Johnny said, Hey, pretty lady, don’t get all excited.
We’re not going to hurt you, the one called Cándido said.
That made me shake all the more.
When the door opened, andwas brought in, I didn’t immediately recognize him. A walking skeleton, that’s what he looked like, shirtless, his back covered with blisters the size of dimes.
I sprang up, but Bloody Juan pushed me back down on the table. You lay down nice like you’re in bed waiting for him, Bug Eye said. Then he said something gross about what torture does to the necessary organ. Johnny told him to shut up.
What do you want with her?shouted. I could tell he was scared.
We want her to help us persuade you, Johnny said in a voice that was too calm and rational for this eerie place.
She has nothing to do with this,cried.
Are you saying you’ve reconsidered, Johnny asked.
Butstood his ground. I’m not discussing the matter further unless you let her go.
That’s when Bug Eye slammed him with a fist, knocking him down. How dare scum dictate terms to the captain! Then all of them joined in kickinguntil he was writhing in agony on the floor.
I was screaming for them to stop. It felt like my very own stomach was being punched, and that’s when the pains as bad as contractions began.
Then Johnny asked me if I couldn’t persuadeAfter all,andhad all reconsidered.
I was so tempted to say, Ay, save yourself, save us. But I couldn’t. It was as if that would have been the real way to let them kill us.
So I told those monsters that I would never askto go against what his conscience told him was right.
Two of a kind, the one called Cándido said. We’ll have to use stronger persuasions.
I guess, Johnny said. Tie her down.
Bug Eye stood before me, holding a rod with a little switch. When he touched me with it, my whole body jumped with exquisite pain. I felt my spirit snapping loose, soaring above my body and looking down at the scene. I was about to float off in a haze of brightness whencried out, I’ll do it, I’ll do it!
And down I went, sucked back into the body like water down a drain.
Next thing I knew,was calling out my name and shouting, Tell them I had to do it, as he was being dragged away.
Johnny seemed in a bad mood at all this commotion. Get him out of here, he said. Then to Bloody Juan, Get her dressed and take her back.
I was left alone in that room with a handful of guards. I could tell they were all ashamed of themselves, avoiding my eyes quiet as if Johnny were still there. Then Bloody Juan gathered up my clothes, but I wouldn’t let him help me. I dressed myself and walked out to the wagon on my own two feet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Minerva
August to November 25, 1960
House Arrest
August and September
All my life, I had been trying to get out of the house. Papá always complained that, of his four girls, I should have been the boy, born to cut loose. First, I wanted to go to boarding school, then university. When Manolo and I started the underground, I traveled back and forth from Monte Cristi to Salcedo, connecting cell with cell. I couldn’t stand the idea of being locked up in any one life.
So when we were released in August and put under house arrest, you’d have thought I was getting just the punishment for me. But to tell the truth, it was as if I’d been served my sentence on a silver platter. By then, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to stay home with my sisters at Mamá‘s, raising our children.
Those first few weeks at home took some getting used to.
After seven months in prison, a lot of that time in solitary, the overload was too much. The phone ringing; a visitor dropping by (with permission from Peña, of course); Peña himself dropping by to see about the visitor; Don Bemardo with guavas from his tree; rooms to go in and out of; children wanting their shoelaces tied; the phone ringing again; what to do with the curdled milk.
In the middle of the day when I should have been out soaking up sun and getting good country air in my infected lungs, I would seek the quiet of the bedroom, slip out of my dress and lie under the sheets watching the sun speckling the leaves through the barely opened jalousies.
But as I lay there, the same overload would start happening in my head. Bits and pieces of the past would bob up in the watery soup of my thoughts those days—Lío explaining how to hit the volleyball so there was a curve in its fall; the rain falling on our way to Papá’s funeral; my hand coming down on Trujillo’s face; the doctor slapping her first breath into my newborn baby girl.
I’d sit up, shocked at what I was letting happen to me. I had been so much stronger and braver in prison. Now at home I was falling apart.
Or, I thought, lying back down, I’m ready for a new life, and this is how it starts.
I grew stronger gradually and began taking part in the life of the household.
None of us had any money, and the dwindling income from the farm was being stretched mighty thin across five families. So we started up a specialty business of children’s christening gowns. I did the simple stitching and seam binding.
The pneumonia in my lungs cleared up. I got my appetite back and began to regain the weight I’d lost in prison. I could wear again my old clothes Dona Fefita had brought down from Monte Cristi.
And, of course, my children were a wonder. I’d swoop down on them, showering them with kisses. “Mami!” they’d shriek. How lovely to be called mother again; to have their little arms around my neck; their sane, sweet breath in my face.
And pinto beans—were they always so colorful? “Wait, wait, wait,” I’d cry out to Fela before she dunked them in the water. I’d scoop up handfuls just to hear the soft rattle of their downpour back in the pot. Everything I had to touch. Everything I had to taste. I wanted everything back in my life again.
But sometimes a certain slant of light would send me back. The light used to fall just so at this time of day on the floor below my top bunk.
