In the Time of Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  “I’ll make it fine,” the woman claims, looking up at the sky “Wow, the light is almost gone.”

  Night has fallen. Out on the road, they hear the sound of a car hurrying home. The interview woman bids Dedé farewell, and together they walk through the darkened garden to the side of the house where the rented Datsun is parked.

  A car nears and turns into the drive, its headlights beaming into their eyes. Dedé and the woman stand paralyzed like animals caught in the beams of an oncoming car.

  “Who could this be?” Dedé wonders aloud.

  “Your next compromiso, no?” the interview woman says.

  Dedé is reminded of her lie. “Yes, of course,” she says as she peers into the dark. “¡Buenas!” she calls out.

  “It’s me, Mamá Dedé,” Minou calls back. The car door slams—Dedé jumps. Footsteps hurry towards them.

  “What on earth are you doing here? I’ve told you a thousand times!” Dede scolds her niece. She doesn’t care anymore if she is betraying her lie. Minou knows, all of her nieces know, that Dedé can’t bear for them to be on the road after dark. If their mothers had only waited until the next morning to drive back over that deserted mountain road, they might still be alive to scold their own daughters about the dangers of driving at night.

  “Ya, ya, Mama Dedé.” Minou bends down to kiss her aunt. Having taken after both her mother and father, she is a head taller than Dedé. “It just so happens I was off the road an hour ago.” There is a pause, and Dedé already guesses what Minou is hesitating to say, for therein awaits another scold. “I was over at Fela’s.”

  “Any messages from the girls?” Dedé says smartly. Beside her, she can feel the eager presence of the interview woman.

  “Can’t we sit down first,” Minou says. There is some emotion in her voice Dedé can’t quite make out. She has soured her niece’s welcome, scolding her the minute she gets out of her car. “Come, come, you’re right. Forgive your old aunt’s bad manners. Let’s go have a limonada.”

  “I was just on my way out,” the interview woman reminds Dedé. To Minou, she adds, “I hope to see you again—”

  “We haven’t even met.” Minou smiles.

  Dedé apologizes for her oversight and introduces the woman to her niece. Oh dear, what a mishmash of gratitude follows. The interview woman is delirious at the good fortune of meeting both sister and daughter of the heroine of the Fourteenth of June underground. Dedé cringes. She had better cut this off. Unlike their aunt, the children won’t put up with this kind of overdone gush.

  But Minou is chuckling away. “Come see us again,” she offers, and Dedé, forced to rise to this politeness, adds, “Yes, now you know the way.”

  “I went to see Fela,” Minou begins after she is settled with a fresh lemonade.

  Dedé hears her niece swallow some emotion. What could be wrong? Dedé wonders. Gently now, she prods Minou, “Tell me what the girls had to say today?”

  “That’s just it,” Minou says, her voice still uneven. “They wouldn’t come. Fela says they must finally be at rest. It was strange, hearing that. I felt sad instead of glad.”

  Her last tie, however tenuous, to her mother. So that’s what the emotion is all about, Dedé thinks. Then it strikes her. She knows exactly why Fela was getting a blackout this afternoon. “Don’t you worry.” Dedé pats her niece’s hand. “They’re still around.”

  Minou scowls at her aunt. “Are you making fun again?”

  Dedé shakes her head. “I swear they’ve been here. All afternoon.”

  Minou is watching her aunt for any sign of irony. Finally, she says, “All right, can I ask you anything just like I do Fela?”

  Dedé laughs uneasily. “Go on.”

  Minou hesitates, and then she says it right out, what Dedé suspects everyone has always wanted to ask her but which some politeness kept them from. Trust Minerva’s incarnation to confront Dedé with the question she herself has avoided. “I’ve always wondered, I mean, you all were so close, why you didn’t go along with them?”

  Certainly she remembers everything about that sunny afternoon, a few days into the new year, when Patria, Mate, and Minerva came over to see her.

