In the Time of Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  It was a delicious revenge to hear them murmur, “No, señora.” Pap.A was not going to get the son he wanted, after all!

  A little later the woman came sauntering from her house, her hair just combed out from rollers and too much of something on her face. When she saw me, her face fell. She scolded the kids as if that was what she’d come for. “I told you not to bother the cars!”

  “They’re not bothering anything,” I defended them, caressing the baby’s cheek.

  The woman was looking me over. I suppose she was taking inventory, what I had, what she didn’t have, doing the simple arithmetic and, perhaps a few days later, exacting some new promise from Papa.

  Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing those four raggedy girls with Papá’s and my own deep-set eyes staring back at me. “Give me, give me!” they cried. But when I asked them, “What do you want?” they stood, mute, their mouths hanging open, not knowing where to start.

  Had they asked me the same thing, I would have stared back, mute, too.

  What did I want? I didn’t know anymore. Three years stuck in Ojo de Agua, and I was like that princess put to sleep in the fairy tale. I read and complained and argued with Dedé, but all that time I was snoring away.

  When I met Lío, it was as if I woke up. The givens, all I’d been taught, fell away like so many covers when you sit up in bed. Now when I asked myself, What do you want, Minerva Mirabal? I was shocked to find I didn’t have an answer.

  All I knew was I was not falling in love, no matter how deserving I thought Lío was. So what? I’d argue with myself. What’s more important, romance or revolution? But a little voice kept saying, Both, both, I want both. Back and forth my mind went, weaving a yes by night and unraveling it by day to a no.

  As always happens, your life decides for you anyway. Lío announced he was seeking asylum out of the country. I was relieved that circumstances would be resolving things between us.

  Still, when he left, I was hurt that he hadn’t even said goodbye. Then I started worrying that his silence meant he had been caught. Out of the comers of my eyes, I kept seeing Lio himself! He was not a pretty sight. His body was bruised and broken as if he had endured all the tortures in La Fortaleza he had ever described to me. I was sure I was having premonitions that Lio had not escaped after all.

  Mama, of course, noticed the tightening in my face. My bad headaches and asthma attacks worried her. “You need rest,” she prescribed one afternoon and sent me to bed in Papá’s room, the coolest in the house. He was off in the Ford for his afternoon review of the farm.

  I lay in that mahogany bed, tossing this way and that, unable to sleep. Then, something I hadn’t planned. I got up and tried the door of the armoire. It was locked, which wasn’t all that strange as the hardware was always getting stuck. Using one of my bobby pins, I popped the inside spring and the door sprang open.

  I ran my hand along Papá’s clothes, releasing his smell in the room. I stared at his new fancy guayaberas and started going through the pockets. In the inside pocket of his dress jacket, I found a packet of papers and pulled them out.

  Prescriptions for his medicines, a bill for a Panama hat he’d been wearing around the farm, a new, important look for him. A bill from El Gallo for seven yards of gingham, a girl’s fabric. An invitation from the National Palace to some party. Then, four letters, addressed to me from Lio!

  I read them through hungrily. He hadn’t heard from me about his proposal to leave the country. (What proposal?) He had arranged for me to come to the Colombian embassy. I should let him know through his cousin Mario. He was waiting for my answer—next letter. Still no answer, he complained in a third letter. In the final letter, he wrote that he was leaving that afternoon on the diplomatic pouch plane. He understood it was too big a step for me at the moment. Some day in the future, maybe. He could only hope.

  It seemed suddenly that I’d missed a great opportunity. My life would have been nobler if I had followed Lío. But how could I have made the choice when I hadn’t even known about it? I forgot my earlier ambivalence, and I blamed Papa for everything: his young woman, his hurting Mamá, his cooping me up while he went gallivanting around.

  My hands were shaking so bad that it was hard to fold the letters into their envelopes. I stuffed them in my pocket, but his bills and correspondence I put back. I left the doors of the armoire gaping open. I wanted him to know he had been found out.

  Minutes later, I was roaring away in the Jeep without a word to Mamá. What would I have said? I’m going to find my good-for-nothing father and drag him back?

