In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  “Patria Mercedes, have you given much thought to the future?” she asked me in a whispery voice.

  Surely it would be pride to claim a calling at my young age! I shook my head, blushing, and looked down at my palms, marked, the country people say, with a map of the future.

  “You must pray to the Virgencita for guidance,” she said.

  I could feel the tenderness of her gaze, and I looked up. Beyond her, I saw the first zigzag of lightning, and heard, far off, the rumble of thunder. “I do, Sister, I pray at all times to know His will so it can be done.”

  She nodded. “We have noticed from the first how seriously you take your religious obligations. Now you must listen deeply in case He is calling. We would welcome you as one of us if that is His Will.”

  I felt the sweet release of tears. My face was wet with them. “Now, now,” she said, patting my knees. “Let’s not be sad.”

  “I’m not sad, Sister,” I said when I had regained some composure. “These are tears of joy and hope that He will make His will known to me.”

  “He will,” she assured me. “Listen at all times. In wakefulness, in sleep, as you work and as you play.”

  I nodded and then she added, “Now let us pray together that soon, soon, you will know.” And I prayed with her, a Hail Mary and an Our Father, and I tried hard but I could not keep my eyes from straying to the flame trees, their blossoms tumbling in the wind of the coming storm.

  There was a struggle, but no one could tell. It came in the dark in the evil hours when the hands wake with a life of their own. They rambled over my growing body, they touched the plumping of my chest, the mound of my belly, and on down. I tried reining them in, but they broke loose, night after night.

  For Three Kings, I asked for a crucifix for above my bed. Nights, I laid it beside me so that my hands, waking, could touch his suffering flesh instead and be tamed from their shameful wanderings. The ruse worked, the hands slept again, but other parts of my body began to wake.

  My mouth, for instance, craved sweets, figs in their heavy syrup, coconut candy, soft golden flans. When those young men whose surnames had been appropriated for years by my mooning girlfriends came to the store and drummed their big hands on the counter, I wanted to take each finger in my mouth and feel their calluses with my tongue.

  My shoulders, my elbows, my knees ached to be touched. Not to mention my back and the hard cap of my skull. “Here’s a peseta,” I’d say to Minerva. “Play with my hair.” She’d laugh, and combing her fingers through it, she’d ask, “Do you really believe what the gospel says? He knows how many strands of hair are on your head?”

  “Come, come, little sister,” I’d admonish her. “Don’t play with the word of God.”

  “I’m going to count them,” she’d say. “I want to see how hard His work is.”

  She’d start in as if it were not an impossible task, “Uno, dos, tres ...” Soon her gratifying fingering and her lilting voice would lull me to sleep again.

  It was after my conference with Sor Asunción, once I had begun praying to know my calling, that suddenly, like a lull in a storm, the cravings stopped. All was quiet. I slept obediently through the night. The struggle was over, but I was not sure who had won.

  I thought this was a sign. Sor Asunción had mentioned that the calling could come in all sorts of ways, dreams, visitations, a crisis. Soon after our conference, school was out for Holy Week. The nuns closed themselves up in their convent for their yearly mortifications in honor of the crucifixion of their bridegroom and Lord, Jesus Christ.

  I went home to do likewise, sure in my bones that I would hear His calling now. I joined in Padre Ignacio’s Holy Week activities, going to the nightly novenas and daily mass. On Holy Thursday, I brought my pan and towels along with the other penitents for washing the feet of the parishioners at the door of the church.

  The lines were long that night. One after another, I washed pairs of feet, not bothering to look up, entranced in my prayerful listening. Then, of a sudden, I noticed a pale young foot luxuriant with dark hair in my fresh pan of water, and my legs went soft beneath me.

  I washed that foot thoroughly, lifting it by the ankle to soap the underside as one does a baby’s legs in cleaning its bottom. Then, I started in on the other one. I worked diligently, oblivious to the long lines stretching away in the dark. When I was done, I could not help looking up.

