In the Time of Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  One morning, close to a month after Mate and Minerva had been taken, I had another visitor. Dedé and Mamá had gone to the capital to make their rounds. Their habit was to drive down every week with Jaimito or with some other prisoner’s family. They refused to take me along. They were sure someone at the SIM headquarters would realize they had overlooked me and grab me on the spot.

  Before heading home, they always drove out to La Victoria. Out of desperation, I suppose, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girls. Of course, they never saw them. But often there were sheets and towels hanging to dry through the bars of windows, and this touch of domesticity always gave them hope.

  I was in the parlor, teaching Noris how to applique monograms just as I had once taught Mate. The children were busy building their block palaces on the floor. Tono came in and announced there was a visitor. Instantly, my heart sank, for I assumed it was Peña again. But no, it was Margarita, no last name given, wanting to see the dona of the house, though she couldn’t say in relation to what.

  The young woman sitting on the stoop out back looked vaguely familiar. She had a sweet, simple face and dark, thick hair held back with bobby pins. The eyes, the brows, the whole look had Mirabal written all over it. Ay, no, I thought, not now. She stood up the minute she saw me, and bowed her head shyly. “Could we speak privately?”

  I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew Minerva had stayed in touch with them over the years, but I had always kept my distance. I did not want to be associated with the issue of a campesina who had had no respect for the holy banns of matrimony or for the good name of Mirabal.

  I nodded towards the garden where no one could overhear our talk.

  When we were a little ways down the path, she reached in her pocket and offered me a folded note.

  My hands began to shake. “God be praised,” I said, looking up. “Where did you get this?”

  “My mother’s cousin works in La Victoria. He doesn’t want his name mentioned.”

  I unfolded the note. It was the label off a can of tomato paste. The back had been written on.

  We’re in Cell # 61, Pavilion A, La Victoria—Duke, Miriam, Violeta, Asela, Delia, Sina, Minerva, and me. Please notify their families. We are well but dying for news of home and the children. Please send Trinalin as we are all down with a bad grippe & Lomotil for the obvious. Any food that keeps. Many kisses to all but especially to my little darling.

  And then, as if I wouldn’t recognize that pretty hand in a million years, the note was signed, Mate.

  My head was spinning with what needed to be done. Tonight with Mama and Dedé, I would write a reply and fix up a package. “Can we send something back with your relative?”

  She nodded, lingering as if she had something else to say. I realized I had forgotten there was always a charge for such services. “Wait here, please,” I said, and ran to the house to get my purse.

  She looked pained when I offered her the bills. “No, no, we wouldn’t take anything from you.” Instead, she handed me a card with the name of the pharmacy I always went to in Salcedo; her own name was written on the back. “Margarita Mirabal, to serve you.”

  That Mirabal was something of a shock. “Thank you, Margarita,” I said, offering her my hand. Then I added the words I found hard to wrench from my prideful heart. “Patria Mercedes, to serve you.”

  When she had left, I read Mate’s note over and over as if with each reading, new information would surface. Then I sat down on the bench by the birds of paradise, and I had to laugh. Papa’s other family would be the agents of our salvation! It was ingenious and finally, I saw, all wise. He was going to work several revolutions at one time. One of them would have to do with my pride.

  That night, Dedé, Mama, and I stayed up late preparing the package. We made sweet potato biscuits with molasses, which would have a lot of nutrition, and filled a bag full of little things that wouldn’t spoil. We packed a change of underwear for each of them, and socks, and inside the socks I stuck a comb and brush for them to share. I couldn’t imagine how Mate was taking care of that long hair.

  Our little pile of things grew, and we began arguing over what was necessary. Mama thought it would be a mistake to send Mate her good black towel she had made the week she was home—to save her nerves. She had finished appliqueing the M in gold satin, but had not gotten to the G yet. “The more you send the more chances someone along the way will steal the whole thing.”

  “Ay, Mama, have a little faith.”