And once, Minou got hold of a piece of pipe and was rattling it against the galería rail. It was a sound exactly recalling the guards in prison running their nightsticks against the bars. I ran out and yanked the pipe from her hand, screaming, “No!” My poor little girl burst out crying, frightened by the terror in my voice.
But those memories, too, began to fade. They became stories. Everyone wanted to hear them. Mate and I could keep the house entertained for hours, telling and retelling the horrors until the sting was out of them.
We were allowed two outings a week: Thursdays to La Victoria to visit the men, and Sundays to church. But for all that I was free to travel, I dreaded going out of the house. The minute we turned onto the road, my heart started pounding and my breathing got shallow.
The open vistas distressed me, the sense of being adrift in a crowd of people pressing in on all sides, wanting to touch me, greet me, wish me well. Even in church during the privacy of Holy Communion, Father Gabriel bent down and whispered “iviva la Mariposa!”
My months in prison had elevated me to superhuman status. It would hardly have been seemly for someone who had challenged our dictator to suddenly succumb to a nervous attack at the communion rail.
I hid my anxieties and gave everyone a bright smile. If they had only known how frail was their iron-will heroine. How much it took to put on that hardest of all performances, being my old self again.
My best performances were reserved for Peña’s visits. He came often to supervise our house arrest. The children got so used to his toad face and grabby hands, they began calling him Tío Capitán and asking to hold his gun and ride on his knee horse.
I myself could not get used to him. Whenever that big white Mercedes turned into our narrow driveway, I ran to my bedroom and shut the door to give myself time to put on my old-self face.
In no time, someone was sent back there to get me. “It’s Peña. You’ve got to come!” Even Mamá, who once refused
to receive him, now buttered him up whenever he was over. After all, he had let her have her babies back.
One afternoon I was out trimming the laurel in the front yard. Manolito was “helping” me. After cutting the branches, all but a sliver, I held him up to pull them off. From his perch on my shoulders, he reported all he saw out on the road. “Tío’s car!” he cried out, and sure enough, I saw the flash of white through a break in the hedge. It was too late to tune up for my performance. I went directly to the carport to receive him.
“What a rare occasion, Dona Minerva. The last few times I’ve come you haven’t been well.” In other words, I’ve noticed your rudeness. All of it is filed away. “You must be feeling better,” he observed, without a question mark.
“I saw your car, I saw your car,” sang Manolito.
“Manolito, my boy, you are all eyes. We could use men like you in the SIM.”
Oh God, I thought.
“Ladies, it’s nice to have you all here,” Pena noted, when Mate and Patria joined us on the patio. Dedé had appeared with her shears to work on the hedge and keep her eye on “things.” Whenever she didn’t like my tone, she would clip the crown of thorns violently, scattering a spray of leaves and red petals in the air.
For the umpteenth time, Pena reminded us how lucky we were. Our five-year sentence had been commuted to house arrest. Instead of the restrictions of prison, we had only a few rules to obey. (We called them Peña’s commandments.) He rehearsed them each time he came: No trips, no visitors, no contact with politicals. Any exceptions only by his permission. “Clear?”
We nodded. I was tempted to bring out the broom and set it by the door, the country way to tell people it was time to go.
Peña dunked the bobbing ice cubes with a fat finger. Today he had come for more than the recital of his rules. “El Jefe has not visited our province for a while now,” he began.
Of course not, I thought. Most families in Salcedo had at least one son or daughter or husband in prison.
“We are trying to get him to come. All loyal citizens are writing letters.”
Clip-clip went Dedé’s shears, as if to drown out anything I might be thinking.
“El Jefe has been very generous to you girls. It would be nice if you composed a letter of thanks for his leniency.”
He glanced at me and Mate, resting his eyes on Patria last. We gave him nothing with our faces. Poor nervous Dedé, who had edged up the patio towards us and was rewatering all the plants, said that yes, that would be wise. “I mean nice,” she corrected herself quickly, and Patria, Mate, and I bowed our heads to hide our smiles.
After Pena left there was a fight. The others wanted to go ahead and write the damn letter. But I was against it. Thank Trujillo for punishing us!
“But what harm can a little letter do?” Mate argued. It was no longer so easy for me to talk that one into anything.
“People look to us to be an example, we’ve got a responsibility!” I spoke so fiercely, they looked a little sheepish. My old self was putting on quite a show.
“Now, Minerva,” Patria reasoned. “You know if he publishes the silly thing everyone will know why we wrote it.”
“Just go along with us this one time,” Mate pleaded with me.
It reminded me of that time in Inmaculada when I had not wanted to perform for Trujillo with my friends. But I had given in to them, and we had almost met our end, too, with Sinita’s bow-and-arrow assassination attempt.
What finally convinced me was Patria’s argument that the letter might help free the men. A grateful note from the Mirabal sisters might just soften El Jefe’s heart towards our husbands.
“Heart?” I said, making a face. Then, sitting down to our task, I made it perfectly clear: “This is against my better principles.”
“Someone needs to have less principles and more sense,” Dedé murmured, but without much fight in her voice. I think she was relieved to see a little spark of the old Minerva again.
Afterwards I felt small with what I’d done. “We’ve got to do something,” I kept muttering.