  She had been preparing a new bed in the garden, enjoying the rare quiet of an empty house. The girl had the day off, and as usual on a Sunday afternoon, Jaimito had gone to the big gallera in San Francisco, this time taking all three boys. Dedé wasn’t expecting them back till late. From Mamá’s house on the main road, her sisters must have seen Jaimito’s pickup drive away without her and hurried to come over and pay Dedé this surprise visit.

  When she heard a car stop in front of the house, Dede considered taking off into the cacao grove. She was getting so solitary. A few nights ago Jaimito had complained that his mother had noticed that Dedé wasn’t her old lively self. She rarely dropped by Dona Leila’s anymore with a new strain of hibiscus she’d sprouted or a batch of pastelitos she’d made from scratch. Miss Sonrisa was losing her smiles, all right. Dedé had looked at her husband, a long look as if she could draw the young man of her dreams out from the bossy, old-fashioned macho he’d become. “Is that what your mother says?”

  He’d brought this up as he sat in slippers in the galería enjoying the cool evening. He took a final swallow from his rum glass before he answered, “That’s what my mother says. Get me another one, would you, Mami?” He held out the glass, and Dedé had gone obediently to the icebox in the back of the house where she burst into tears. What she wanted to hear from him was that he had noticed. Just his saying so would have made it better, whatever it was. She herself wasn’t sure what.

  So when she saw her three sisters coming down the path that afternoon, she felt pure dread. It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised to snip the knot that was keeping Dedé’s life from falling apart.

  She knew why they had come.

  Patria had approached her in the fall with a strange request. Could she bury some boxes in one of the cacao fields in back of their old house?

  Dedé had been so surprised. “Why, Patria! Who put you up to this?”

  Patria looked puzzled. “We’re all in it, if that’s what you mean. But I’m speaking for myself.”

  “I see,” Dedé had said, but really what she saw was Minerva in back of it all. Minerva agitating. No doubt she had sent Patria over rather than come herself since she and Dede were not getting along. It had been years since they’d fought openly—since Lío, wasn’t it?—but recently their hot little exchanges had started up again.

  What could Dedé say? She had to talk to Jaimito first. Patria had given her a disappointed look, and Dedé had gotten defensive. “What? I should go over Jaimito’s head? It’s only fair. He’s the one farming the land, he’s responsible for this place.”

  “But can’t you decide on your own, then tell him?”

  Dedé stared at her sister, disbelieving.

  “That’s what I did,” Patria went on. “I joined, and then I talked Pedrito into joining me.”

  “Well, I don’t have that kind of marriage,” Dedé said. She smiled to take the huffiness out of her statement.

  “What kind of marriage do you have?” Patria looked at her with that sweetness on her face that could always penetrate Dedé’s smiles. Dedé looked away.

  “It’s just that you don’t seem yourself,” Patria continued, reaching for Dedé’s hand. “You seem so—I don’t know—withdrawn. Is something wrong?”

  It was Patria’s worried tone more than her question that pulled Dedé back into that abandoned part of herself where she had hoped to give love, and to receive it, in full measure, both directions.

  Being there, she couldn’t help herself. Though she tried giving Patria another of her brave smiles, Miss Sonrisa burst into tears.

  After Patria’s visit, Dedé had talked to Jaimito. As she expected, his answer was an adamant no. But beyond what she expected, he was furious with her for even considering such a request. The Mirabal sis
ters liked to run their men, that was the problem. In his house, he was the one to wear the pants.

  “Swear you’ll keep your distance from them!”

  When he got upset, he would just raise his voice. But that night, he grabbed her by the wrists and shoved her on the bed, only—he said later—to make her come to her senses. “Swear!”

  Now, when she thinks back, Dedé asks herself as Minou has asked her, Why? Why didn’t she go along with her sisters. She was only thirty-four. She could have started a new life. But no, she reminds herself. She wouldn’t have started over. She would have died with them on that lonely mountain road.