  She put her hands on her hips and shook her head at me. “Patria Mercedes, you should be the first one to know .. We kept our sentences incomplete whenever we were criticizing the government inside the house. There were ears everywhere, or at least we imagined them there. ”That is no towel for a jail cell,“ Mamá finished, as if that was what she had been about to say from the start.

  Dedé convinced her. She used the same argument about the manicure set, the case with lipstick and face powder, the little bottle of Matador’s Delight. These little touches of luxury would raise the the girls’ spirits. How could Mama argue with that!

  Tucked inside Mate’s prayerbook, I put some money and our note.

  Dearest Minerva and Mate, we are petitioning at headquarters, and God willing, some door will open soon. The children are all well, but missing you terribly. Please advise us of your health and any other needs. Also, what of the men, and dear Nelson? Send any news, and remember you are in the hearts and prayers of Patria and Dedé, and your loving mother.

  Mama wrote her own name. I couldn’t keep back my tears when I saw her struggling with the pen and then ruining her signature by running the ink with her tears.

  After Mamá went to bed, I explained to Dedé who had brought the note over. I had been vague with Mama, so as not to open old wounds. “She looks like Mate,” I reported. “She’s quite pretty.”

  “I know,” Dedé admitted. It turned out she knew a lot more.

  “Back when Papa died, Minerva asked me to take out of her inheritance for those girls’ education.” Dedé shook her head, remembering. “I got to thinking about it, and I decided to put in half. It wasn’t all that much,” she added when she saw my face. I was a little hurt not to be included in this charitable act. “Now the oldest has her pharmacy degree and is helping out the others.”

  “A fine girl,” I agreed.

  “There isn’t any other kind of Mirabal girl,” Dedé said, smiling. It was a remark Papá used to make about his girls. Back then, we had assumed he was talking just about us.

  Something wistful and sisterly hung in the air. Maybe that’s why I went ahead and asked her. “And you, Dedé, how are you doing?”

  She knew what I meant. I could read a sister’s heart even if it was hidden behind a practiced smile. Padre de Jesus had told me about an aborted visit Dedé had made to his rectory. But since the girls’ arrest, we were all too numb to feel or talk of any other grief.

  “Jaimito is behaving himself very well. I can’t complain,” she said. Behave? What a curious word for a wife to use about her husband. Often now, Dedé slept over at Mamá’s with the two younger boys. To keep an eye on us, so she said.

  “Things are all right then?”

  “Jaimito’s been great,” Dedé went on, ignoring my question. “I’m very grateful, since I know he didn’t want any part of this mess.”

  “None of us did,” I observed. And then, because I could see her drawing in, I turned away from any implied criticism of Jaimito. Actually— unlike Minerva—I liked our blustery cousin. Under all his swagger, that man had a good heart.

  I took her hand. “When all this is over, please get some counsel from Padre de Jesús. Faith can strengthen a marriage. And I want you both to be happy together.”

  Suddenly she was in tears. But then, she always got weepy when I spoke to her that way. I touched her face, and motioned for us to go outside. “What’s wrong, you can tell me,” I asked as we walked up the moon-lit drive.

  She was looking up
at the sky. The big old moon of a few days back had shrunk to something with a big slice of itself gone. “Jaimito’s a good man, whatever anyone thinks. But he would have been happier with someone else, that’s all.” There was a pause.

  “And you?” I prodded.

  “I suppose,” she admitted. But if she had a ghost in her heart, she didn’t give out his name. Instead, she reached up as if that moon were a ball falling into her empty hands. “It’s late,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  As we made our way back down the drive, I heard a distinct cough.

  “We’ve got visitors again,” I whispered.

  “I know,” she said, “ghosts all over the place.”

  The minute Jaimito’s pickup turned onto the road in the mornings for daily mass, the little toy-engine sound of a VW would start up. All night, we smelled their cigarettes in the yard and heard muffled coughs and sneezes. Sometimes, we would call out, “God bless you!” As the days wore on, we began taking our little revenges on them.