  A young man was staring down at me, his face alluring in the same animal way as his feet. The cheeks were swarthy with a permanent shadow, his thick brows joined in the center. Underneath his thin guayabera, I could see the muscles of his broad shoulders shifting as he reached down and gave me a wad of bills to put in the poor box as his donation.

  Later, he would say that I gave him a beatific smile. Why not? I had seen the next best thing to Jesus, my earthly groom. The struggle was over, and I had my answer, though it was not the one I had assumed I would get. For Easter mass, I dressed in glorious yellow with a flamboyant blossom in my hair. I arrived early to prepare for singing Alleluia with the other girls, and there he was waiting for me by the choir stairs.

  Sixteen, and it was settled, though we had not spoken a word to each other. When I returned to school, Sor Asunción greeted me at the gate. Her eyes searched my face, but I would not let it give her an answer. “Have you heard?” she asked, taking both my hands in her hands.

  “No, Sister, I have not,” I lied.

  April passed, then came May, the month of Mary. Mid-May a letter arrived for me, just my name and Inmaculada Concepción in a gruff hand on the envelope. Sor Asunción called me to her office to deliver it, an unusual precaution since the sisters limited themselves to monitoring our correspondence by asking us what news we had gotten from home. She eyed me as I took the envelope. I felt the gravity of the young man’s foot in my hand. I smelled the sweat and soil and soap on the tender skin. I blushed deeply.

  “Well?” Sor Asunción said, as if she had asked a question and I was tarrying in my answer. “Have you heard, Patria Mercedes?” Her voice had grown stem.

  I cleared my throat, but I could not speak. I was so sorry to disappoint her, and yet I felt there was nothing to apologize for. At last, my spirit was descending into flesh, and there was more, not less, of me to praise God. It tingled in my feet, warmed my hands and legs, flared in my gut. “Yes,” I confessed at last, “I have heard.”

  I did not go back to Inmaculada in the fall with Dedé and Minerva. I stayed and helped Papa with minding the store and sewed frocks for Maria Teresa, all the while waiting for him to come around.

  His name was Pedrito González, the son of an old farming family from the next town over. He had been working his father’s land since he was a boy, so he had not had much formal schooling. But he could count to high numbers, launching himself first with his ten fingers. He read books, slowly, mouthing words, holding them reverently like an altar boy the missal for the officiating priest. He was born to the soil, and there was something about his strong body, his thick hands, his shapely mouth that seemed akin to the roundness of the hills and the rich, rolling valley of El Cibao.

  And why, you might ask, was the otherworldly, deeply religious Patria attracted to such a creature? I’ll tell you. I felt the same excitement as when I’d been able to coax a wild bird or stray cat to eat out of my hand.

  We courted decorously, not like Dedé and Jaimito, two little puppies you constantly have to watch over so they don’t get into trouble—Mamá has been telling me the stories. He’d come over after a day in the fields, all washed up, the comb marks still in his wet hair, looking uncomfortable in his good guayabera. Is pity always a part of love? It was all I could do to keep from touching him.

  Once only did I almost let go, that Christmas. The wedding was planned for February 24th, three days before my seventeenth birthday. Papa had said we must wait until I was seventeen, but he consented to giving me those three days of dispensation. Otherwise, we would be upon the Lenten season, when real
ly it’s not right to be marrying.

  We were walking to our parish church for the Mass of the Rooster, Mama, Papa, my sisters. Pedrito and I lagged behind the others, talking softly. He was making his simple declarations, and I was teasing him into having to declare them over and over again. He could not love me very much, I protested, because all he said was that he loved me. According to Minerva, those truly in love spoke poetry to their beloved.

  He stopped, and took me by the shoulders. I could barely see his face that moonless night. “You’re not getting a fancy, high-talking man in Pedrito González,” he said rather fiercely. “But you are getting a man who adores you like he does this rich soil we’re standing on.”

  He reached down and took a handful of dirt and poured it in my hand. And then, he began kissing me, my face, my neck, my breasts. I had to, I had to stop him! It would not be right, not on this night in which the word was still so newly fleshed, the porcelain baby just being laid by Padre Ignacio—as we hurried down the path—in His crèche.

