In the Time of Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  “We women in the family need the Virgencita’s help,” Mamá reminded her.

  She was right, too. Everyone knew my public sorrow, the lost baby, but none my private one, my loss of faith. Then there was Minerva with her restless mind and her rebellious spirit. Settle her down, Mama prayed. Mate’s asthma was worse than ever and Mama had transferred her to a closer school in San Francisco. Only Dedé was doing well, but she had some big decisions ahead of her and she wanted the Virgencita’s help.

  So, the five of us made our plans. I decided not to take the children, so I could give myself over to the pilgrimage. “You sure you women are going on a pilgrimage?” Pedrito teased us. He was happy again, his hands fresh with my body, a quickness in his face. “Five good-looking women visiting the Virgin, I don’t believe it!”

  My sisters all looked towards me, expecting I would chide my husband for making light of sacred things. But I had lost my old strictness about sanctity. God, who had played the biggest joke on us, could stand a little teasing.

  I rolled my eyes flirtatiously “Ay, sí,” I said, “those roosters of Higüey!”

  A cloud passed over Pedrito’s face. He was not a jealous man. I’ll say it plain: he was not a man of imagination, so he wasn’t afflicted by suspicions and worries. But if he saw or heard something he didn’t like, even if he had said it himself, the color would rise in his face and his nostrils flare like a spirited stallion’s.

  “Let them crow all they want,” I went on, “I’ve got my handsome rooster in San José de Conuco. And my two little chicks,” I added. Nelson and Noris looked up, alerted by the play in my voice.

  We set out in the new car, a used Ford Papa had bought for the store, so he said. But we all knew who it was really for—the only person who knew how to drive it besides Papa. He had hoped that this consolation prize would settle Minerva happily in Ojo de Agua. But every day she was on the road, to Santiago, to San Francisco, to Moca—on store business, she said. Dedé, left alone to mind the store, complained there were more deliveries than sales being made.

  Maria Teresa was home from school for the long holiday weekend in honor of El Jefe’s birthday, so she came along. We joked about all the commemorative marches and boring speeches we had been spared by leaving this particular weekend. We could talk freely in the car, since there was no one to overhear us.

  “Poor Papá,” María Teresa said. “He’ll have to go all by himself.” “Papá will take very good care of himself, I’m sure, ” Mama said in a sharp voice. We all looked at her surprised. I began to wonder why Mama had suggested this pilgrimage. Mama, who hated even day trips. Something big was troubling her enough to stir her far from home.

  It took us a while to get to Higüey, since first we hit traffic going to the capital for the festivities, and then we had to head east on poor roads crossing a dry flat plain. I couldn’t remember sitting for five hours straight in years. But the time flew by. We sang, told stories, reminisced about this or that.

  At one point, Minerva suggested we just take off into the mountains like the gavilleros had done. We had heard the stories of the bands of campesinos who took to the hills to fight the Yanqui invaders. Mamá had been a young woman, eighteen, when the Yanquis came.

  “Did you sympathize with the gavilleros, Mamá?” Minerva wanted to know, looking in the rearview mirror and narrowly missing a man in an ox cart going too slow. We all cried out. “He was at least a kilometer away,” Minerva defended herself.

  “Since when is ten feet a kilometer!” Dedé snapped. She had a knack for numbers, that one, even in an emergency.

  Mamá intervened before those two could get into one of their fights. “Of course, I sympathized with our patriots. But what could we do against the Yanquis? They killed anyone who stood in their way. They burned our house down and called it a mistake. They weren’t in their own country so they didn’t have to answer to anyone.”

  “The way we Dominicans do, eh?” Minerva said with sarcasm in her voice.

  Mama was silent a moment, but we could all sense she had more to say. At last, she added, “You’re right, they’re all scoundrels—Dominicans, Yanquis, every last man.”

  “Not every one,” I said. After all, I had to defend my husband.

  María Teresa agreed, “Not Papá.”

  Mama looked out the window a moment, her face struggling with some emotion. Then, she said quietly, “Yes, your father, too.”

