Lo que no se dice

In the Restrepo family, the question of who will host Christmas is never asked directly. It is answered every year in the family group chat, without anyone appearing to answer it.

This year it began in October, when Aunt Gloria posted a photo of her new dining table. “It seats twelve,” she wrote, followed by a laughing face.

Two days later, Mónica’s mother mentioned that her knee had been giving her trouble, and that the stairs in her house were “getting to be too much”. Nobody replied for six hours, which in that group is a very long time.

Then Uncle Fernando shared a recipe for natilla, which, he said, should be made “the proper way, like Grandma did”. Everyone understood this as a comment on last Christmas, when the natilla had been bought at a supermarket. Last Christmas was at Gloria’s.

Mónica lives in Bogotá and had not been planning to host anything. She read all of this on the bus to work and said nothing. She has learned that in her family, what is written in the chat is rarely what is meant, and what is meant is rarely written.

In November her mother called. She asked how work was going, and whether Mónica’s flat was big enough “for people to stay, if they had to”. Then she asked what the weather was like in Bogotá in December.

Mónica told her it was cold.

“Cold is nice for Christmas,” her mother said.

By the first of December, it had been decided. Nobody could say exactly when, or by whom. Mónica was hosting Christmas for eleven people in a two-bedroom flat, and her mother was bringing the natilla, made the proper way.

She has bought six folding chairs. She has not complained in the group. She is saving that for next October.

The bridge was promised in 2015, a few weeks before the elections. A photograph was taken of the mayor next to the river, holding a plan, and it was printed on the front page of the local newspaper. Everybody in San Vicente remembers the photograph. Fewer people remember the mayor’s name.

Until then, the only way across the river was a cable with a wooden basket. It carried two people at a time, and it was operated by a man called Don Aurelio. Every morning, children were taken across in it to the school on the other side. When the river was high, they stayed at home.

Don Aurelio had done the job for thirty-one years. He knew every family in the village, and most of their secrets, because people talk in a basket that moves slowly over a river. He was paid by the passengers, a few hundred pesos each, and on rainy days he was often not paid at all.

The contract was awarded in 2016. Work was started in 2017 and stopped in 2018, when it was discovered that the ground on the far side was not strong enough. A new study was ordered. It was completed, then lost, then completed again. The company that had won the contract was later found to have no engineers.

None of this was hidden. All of it was reported. It was simply never anyone’s fault. Each time the newspaper asked, the answer came in the same grammar: mistakes had been made, delays had been caused, lessons had been learned.

In 2021, during a storm, an eleven-year-old girl fell from the basket. She was pulled out of the water by her brother, and she was fine, but a video of it was seen by half a million people in two days. The bridge was finished eleven months later.

At the opening there were speeches, and a ribbon was cut. The new mayor said that if the previous administration had done its job, the bridge would have been built years earlier. The previous mayor, who was standing in the crowd, told a journalist that if the money hadn’t been blocked by the national government, it would have been finished on time.

Don Aurelio was not invited to speak. A reporter asked him what he thought, and he said the bridge was very nice, and that he was going to miss the work.

Then he said something else, which was not printed. His granddaughter wrote it down and put it on the internet that evening. He said that in seven years, nobody from any government had ever crossed the river in his basket. Not once. If they had, he said, the bridge would have been built in a year.

The basket is still there. Tourists pay to ride it now, and Don Aurelio sells them coffee on the far side.