  I knew where to find him all right. Now that Papa was doing so well, he had bought a second car, a Jeep. I knew damn well he wasn’t reviewing the fields if he had taken the Ford, not the Jeep. I headed straight for that yellow house.

  When I got there, those four girls looked up, startled. After all, the man they always expected was already there, the car parked in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I turned into the dirt path and crashed into the Ford, making the bumper curl up and shattering the window in back. Then I came down on that horn until he appeared, shirtless and furious in the doorway.

  He took one look at me and got as pale as an olive-skinned man can get. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. “What do you want?” he said at last.

  I heard the little girls crying, and I realized my own face was wet with tears. When he came forward, I gave a warning honk and wildly backed out of the path and into the road. A pickup coming around the curve veered and ran into the ditch—plantains, oranges, mangoes, yucca spilling all over the road. That didn’t stop me, no. I stepped on the gas. From the comer of my eye I saw him, a figure growing smaller and smaller until I left him behind me.

  When I got home, Mama met me at the door. She eyed me, and she must have known. “Next time, you don’t leave this house without saying where you’re going.” We both knew her scold was meaningless. She hadn’t even asked where I’d been.

  Papa returned that night, his face drawn with anger. He ate his supper in silence as if his review of the farm had not gone well. As soon as I could without making Mama more suspicious, I excused myself. I had a throbbing headache, I explained, heading for my room.

  In a little while, I heard his knock. “I want to see you outside.” His voice through the door was commanding. I threw water on my face, combed my hands through my hair, and went out to Papa.

  He led me down the drive past the dented Ford into the dark garden. The moon was a thin, bright machete cutting its way through patches of clouds. By its sharp light I could see my father stop and turn to face me. With his shrinking and my height, we were now eye to eye.

  There was no warning it was coming. His hand slammed into the side of my face as it never had before on any part of my body. I staggered back, stunned more with the idea of his having hit me than with the pain exploding in my head.

  “That’s to remind you that you owe your father some respect!”

  “I don’t owe you a thing,” I said. My voice was as sure and commanding as his. “You’ve lost my respect.”

  I saw his shoulders droop. I heard him sigh. Right then and there, it hit me harder than his slap: I was much stronger than Papá, Mamá was much stronger. He was the weakest one of all. It was he who would have the hardest time living with the shabby choices he’d made. He needed our love.

  “I hid them to protect you,” he said. At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I realized he must have discovered the letters missing from his coat pocket.

  “I know of at least three of Virgilio’s friends who have disappeared.”

  So he was going to pass this off as my fury over his taking my mail. And I knew that in order to go on living under the same roof, I would have to pretend this was our true difference.

  That fancy invitation I found in Papá’s pocket caused another uproar—this time from Mamá. It was an invitation to a private party being thrown by Trujillo himself in one of his seclude
d mansions three hours away. A handwritten note at the end requested that la señorita Minerva Mirabal not fail to show.

  Now that Papá had become rich, he got invited to a lot of official parties and functions. I always went along as Papa’s partner since Mamá wouldn’t go. “Who wants to see an old woman?” she complained.

  “Come on, Mamá,” I argued. “You’re in your prime. A mujerona of fifty-one.” I snapped my fingers, jazzing up Mamá’s life. But the truth was, Mama looked old, even older than Papa with his dapper new hat and his linen guayaberas and his high black boots, and a debonair cane that seemed more a self-important prop than a walking aid. Her hair had gone steel gray, and she pulled it back in a severe bun that showed off the long-suffering look on her face.

  This time, though, Mama didn’t want me to go either. The note at the end scared her. This wasn’t an official do but something personal. In fact, after the last big party, a colonel friend had visited Jaimito’s family asking after the tall, attractive woman Don Enrique Mirabal had brought along. She had caught El Jefe’s eye.

  Mama wanted to get me a medical excuse from Doctor Lavandier. After all, migraines and asthma attacks weren’t against the law, were they?