  We protested, but Mamá would not budge—either in taking back or going further with what she had said.

  Now I knew why she had come on her pilgrimage.

  The town was jammed with eager pilgrims, and though we tried at all the decent boarding houses, we could not find a single room. Finally we called on some distant relations, who scolded us profusely for not having come to them in the first place. By then, it was dark, but from their windows as we ate the late supper they fixed us, we could see the lights of the chapel where pilgrims were keeping their vigil. I felt a tremor of excitement, as if I were about to meet an estranged friend with whom I longed to be reconciled.

  Later, lying in the bed we were sharing, I joined Mamá in her goodnight rosary to the Virgencita. Her voice in the dark was full of need. At the first Sorrowful Mystery, she said Papá’s full name, as if she were calling him to account, not praying for him.

  “What’s wrong, Mamá?” I whispered to her when we were finished.

  She would not tell me, but when I guessed, “Another woman?” she sighed, and then said, “Ay, Virgencita, why have you forsaken me?”

  I closed my eyes and felt her question join mine. Yes, why? I thought. Out loud, I said, “I’m here, Mamá.” It was all the comfort I had.

  The next morning we woke early and set out for the chapel, telling our hosts that we were fasting so as not to give them any further bother. “We’re starting our pilgrimage with lies,” Minerva laughed. We breakfasted on water breads and the celebrated little cheeses of Higüey, watching the pilgrims through the door of the cafeteria. Even at this early hour, the streets were full of them.

  The square in front of the small chapel was also packed. We joined the line, filing past the beggars who shook their tin cups or waved their crude crutches and canes at us. Inside, the small, stuffy chapel was lit by hundreds of votive candles. I felt woozy in a familiar girlhood way. I used the edge of my mantilla to wipe the sweat on my face as I followed behind Maria Teresa and Minerva, Mamá and Dedé close behind me.

  The line moved slowly down the center aisle to the altar, then up a set of stairs to a landing in front of the Virgencita’s picture. María Teresa and Minerva and I managed to squeeze up on the landing together. I peered into the locked case smudged with fingerprints from pilgrims touching the glass.

  All I saw at first was a silver frame studded with emeralds and agates and pearls. The whole thing looked gaudy and insincere. Then I made out a sweet, pale girl tending a trough of straw on which lay a tiny baby. A man stood behind her in his red robes, his hands touching his heart. If they hadn’t been wearing halos, they could have been a young couple up near Constanza where the campesinos are reputed to be very white.

  “Hail Mary,” Maria Teresa began, “full of grace ...”

  I turned around and saw the packed pews, hundreds of weary, upturned faces, and it was as if I’d been facing the wrong way all my life. My faith stirred. It kicked and somersaulted in my belly, coming alive. I turned back and touched my hand to the dirty glass.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I joined in.

  I stared at her pale, pretty face and challenged her. Here I am, Virgencita. Where are you?

  And I heard her answer me with the coughs and cries and whispers of the crowd: Here, Patria Mercedes, Fm here, all around you. I’ve already more than appeared.

  II

  1948 to 1959

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dedé

  1994

  and

  1948

  Over the interview woman’s head, Dedé
notices the new girl throwing plantain peelings outside the kitchen shed. She has asked her not to do this. “That is why we have trash baskets,” she has explained. The young maid always looks at the barrel Dedé points to as if it were an obscure object whose use is beyond her.

  “You understand?” Dedé asks her. “Sí, señora.” The young girl smiles brightly as if she has done something right. At Dedé’s age, it is hard to start in with new servants. But Tono is needed over at the museum to take the busloads through the house and answer the phone. Tono has been with them forever. Of course, so had Fela until she started going wacky after the girls died.

  Possessed by the spirits of the girls, can you imagine! People were coming from as far away as Barahona to talk “through” this ebony black sibyl with the Mirabal sisters. Cures had begun to be attributed to Patria; Maria Teresa was great on love woes; and as for Minerva, she was competing with the Virgencita as Patroness of Impossible Causes. What an embarrassment in her own backyard, as if she, Dedé, had sanctioned all this. And she knew nothing. The bishop had called on her finally. That’s how Dedé had found out.