  There was a nook where one side of the house met another, and that was their favorite after-dark hiding place. Mama put some cane chairs out there along with a crate with an ashtray so they’d stop littering her yard. One night, she set out a thermos full of ice water and a snack, as if the three Kings were coming. They stole that thermos and glasses and the ashtray, and instead of using the path Mamá had cleared for them, they trampled through her flowers. The next day, Mama moved her thorn bushes to that side of the yard. That night when she heard them out there, she opened up the bathroom window and dumped Jacqueline‘s dirty bathwater out into the yard. There was a surprised cry, but they didn’t dare come after us. After all, they were top secret spies, and we weren’t supposed to know they were out there.

  Inside, Dedé and I could barely contain our hilarity. Minou and Jacqueline laughed in that forced way of children imitating adult laughter they don’t really understand. Next morning, we found bits of fabric and threads and even a handkerchief caught on the thorns. From then on when they spied on us, they kept a respectful distance from the house.

  Getting our packet to Margarita took some plotting.

  The morning after her visit, we stopped at the pharmacy on the way back from daily mass. While the others waited in the pickup, I went in. I was holding Raulito in such a way that his blanket covered up the package. For once, that little boy was quiet, as if he could tell I needed his good behavior.

  It was strange going into that pharmacy now that I knew she worked there. How many times in the past hadn’t I dropped in to buy aspirin or formula for the baby. How many times hadn’t the sweet, shy girl in the white jacket taken care of my prescriptions. I wondered if she’d known all along who I was.

  “If it’s any problem—” I began, handing her the package. Quickly, she slipped it under the counter. She looked at me pointedly. I should not elaborate in this public place.

  Margarita scowled at the large bill I pressed into her hand. In a whisper, I explained it was for the Lomotil and Trinalin and vitamins I wanted her to include in the package. She nodded. The owner of the pharmacy was approaching.

  “I hope this helps,” Margarita said, handing me a bottle of aspirin to disguise our transaction. It was the brand I always bought.

  That week, Mamá and Dedé came back elated from their weekly trip. They had seen a black towel hanging out of a window of La Victoria! Dedé couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a zigzag of something in the front, probably the monogram. And who else would have a black towel in prison?

  “I know, I know,” Mama said. “I already heard it several times coming home.” She mimicked Dedé: “See, Mamá, what a good idea it was to send that towel. ”

  “The truth is,” Mamá continued—it was her favorite phrase these days—“I didn’t think it’d get to her. I’ve gotten so I suspect everyone.”

  “Look at this!” Jaimito called us over to where he was sitting at the dining room table, reading the papers he’d bought in the capital. He pointed to a photograph of a ghostly bunch of young prisoners, heads bowed, as El Jefe wagged his finger at them. “Eight prisoners pardoned yesterday at the National Palace.” He read off the names. Among them, Dulce Tejeda and Miriam Morales, who, according to Mate’s note, shared a cell with her and Minerva.

  I felt my heart lifting, my cross light as a feather. All eight pardoned prisoners were either women or minors! My Nelson had only turned eighteen a few weeks ago in prison. Surely, he still counted as a boy?

  “My God, here’s something else,” Jaimito went on. Capitan Victor Alicinio Peña was listed in the real estate transactions as having bought the old González farm from the government for a pittance. “He stole it is what he did,” I blurted out.

  “Yes, the boy stole the mangoes,” Dedé said in a loud voice to conceal my indiscretion. Last week, Tono had found a little rod behind Mama’s wedding picture—a telltale sign of bugging. Only in the garden or riding around in a car could we speak freely with each other.

  “The truth is ...” Mamá began, but stopped herself. Why give out the valuable truth to a hidden microphone?

  Peña owed me was the way I saw it. The next day, I put on the yellow dress I’d just finished and the black heels Dedé had passed on to me. I talcumed myself into a cloudy fragrance and crossed the hedge to Don Bernardo’s house.

  “Where are you going, Mamá?” Noris called after me. I’d left her tending the children. “Out,” I said, waving my hand over my shoulder, “to see Don Bernardo.” I didn’t want Mamá or Dedé to know about my outing.