  Even so, that night, her ears still ringing from Jaimito’s shout, Dedé had been ready to risk her life. It was her marriage that she couldn’t put on the line. She had always been the docile middle child, used to following the lead. Next to an alto she sang alto, by a soprano, soprano. Miss Sonrisa, cheerful, compliant. Her life had gotten bound up with a domineering man, and so she shrank from the challenge her sisters were giving her.

  Dedé sent Patria a note: Sorry. jaimito says no.

  And for weeks afterwards, she avoided her sisters.

  And now, here they were, all three like a posse come to rescue her.

  Dede’s heart was beating away as she stood to welcome them. “How wonderful to see you!” She smiled, Miss Sonrisa, armed with smiles. She led them through the garden, delaying, showing off this and that new planting. As if they were here on a social call. As if they had come to see how her jasmine shrubs were doing.

  They sat on the patio, exchanging the little news. The children were all coming down with colds. Little Jacqueline would be one in a month. Patria was up all hours again with Raulito. That boy was still not sleeping through the night. This gringo doctor she was reading said it was the parents of colicky babies who were to blame. No doubt Raulito was picking up all the tension in the house. Speaking of picking up things: Minou had called Trujillo a bad word. Don’t ask. She must have overheard her parents. They would have to be more careful. Imagine what could happen if there were another spying yardboy like Prieto on the premises.

  Imagine. An awkward silence fell upon them. Dedé braced herself. She expected Minerva to make an impassioned pitch for using the family farm for a munitions storage. But it was Mate who spoke up, the little sister who still wore her hair in braids and dressed herself and her baby girl in matching dresses.

  They had come, she said, because something big, I mean really big, was about to happen. Mate’s eyes were a child‘s, wide with wonder.

  Minerva drew her index finger across her throat and let her tongue hang out of her mouth. Patria and Mate burst into nervous giggles.

  Dedé couldn’t believe it. They’d gone absolutely mad! “This is serious business,” she reminded them. Some fury that had nothing to do with this serious business was making her heart beat fast.

  “You bet it is,” Minerva said, laughing. “The goat is going to die.”

  “Less than three weeks!” Mate’s voice was becoming breathy with excitement.

  “On the feast day of the Virgencita!” Patria exclaimed, making the sign of the cross and rolling her eyes heavenward. “Ay, Virgencita, watch over us.”

  Dedé pointed to her sisters. “You’re going to do it yourselves?”

  “Heavens, no,” Mate said, horrified at the thought. “The Action Group does the actual justice, but then all the different cells will liberate their locations. We’ll be taking the Salcedo Fortaleza.”

  Dedé was about to remind her little sister of her fear of spiders, worms, noodles in her soup, but she let Mate go on. “We’re a cell, see, and there are usually only three in a cell, but we could make ours four.” Mate looked hopefully at Dedé.

  As if they were inviting her to join a goddamn volleyball team!

  “This is a little sudden, I know,” Patria was saying. “But it’s not like with the boxes, Dedé. This looks like a sure thing.”

  “This is a sure thing,” Minerva confirmed.

  “Don’t decide now,” Patria went on as if afraid what Dedé’s snap decision might be. “Think about it, sleep on it. We’re having a meeting next Sunday at my place.”

  “Ay, like old times, all four of us!” Mate clapped her hands.

  Dedé could feel herself being swayed by the passion of her sisters. Then she hit the usual snag. “And Jaimito?”

  There was another awkward silence. Her sisters looked at each other. “Our cousin is also invited,” Minerva said with that stiff tone she always used with Jaimito. “But you know best whether it’s worth asking him.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Dedé snapped.

  “I mean by that that I don’t know what Jaimito’s politics are.”

  Dedé’s pride was wounded. Whatever their problems, Jaimito was her husband, the father of her children. “Jaimito’s no trujillista, if that’s what you’re implying. No more than ... than Papa was.”

  “In his own way, Papá was a trujillista,” Minerva announced.

  All her sisters looked at her, shocked. “Papá was a hero!” Dedé fumed. “He died because of what he went through in prison. You should know. He was trying to keep you out of trouble!”