  You’d think there was nothing else but the private debates of my flesh and spirit going on, the way I’ve left out the rest of my life. Don’t believe it! Ask anyone around here who was the easiest, friendliest, simplest of the Mirabal girls, and they’d tell you, Patria Mercedes. The day I married, the whole population of Ojo de Agua turned out to wish me well. I burst out crying, already homesick for my village even though I was only moving fifteen minutes away.

  It was hard at first living in San José de Conuco away from my family, but I got used to it. Pedrito came in from the fields at noon hungry for his dinner. Afterwards we had siesta, and his other hunger had to be satisfied, too. The days started to fill, Nelson was bom, and two years later, Noris, and soon I had a third belly growing larger each day. They say around here that bellies stir up certain cravings or aversions. Well, the first two bellies were simple, all I craved were certain foods, but this belly had me worrying all the time about my sister Minerva.

  It was dangerous the way she was speaking out against the government. Even in public, she’d throw a jab at our president or at the church for supporting him. One time, the salesman who was trying to sell Papá a car brought out an expensive Buick. Extolling its many virtues, the salesman noted that this was El Jefe’s favorite car. Right out, Minerva told Papa, “Another reason not to buy it.” The whole family walked around in fear for a while.

  I couldn’t understand why Minerva was getting so worked up. El Jefe was no saint, everyone knew that, but among the bandidos that had been in the National Palace, this one at least was building churches and schools, paying off our debts. Every week his picture was in the papers next to Monsignor Pittini, overseeing some good deed.

  But I couldn’t reason with reason herself. I tried a different tack. “It’s a dirty business, you’re right. That’s why we women shouldn’t get involved.”

  Minerva listened with that look on her face of just waiting for me to finish. “I don’t agree with you, Patria,” she said, and then in her usual, thorough fashion, she argued that women had to come out of the dark ages.

  She got so she wouldn’t go to church unless Mamá made a scene. She argued that she was more connected to God reading her Rousseau than when she was at mass listening to Padre Ignacio intoning the Nicene Creed. “He sounds like he’s gargling with words,” she made fun.

  “I worry that you’re losing your faith,” I told her. “That’s our pearl of great price; you know, without it, we’re nothing.”

  “You should worry more about your beloved church. Even Padre Ignacio admits some priests are on double payroll.”

  “Ay, Minerva,” was all I could manage. I stroked my aching belly. For days, I’d been feeling a heaviness inside me. And I admit it, Minerva’s talk had begun affecting me. I started noting the deadness in Padre Ignacio’s voice, the tedium between the gospel and communion, the dry papery feel of the host in my mouth. My faith was shifting, and I was afraid.

  “Sit back,” Minerva said, kindly, seeing the lines of weariness on my face. “Let me finish counting those hairs.”

  And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside me.

  After I lost the baby, I felt a strange vacancy. I was an empty house with a sign in front, Se Vende, For Sale. Any vagrant thought could take me.

  I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, sure that some brujo had put a spell on me and that’s why the baby had died. This from Patria Mercedes, who had always kept herself from such low superstitions.

  I fell asleep and dreamed the Yanquis were back, but it wasn’t my grandmother’s house they were burning—it was Pedrito’s and mine. My babies, all three of them, were going up in flames. I leapt from the bed crying, “Fire! Fire!”

  I wondered if the dead child were not a punishment for my having turned my back on my religious calling? I went over and over my life to this point, complicating the threads with my fingers, knotting everything.

  We moved in with Mama until I could get my strength back. She kept trying to comfort me. “That poor child, who knows what it was spared!”

  “It is the Lord’s will,” I agreed, but the words sounded hollow to my ear.

  Minerva could tell. One day, we were lying side by side on the hammock strung just inside the galería. She must have caught me gazing at our picture of the Good Shepherd, talking to his lambs. Beside him hung the required portrait of El Jefe, touched up to make him look better than he was. “They’re a pair, aren’t they?” she noted.