  “Trujillo is the law,” Papa whispered, as we all did nowadays when we pronounced the dreaded name.

  Finally, Mama relented, but she insisted Pedrito and Patria go along to take care of me, and Jaimito and Dedé go to make sure Patria and Pedrito did their job. María Teresa begged to go, too. But Mama wouldn’t hear of it. Expose another young, single daughter to danger, ¡No, señorita! Besides, Maria Teresa couldn’t go to night parties until her quinceañera next year.

  Poor Mate cried and cried. As a consolation prize, I offered to bring her back another souvenir. Last time at the party at Hotel Montana, we all got paper fans with the Virgencita on one side and El Jefe on the other. I kept making Maria Teresa turn the fan around when she sat in front of me, fanning herself. Sometimes it was El Jefe’s probing eyes, sometimes it was the Virgin’s pretty face I couldn’t stand to look at.

  With the party a week away, Papá had to get the Ford fixed. The president of our local branch of Trujillo Tillers couldn’t very well arrive at El Jefe’s house in a Jeep. It seemed pretty appropriate to me, but having banged up Papá’s beauty it wasn’t for me to disagree.

  While the Ford was at the shop, I drove Papá to his doctor’s appointments in San Francisco. It was sad how the richer he got, the more his health deteriorated. He was drinking too much, even I could see that. His heart was weak and his gout made it painful sometimes for him to move around. Doctor Lavandier had him on treatments twice a week. I’d drop him off, then visit with Dedé and Jaimito at their new ice cream shop until it was time to pick him up.

  One morning, Papa told me to go on home. He had some errands to run after his appointment. Jaimito would drive him back later.

  “We can run them together,” I offered. When he looked away, I guessed what he was up to. Several days ago, I had driven out to the yellow house and found it all boarded up. Of course! Papá hadn’t broken with this woman but merely moved her off the grounds and into town.

  I sat, facing forward, not saying a word.

  Finally, he admitted it. “You have to believe me. I only go to see my children. I’m not involved with their mother anymore.”

  I waited for things to settle down inside me. Then I said, “I want to meet them. They’re my sisters, after all.”

  I could see he was moved by my acknowledging them. He reached over, but I was not ready yet for his hugs. “I’ll be back to pick you up.”

  We drove down narrow streets, past row on row of respectable little houses. Finally we came to a stop in front of a pretty turquoise house with the porch and trim painted white. There they were, awaiting Papá, four little girls in look-alike pale yellow gingham dresses. The two oldest must have recognized me, for their faces grew solemn when I got out of the car.

  The minute Papá was on the sidewalk, they darted towards him and dug the mints out of his pockets. I felt a pang of jealousy seeing them treat Papá in the same way my sisters and I had.

  “This is my big girl, Minerva,” he introduced me. Then, putting a hand on each one’s head, he presented them to me. The oldest, Margarita, was about ten, then three more with about three years’ difference between them down to the baby with her pacifier on a dirty ribbon round her neck. While Papá went inside the house with an envelope, I waited on the porch, asking them questions they were too shy to answer.

  As we were leaving, I saw the mother peeking at me from behind the door. I beckoned for her to come out. “Minerva Mirabal,” I said, offering her my hand.

  The woman hung her head and mumbled her name, Carmen something. I noticed she was wearing a cheap ring, the adjustable kind that children buy at any street corner from the candy vendors. I wondered if she was trying to pass herself off as a respectable married lady in this, one of the nicer barrios of San Francisco.

  As we drove back to Ojo de Agua, I was working out what had been happening ten years back that might have driven Papa into the arms of another woman. Patria, Dedé, and I had just gone away to Inmaculada Concepción, and Maria Teresa would have been all of four years old. Maybe, I told myself, Papa had missed us so much that he had gone in search of a young girl to replace us? I looked over at him and instantly he looked my way.

  “That was very fine of you,” he said, smiling hesitantly.

  “I know the clouds have already rained,” I said, “but, Papa, why did you do it?”

  His hands gripped his cane until his knuckles whitened. “Cosas de los hombres,” he said. Things a man does. So that was supposed to excuse him, macho that he was!