  Minerva nodded. “That’s right. His advice was always, don’t annoy the bees, don’t annoy the bees. It’s men like him and Jaimito and other scared fulanitos who have kept the devil in power all these years.”

  “How can you say that about Papá?” Dede could hear her voice rising. “How can you let her say that about Papá?” She tried to enlist her sisters.

  Mate had begun to cry.

  “This isn’t what we came for,” Patria reminded Minerva, who stood and walked to the porch rail and stared out into the garden.

  Dedé raked her eyes over the yard, half-afraid her sister was finding fault there, too. But the crotons were lusher than ever and the variegated bougainvilleas she hadn’t thought would take were heavy with pink blossoms. All the beds were neat and weedless. Everything in its place. Only in the new bed where she’d just been working did the soil look torn up. And it was disturbing to see—among the established plantings—the raw brown earth like a wound in the ground.

  “We want you with us. That’s why we’re here.” Minerva’s eyes as she fixed them on her sister were full of longing.

  “What if I can’t?” Dedé’s voice shook. “Jaimito thinks it’s suicide. He’s told me he’ll have to leave me if I get mixed up in this thing.” There, she’d said it. Dedé felt the hot flush of shame on her face. She was hiding behind her husband’s fears, bringing down scorn on him instead of herself.

  “Our dear cousin,” Minerva said sarcastically. But she stopped herself on a look from Patria.

  “Everyone has their own reasons for the choices they make,” Patria said, defusing the charged atmosphere, “and we have to respect that.”

  Blessed are the peacemakers, Dedé thought, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what the prize was that had been promised them.

  “Whatever you decide, we’ll understand,” Patria concluded, looking around at her sisters.

  Mate nodded, but Minerva could never leave well enough alone. As she climbed in the car, she reminded Dedé, “Next Sunday at Patria’s around three. In case you change your mind,” she added.

  As she watched them drive away, Dedé felt strangely mingled surges of dread and joy. Kneeling at the new bed helped calm the shaking in her knees. Before she had finished smoothing the soil and laying out a border of little stones, she had worked out her plan. Only much later did she realize she had forgotten to put any seeds in the ground.

  She would leave him.

  Next to that decision, attending the underground meeting over at Patria’s was nothing but a small step after the big turn had been taken. All week she refined the plan for it. As she beat the mattresses and fumigated the baseboards for red ants, as she chopped onions for the boys’ breakfast mangú and made them drink limonsillo tea to keep away the cold
going around, she plotted. She savored her secret, which tasted deliciously of freedom, as she allowed his weight on her in the dark bedroom and waited for him to be done.

  Next Sunday, while Jaimito was at his gallera, Dedé would ride over to the meeting. When he came back, he would find the note propped on his pillow.

  I feel like I’m buried alive. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.

  Their life together had collapsed. From puppydog devotion, he had moved on to a moody bossiness complicated with intermittent periods of dogged remorse that would have been passion had there been less of his hunger and more of her desire in it. True to her nature, Dedé had made the best of things, eager for order, eager for peace. She herself was preoccupied—by the births of their sons, by the family setbacks after Papa was jailed, by Papá’s sad demise and death, by their own numerous business failures. Perhaps Jaimito felt broken by these failures and her reminders of how she had tried to prevent them. His drinking, always social, became more solitary.

  It was natural to blame herself. Maybe she hadn’t loved him enough. Maybe he sensed how someone else’s eyes had haunted her most of her married life.

  Lío! What had become of him? Dedé had asked Minerva several times, quite casually, about their old friend. But Minerva didn’t know a thing. Last she’d heard Lio had made it to Venezuela where a group of exiles was training for an invasion.

  Then, recently, without her even asking, Minerva had confided to Dedé that their old friend was alive and kicking. “Tune into Radio Rumbos, 99 on your dial.” Minerva knew Jaimito would be furious if he found Dedé listening to that outlawed station, yet her sister taunted her.