  It was a Friday, Fela’s day off. As soon as the bishop had left, Dedé headed for the shed behind her house. She had jiggled the door just so to unlock it—a little trick she knew—and iDios mío! The sight took her breath away. Fela had set up an altar with pictures of the girls cut out from the popular posters that appeared each November. Before them, a table was laid out, candles and the mandatory cigar and bottle of rum. But most frightening was the picture of Trujillo that had once hung on Dede and Jaimito’s wall. Dedé was sure she had thrown it in the trash. What the devil was he doing here if, as Fela argued later, she was working only with good spirits?

  Dedé had pulled the door to, letting the old lock catch again. Her head was spinning. When Fela returned, Dedé offered her two alternatives. Either stop all this nonsense and clean out that shed, or.... She could not bring herself to state the alternative to the stooped, white-haired woman who had weathered so much with the family. She hadn’t had to. The next morning, the shed was indeed empty. Fela had moved her operation down the road to what was probably a better spot—an abandoned storefront on the bus route to Salcedo.

  Minou was furious when she heard what Dedé had done to Fela. Yes, that’s the way she had phrased it, “What have you done to her, Mama Dedé?”

  “It was disrespectful to your mother’s memory. She was a Catholic, Minou, a Catholic!”

  Minou would have none of it. Dede had already told her too much about her mother’s falling out with the church. Sometimes Dedé worries that she has not kept enough from the children. But she wants them to know the living breathing women their mothers were. They get enough of the heroines from everyone else.

  Now, Minou stops by at Fela’s whenever she comes to visit her aunt. It gives Dedé goose bumps when Minou says, “I talked to Mama at Fela’s today, and she said ...”

  Dedé shakes her head, but she always listens to what the old woman has to say.

  The strangest time was when Minou came from Fela asking after Virgilio Morales. “Mamá says he’s still alive. Do you know where he is, Mama Dedé?”

  “Didn’t your mother tell you?” Dedé asked sarcastically. “Don’t spirits know the whereabouts of all of us?”

  “You sound upset, Mama Dedé,” Minou observed.

  “You know I don’t believe in all this spirit business. And I think it’s a disgrace that you, the daughter of—”

  Minou’s eyes flashed with anger, and Minerva herself stood before Dedé again. “I’m my own person. I’m tired of being the daughter of a legend.”

  Quickly, the face of her sister fell away like water down a slanted roof. Dedé held out her arms for her dear niece-daughter. Dark mascara tears were coursing down Minou’s cheeks. Didn’t she, Dedé, understand that feeling of being caught in a legacy. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “Of course, you have a right to be yourself.”

  Afterwards, Dedé confessed that she did know where Lío Morales now lived. Someone had pointed out the house to her the last time she was in the capital. The comfortable bungalow was just blocks from the dictator’s huge wedding cake palace that the mobs had long ago burned down.

  “So what’s the message you’re to deliver?” Dedé asked as casually as she could.

  “Message?” Minou looked up, surprised. “I was just to say hello and how much Mamá thought of him.”

  “Me, too,” Dedé said, and then to clarify, “Tell him I said hello, too.”

  “So when did all the problems start?” The interview woman’s voice calls Dedé back to the present moment. Again, Dedé feels as if the woman has been eerily reading her thoughts.

  “What problems?” she asks, an edge to her voice. Whatever feelings she once had for Lío never became a problem for anyone, even for herself. She had taken care of that.

  “I mean the problems with the regime. When did these problems start?” The woman speaks in a soft voice as if she suspects she is intruding.

  Dedé apologizes. “My mind wanders.” She feels bad when she can’t carry off what she considers her responsibility. To be the grande dame of the beautiful, terrible past. But it is an impossible task, impossible! After all, she is the only one left to manage the terrible, beautiful present.