  That moment, I understood her hatred. My family had not been personally hurt by Trujillo, just as before losing my baby, Jesus had not taken anything away from me. But others had been suffering great losses. There were the Perozos, not a man left in that family. And Martinez Reyna and his wife murdered in their bed, and thousands of Haitians massacred at the border, making the river, they say, still run red—iAy, Dios santo!

  I had heard, but I had not believed. Snug in my heart, fondling my pearl, I had ignored their cries of desolation. How could our loving, all-powerful Father allow us to suffer so? I looked up, challenging Him. And the two faces had merged!

  I moved back home with the children in early August, resuming my duties, putting a good face over a sore heart, hiding the sun—as the people around here say—with a finger. And slowly, I began coming back from the dead. What brought me back? It wasn’t God, no señor. It was Pedrito, his grief so silent and animal-like. I put aside my own grief to rescue him from his.

  Every night I gave him my milk as if he were my lost child, and afterwards I let him do things I never would have before. “Come here, mi amor,” I’d whisper to guide him through the dark bedroom when he showed up after having been out late in the fields. Then I was the one on horseback, riding him hard and fast until I’d gotten somewhere far away from my aching heart.

  His grief hung on. He never spoke of it, but I could tell. One night, a few weeks after the baby was buried, I felt him leaving our bed ever so quietly. My heart sank. He was seeking other consolations in one of the thatched huts around our rancho. I wanted to know the full extent of my losses, so I said nothing and followed him outside.

  It was one of those big, bright nights of August when the moon has that luminous color of something ready for harvest. Pedrito came out of the shed with a spade and a small box. He walked guardedly, looking over his shoulder. At last, he stopped at a secluded spot and began to dig a little grave.

  I could see now that his grief was dark and odd. I would have to be gentle in coaxing him back. I crouched behind a big ceiba, my fist in my mouth, listening to the thud of soil hitting the box.

  After he was gone to the yucca fields the next day, I searched and searched, but I could not find the spot again. Ay, Dios, how I worried that he had taken our baby from consecrated ground. The poor innocent would be stuck in limbo all eternity! I decided to ch
eck first before insisting Pedrito dig him back up.

  So I went to the graveyard and enlisted a couple of campesinos with the excuse that I’d forgotten the baby’s Virgencita medallion. After several feet of digging, their shovels struck the small coffin.

  “Open it,” I said.

  “Let us put in the medal ourselves, Dona Patria,” they offered, reluctant to pry open the lid. “It’s not right for you to see.”

  “I want to see,” I said.

  I should have desisted, I should not have seen what I saw. My child, a bundle of swarming ants! My child, decomposing like any animal! I fell to my knees, overcome by the horrid stench.

  “Close him up,” I said, having seen enough.

  “What of the medal, Doña Patria?” they reminded me.

  It won’t do him any good, I thought, but I slipped it in. I bowed my head, and if this was prayer, then you could say I prayed. I said the names of my sisters, my children, my husband, Mama, Papa. I was deciding right then and there to spare all those I love.

  And so it was that Patria Mercedes Mirabal de González was known all around San Jose de Conuco as well as Ojo de Agua as a model Catholic wife and mother. I fooled them all! Yes, for a long time after losing my faith, I went on, making believe.

  It wasn’t my idea to go on the pilgrimage to Higüey. That was Mamá’s brainstorm. There had been sightings of the Virgencita. She had appeared one early morning to an old campesino coming into town with his donkey loaded down with garlic. Then a little girl had seen the Virgencita swinging on the bucket that was kept decoratively dangling above the now dry well where she had once appeared back in the 1600s. It was too whimsical a sighting for the archbishop to pronounce as authentic, but still. Even El Jefe had attributed the failure of the invasion from Cayo Confites to our patron saint.

  “If she’s helping him—” was all Minerva got out. Mama silenced her with a look that was the grownup equivalent of the old slipper on our butts.