  Don Bernardo really was our next door angel disguised as an old Spaniard with an ailing wife. He had come to the island under a refugee program Trujillo had instituted in the forties “to whiten the race.” He had not been much help to the dictator in that regard, since he and Dona Belén had never had any children. Now he spent most of his days reminiscing on his porch and tending to an absence belted into a wheelchair. From some need of his own, Don Bernardo pretended his wife was just under the weather rather than suffering from dementia. He conveyed made-up greetings and apologies from Dona Belén. Once a week, the old man struggled to get behind the wheel of his old Plymouth to drive Dona Belén over to Salcedo for a little checkup.

  He was a true angel all right. He had come through for us as a god-father for all the little ones—Raulito, Minou, and Manolito—at a time when most people were avoiding the Mirabals.

  Then, after the girls were taken, I realized that Jacqueline hadn’t been christened. All my children had been baptized the country way, within the first cycle of the moon after their birth. But Maria Teresa, who always loved drama and ceremony, had kept postponing the christening until it could be done “properly” in the cathedral in San Francisco with the bishop officiating and the girls’ choir from Inmaculada singing “Regina Coeli.” Maybe pride ran in more than one set of veins in the family.

  One afternoon when I was still a little crazy with grief, I ran out of Mamá’s house, barefoot, with Jacqueline in my arms. Don Bemardo was already at his door with his hat on and his keys in his hand. “So you’re ready to be a fish in the waters of salvation, eh, my little snapper?” He chucked Jacqueline under her little chin, and her tears dried up like it was July in Monte Cristi.

  Now I was at Don Bemardo’s door again, but this time without a baby in my arms. “What a pleasure, Patria Mercedes,” he greeted me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have me drop in at any hour of the day or night, barefoot or dressed up, with a favor to ask.

  “Don Bernardo, here I am bothering you again,” I said. “But I need a ride to Santiago to Captain Peña’s office.”

  “A visit to the lion’s den, I see.”

  I caught a glimpse of a smile in the curve of his thick, white mustache. Briefly, he entered the bedroom where Dona Belén lay harnessed in her second childhood. Then out he came, crooking his elbow as my escort. “Doña Belén sends her greetings,” he said.

  Captain Victor Alici
nio Pena received me right away. Maybe it was my nerves, but his office had the closed-in feeling of a jail cell, metal jalousies at the windows and fluorescence the only light. An air conditioner gave out a violent mechanical sound, as if it were about to give out. I wished I were outside, waiting under the almond trees in the square with Don Bernardo.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you, Dona Patria.” Captain Peña eyeballed me as if he had to be true to his verb and see every part of me. “How can I be of help?” he asked, motioning for me to sit down.

  I had planned to make an impassioned plea, but no words came out of my mouth. It wouldn’t have been exaggerating to say that Patria Mercedes had been struck dumb in the devil’s den.

  “I must say I was a little surprised to be told you were here to see me,” Pena went on. I could see he was growing annoyed at my silence. “I am a busy man. What is it I can do for you?”

  Suddenly, it all came out, along with the tears. How I had read in the papers about El Jefe excusing minors, how my boy had just turned eighteen in prison, how I wondered if there was anything at all Pena could do to get my boy pardoned.

  “This matter is outside my department,” he lied.

  That’s when it struck me. This devil might seem powerful, but finally I had a power stronger than his. So I used it. Loading up my heart with prayer, I aimed it at the lost soul before me.

  “This came down from above,” he continued. But now, he was the one growing nervous. Absently, his hands fiddled with a plastic card on his key ring. It was a prism picture of a well-stacked brunette. When you tilted it a certain way, her clothes dropped away. I tried not to be distracted, but to keep right on praying.

  Soften his devils heart, oh Lord. And then, I said the difficult thing, For he, too, is one of your children.

  Pena lay down his pathetic key ring, picked up the phone, and dialed headquarters in the capital. His voice shifted from its usual bullying bark to an accommodating softness. “Yes, yes, General, absolutely.” I wondered if he would ever get to my petition. And then it came, so smoothly buttered, it almost slipped right by me. “There’s a little matter I’ve got sitting here in my office.” He laughed uproariously at something said on the other end. “No, not exactly that little matter.”