“Calm down, Minerva. Here,” Dedé said, pulling down Gandhi from the shelf. Elsa had given me this book when I first got out of prison to show me, she said, that being passive and gentle could be revolutionary. Dedé had approved wholeheartedly.
Today, Gandhi would not do. What I needed was a shot of Fidel’s fiery rhetoric. He would have agreed with me. We had to do something, soon!
“We have to accept this cross is what we have to do,” Patria said.
“Like hell we do!” I said. I was on a rampage.
It lasted only until the end of that day.
We were already in bed when I heard them talking loudly on the porch. They were everywhere—the dark glasses, the ironed pants, the pomaded hair. They stayed on the road until night, when they drew close to the house like moths drawn towards the light.
Usually I covered my head with my pillow and after a while fell asleep. But tonight I couldn’t ignore them. I got up from bed, not even bothering to throw a shawl over my nightgown.
Dedé caught me going out the door. She tried to hold me back, but weak though I still was, I pushed her aside easily. Dedé was still Dedé, without much conviction in her fighting.
Two SIM agents were sitting on our rockers as comfortable as you please. “Compañeros,” I said, startling them in mid-rock with the revolutionary greeting. “I’m going to have to ask you to please keep your voices down. You’re right under our bedroom windows. Remember, you are guards, not guests here.”
Neither of them said a word.
“Well, if there’s nothing else, good night then, compañeros.”
I had turned back towards the door when one of them called out, “iViva Trujillo!” the “patriotic” way of beginning and closing the day. But I wasn’t going to invoke the devil’s name in my own yard.
After a short pause in which she was probably waiting to see if I’d answer, Dedé called from inside the house, “¡Viva Trujillo!”
“¡Viva Trujillo!” Mate took it up.
And then a couple of more voices added their good wishes to our dictator, until what had been a scared compliance became, by the exaggeration of repetition, a joke. But I could feel the men listening specifically for my loyalty call.
“Viva—” I began and felt ashamed as I took a deep breath and pronounced the hated name.
Just in case I should go on a rampage again, Mama confiscated the old radio. “What we need to know, we’ll know soon enough!” And she was right, too. Little bits of news leaked in, sometimes from the least likely people.
My old friend Elsa. She had married the journalist Roberto Suárez, who was assigned to the National Palace and, though critical of the regime, wrote the flowery feature articles required of him. One night long ago, he had kept Manolo and me, as well as Elsa, in stitches with tales of his journalistic escapades. He had been held in prison once for three days for printing a picture in which Trujillo’s bare leg showed between the cuff of his pants and the top of his sock. Another time, in a misprint he hadn’t caught, Roberto’s article had stated that Senator Smathers had delivered an elegy, instead of a eulogy, of Trujillo before the joint members of the United States Congress. That time Roberto was put in jail for a month.
I had thought for sure the Suarezes would join our movement. So when Leandro moved to the capital to coordinate the cells there, I mentioned the Suarezes to him as a likely couple. Elsa and Roberto were contacted and declared themselves “friendly,” but did not want to join.
Now, in my hard times, my old friend sprang to my side. Every week since our release in August, Elsa had driven up from the capital to visit her elderly grandfather in La Vega. She would then swing up to Santiago, butter up Pena (she was good at this), and get a pass to come see me. Knowing we were in straitened circumstances, she brought bags of “old” clothes that looked fairly new to me. She claimed she couldn’t fit into anything after her babies had been born and she’d got
ten big as a cow.
Elsa... always exaggerating. She had the same good figure as always—as far as I could tell. “But look at these hips, please, just look at these legs!” she’d remind me.
Once she asked me, “How do you stay so trim?” Her eyes ran over my figure in an appraising way.
“Prison,” I said flatly. She didn’t mention my figure again.
Elsa and Roberto owned a boat, and every weekend they took it out. “To fish.” Elsa winked. At sea they picked up Swan broadcasts from a little island south of Cuba as well as Radio Rebelde in Cuba and Radio Rumbos from Venezuela. “It’s a regular newsroom out there,” said Elsa, every visit catching me up on the latest news.
One day Elsa appeared, her face flushed with excitement. She couldn’t sit down for a minute, not even for her favorite pastelito snack. She had news to tell me that required an immediate walk in the garden. “What is it?” I said, clutching her arm when we were halfway down the anthuriums.
“The OAS has imposed sanctions! Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela,” Elsa counted them off with her fingers, “even the gringos. They’ve all broken relations!” She and Roberto had been out on the boat Sunday and seen an American warship on the horizon.
“The capital is like this!” Elsa rubbed her fingers together. “Roberto says by next year—”
“Next year!” I was alarmed. “By then, who knows what can happen.”
We walked a little while in silence. Far off, I could hear the shouts of the children playing with the big, bright beach ball their Tía Elsa had brought them from the capital. “Dedé tells me I shouldn’t talk to you about all this. But I said to her, Dedé, it’s in Minerva’s blood. I told her about that time you almost shot Trujillo with a toy arrow, remember? I had to step in and pretend it was part of our play.”
Julia Alvarez Page 28