Esteban Ibáñez didn’t know who his mother was to the people filling the funeral hall. He knows she was a professor, a woman who crossed some river, someone others call a teacher with a reverence he doesn’t recognize. He knows she chose him to receive the lot in Monteluce, a piece of land with a history she never explained.
What he learns in the weeks after the funeral: Helena spent fifty years documenting a dispossession the legal system refused to acknowledge, and his family’s silence across those decades had its own cost. His sister wants to sell. The community wants the land held. Helena’s archive keeps opening questions that a quick sale would close forever.
The Other Side of the River is a novel about what it costs to ask questions your family stopped asking a generation ago, and what it costs to stop.
Esteban Ibáñez hereda un lote de su madre en Monteluce, el sector élite de Cajibó. Cuando decide vendérselo a Camilo Barreto, un constructor de La Pedriza, el barrio popular al otro lado del río, reactiva una división de cincuenta años. Dos hombres que cargan silencios: Esteban fue guerrillero en los ochenta y nunca testimonió en la JEP; Camilo sirvió en la Armada destruyendo casas de civiles y tampoco habló ante la Comisión de la Verdad.
Ambos intentan su propia forma de reparación: construir algo juntos. El puente que construyen no cruza a todos. No resuelve todo. Pero existe. Una novela para la Colombia post-acuerdos, sobre cómo se construye la paz en lo cotidiano cuando los procesos oficiales no alcanzan.
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