  Before I could ask him another question, Papa spoke up. “Why’d you do what you just did?”

  Quick as my reputation said my mouth was, I couldn’t come up with an answer, until I remembered his own words. “Things a woman does.”

  And as I said those words my woman’s eyes sprang open.

  All the way home I kept seeing them from the comers of my eyes, men bending in the fields, men riding horses, men sitting by the side of the road, their chairs tipped back, nibbling on a spear of grass, and I knew very well I was looking at what I wanted at last.

  Discovery Day Dance

  October 12

  By the time we find the party, we’re an hour late. All the way here Papá and Pedrito and Jaimito have been working out the details of their story. “You say how we started out early this morning to give us plenty of time, and then you say we didn’t know the way.” Papa assigns the different facts to his sons-in-law

  “And you”—he looks around at me in the back seat—“you keep quiet.”

  “You don’t have to plan anything when you’re telling the truth,” I remind them. But no one listens to me. Why should they? They’re probably thinking I got them into this.

  Here is the truth. We arrived in San Cristóbal late this afternoon and got a room at the local hotel and changed. By then, our dresses were a mess from riding around on our laps all day. “The worse you look, the better for you,” Patria said when I complained that I looked like I’d gotten here on a donkey.

  Then we climbed back in the car and drove forever. As a man who always knows where he’s going, Jaimito couldn’t very well stop to ask for directions. Soon we were lost on the back roads somewhere near Baní. At a checkpoint, a guardia finally convinced Jaimito that we were going the wrong way. We headed back, an hour late.

  Jaimito parks the Ford at the end of the long driveway, facing the road. “In case we have to take off quickly,” he says in a low voice. He’s been a bundle of nerves about this whole outing. I guess we all have.

  It’s a hike to the house. Every few steps we have to stop at a checkpoint and flash our invitation. The driveway is well lit, so at least we can see the puddles before we splash into them. It’s been raining on and off all day, the usual October hurricane weather. This year, though, the r
ains seem more severe than ever, everyone says so. My theory is that the god of thunder Huracán always acts up around the holiday of the Conquistador, who killed off all his Taino devotees. When I suggest this to Patria as we walk up the drive, she gives me her pained Madonna look. “Ay, Minerva, por Dios, keep that tongue in check tonight.”

  Manuel de Moya is pacing back and forth at the entrance. I recognize him from the last party, and of course his picture is always in the papers. “Secretary of state,” people say, winking one eye. Everyone knows his real job is rounding up pretty girls for El Jefe to try out. How they get talked into it, I don’t know. Manuel de Moya is supposed to be so smooth with the ladies, they probably think they’re following the example of the Virgencita if they bed down with the Benefactor of the Fatherland.

  Papa starts in on our explanation, but Don Manuel cuts him off. “This is not like him. The Spanish ambassador has been waiting.” He checks his watch, holding it to his ear as if it might whisper El Jefe’s whereabouts. “You didn’t see any cars on the way?” Papa shakes his head, his face full of exaggerated concern.

  Don Manuel snaps his fingers, and several officers rush forward for instructions. They are to keep a sharp lookout while he escorts the Mirabals to their table. We wonder at this special attention, and Papa begs Don Manuel not to go to so much bother. “This,” he says, offering me his arm, “is all my pleasure.”

  We go down a long corridor, and into a courtyard hung with lanterns. The crowd hushes as we enter. The band leader stands up but then sits back down when he realizes it’s not El Jefe. Luis Alberti moved his whole orchestra from the capital just to be on call at Casa de Caoba. This is supposed to be El Jefe’s favorite party mansion, where he keeps his favorite of the moment. At the last few parties the excited gossip in the powder rooms has been that at present the house is vacant.

  Only one reserved table is left in front of the dais. Don Manuel is pulling out chairs for everybody, but when I go to sit down next to Patria, he says, “No, no, El Jefe has invited you to his table.” He indicates the head table on the dais where a few dignitaries and their wives nod in my direction. Patria and Dedé exchange a scared look.