – bear’s teeth for coppers – it was crap, and no one gave a shit.

A SECOND wave of immigration happened in the 1950s. Although isolated, Coca continued to attract new populations that need to be housed – families driven from the coasts where life has become too expensive, where work is scarce; modest and working families besotted with detached houses and nature, poor folk seeking to remake themselves, lost souls seized by the dream of the West, that stubborn myth that colonizes their minds. They speculate on land to be divided into lots, take over the pasture land, conquer the fields; little by little the tractors are put away and gas stations pop up, wagons are soon replaced by pickup trucks and Fords – and some real property swindles go down. A few roads are rapidly outfitted with motels, fringed with restaurants that serve cheap meat, with bowling alleys and supermarkets, with warehouses. At night, neon signs trace the outline of girls in pink garters, stetsons on their heads, mugs of beer in hand. Because – funny thing – the more the city modernizes, the more people turn to the clichés of the past to attract regulars – in other words, the fewer real horses, the more rodeos there are – in freshly done-up arenas plastered with giant ads, and so people pay their share. The descendants of the pioneers stick together, fold inward reflexively and cement a violent aristocracy whose financial dominance is based in the major areas, or what’s left of them – they keep close ties with the police, the courts, and the banks, and the most intuitive ones team up with the unscrupulous wheeler-dealers who operate here. Violence itself changes shape. Where there used to be brutal brawls, settling of accounts and ordinary vendetta, now there’s petty crime, drug trafficking, women traded like horses, and sexual crimes. Now there’s racketeering, deportation, extortion, and usury; now they use intimidation in order to take their pound of flesh.

BY THE END of the millennium, Coca’s getting bored, super-provincial, and so confined. Definitively insular. The youth who mope around here spit in its face. The asshole of the world. The city has nevertheless verticalized with a few buildings. People also say it’s a modern city. White city hall with columns, white courthouse with cupola, white chamber of commerce. Standard American decor with large dark-windowed sedans gliding past. You wonder where the people are. Air conditioning everywhere and long bars of automatic watering on the beds of close-shorn grass, of a gaudy green. Indifference towards the world, exacerbation of family powers, suspicion towards foreigners, contained prosperity, sorrow of women whose elegance is lifted directly from the pages of fashion magazines from Paris, New York, and Milan – copied so closely it breaks your heart, truly, it hurts to see – no distance, no delay, the latest lipstick on their dry lips, the right bra, the right panties – people are suffocating here.

Luckily there’s the water. The movement of the water. The light of the water. The deep, wide, fertile river. The frozen river – skating rink that cracks on all sides when the thaw comes, wakes like an animal and shakes its scales of ice, suddenly so alive beside the weary city. Luckily there’s this freedom. But on the other bank, the neighbourhood of Edgefront is still nothing but an edge – edge of the city, edge of the forest, edge of the river, thrice marginal, triply fascinating – densely populated strip served by the old Golden Bridge and the cohort of ferries crammed tight with people who are pushed back from the pleasures of the city, them and their motorcycles, strollers, cars, those who live in the shanty towns leaning up against the forest. There’s nothing of interest here. Sure, there are factories, harbour docks, a football field without bleachers, a supermarket, a school. But no one puts a kopeck into it. Volunteer associations set up free clinics in prefab buildings that start leaking at the first sign of the rainy season, maintain the church, care for the cemetery. That’s it, and the general opinion is that that’s enough. It’s the land of cobbling things together and small-scale deals, schemes, ploys, all the little survival strategies that keep the mind alert; the land of small gardens, all the yards in fertile disarray; the land of hammocks cobbled together in damp shacks, the latest plasma-screen TVs and fridges full of beer; of trailers where Natives with piercing eyes sleep, depressed; and slapdash houses that won’t make it through the winter – the floors warp, the electric wires melt once the space heater is plugged in, the exposed pipes freeze to the front walls. It’s the land of the other side of the water, it’s the outskirts of the city and the suburb of the forest, it’s the land of the edge.

WHEN JOHN Johnson, called the Boa, bursts onto the municipal political scene in the early 2000s, he causes a stir – he is the reform and the new – and by bypassing the elite, supplanting the local heirs and using surprise, he creates a tactical advantage that lasts until his election. During his final campaign speech, he presents himself as Prince Charming, called to wake Sleeping Beauty. The one you’ve all been waiting for to begin living again.