  “If it is too much, I can stop now,” the woman offers.

  Dedé waves the offer away “I was just thinking about those days. You know, everyone says our problems started after Minerva had her run-in with Trujillo at the Discovery Day dance. But the truth is Minerva was already courting trouble two or three years before that. We had this friend who was quite a radical young man. You might have heard of Virgilio Morales?”

  The woman narrows her eyes as if trying to make out a figure in the distance. “I don’t think I ever read about him, no.”

  “He was thrown out of the country so many times, the history books couldn’t keep up with him! He came back from exile in ‘47 for a couple of years. Trujillo had announced we were going to have a free country—just like the Yanquis he was trying to butter up. We all knew this was just a show, but Lio—that’s what we called him—may have gotten swept up in the idea for a while. Anyhow, he had family in this area, so we saw a lot of him for those two years before he had to leave again.”

  “So he was Minerva’s special friend?”

  Dede feels her heart beating fast. “He was a special friend of mine and my other sisters too!” There she has said it, so why doesn’t it feel good? Fighting with her dead sister over a beau, my goodness.

  “Why was the friendship the beginning of problems?” The woman’s head tilts with curiosity.

  “Because Lio presented a very real opportunity to fight against the regime. I think that, after him, Minerva was never the same.” And neither was I, she adds to herself. Yes, years after she had last seen Lio, he was still a presence in her heart and mind. Every time she went along with some insane practice of the regime, she felt his sad, sober eyes accusing her of giving in.

  “How do you spell his name?” The woman has taken out a little pad and is making invisible zeroes trying to get her reluctant pen to write. “I’ll look him up.”

  “I’ll tell you what I remember of him,” Dedé offers, stroking the lap of her skirt dreamily. She takes a deep breath, just the way Minou describes Fela doing right before the sisters take over her body and use her old woman’s voice to assign their errands.

  She remembers a hot and humid afternoon early in the year she got married. She and Minerva are at the store plowing through an inventory. Minerva is up on a stool, counting cans, correcting herself, adding “more or less,” when Dedé repeats the figure before she writes it down. Usually, Dedé cannot bear such sloppiness. But today she is impatient to be done so they can close up and drive over to Tío Pepe’s where the young people have been gathering evenings to play volleyball.

  Her cousin Jaimito will be there. They have known each other all their lives, been paired a
nd teased by their mothers ever since the two babies were placed in the same playpen during family gatherings. But in the last few weeks, something has been happening. All that had once annoyed Dedé about her spoiled, big-mouthed cousin now seems to quicken something in her heart. And whereas before, her mother’s and Jaimito’s mother’s hints were the intrusion of elders into what was none of their business, now it seems the old people were perceiving destiny. If she marries Jaimito, she’ll continue in the life she has always been very happy living.

  Minerva must have given up calling down numbers and getting no response. She stands directly in Dedé’s line of vision, waving. “Hello, hello!”

  Dedé laughs at getting caught daydreaming. It is not like her at all. Usually it is Minerva whose head is somewhere else. “I was just thinking ...” She tries to make up something. But she is not good at quick lies either. Minerva is the one with stories on the tip of her tongue.

  “I know, I know,” Minerva says. “You were thinking about Einstein’s theory of relativity.” Sometimes she can be funny. “You want to call it quits for today?” The hopeful expression on her face betrays her own wishes.

  Dedé reminds them both, “We should have gotten this done a week ago!”

  “This is so silly” Minerva mimics their counting. “Four crumbs of dulce de leche; one, two, let’s see, seven ants marching towards them—” Suddenly, her voice changes, “Two visitors!” They are standing at the door, Mario, one of their distributors, and a tall, pale man behind him, his glasses thick and wire-rimmed. A doctor maybe, a scholar for sure.

  “We’re closed,” Dedé announces in case Mario is here on business. “Papá’s at the house.” But Minerva invites them in. “Come and rescue us, please!”

  “What’s wrong?” Mario says, laughing and coming into the store. “Too much work?”