In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  “Of the uninspiring kind,” Minerva says archly.

  “But it needs to be done—our end-of-the-year inventory is now our new year’s unfinished business.” Saying it, Dedé feels annoyed at herself all over again for not having finished the job earlier.

  “Maybe we can help?” The young scholar has stepped up to the counter and is gazing at the shelves behind Dedé.

  “This is my cousin,” Mario explains, “just come from the capital to rescue ladies in distress.”

  “You’re at the university?” Minerva pipes up. And when the young man nods, Mario goes on to brag for his cousin. Virgilio Morales has recently returned from Venezuela where he earned his medical degree. He is now teaching in the faculty of medicine. Every weekend he comes up to the family place in Licey.

  “What a serious name Virgilio.” Dedé blushes. She is not used to putting herself forward in this way.

  The young man’s serious look fades. “That’s why everyone calls me Lío.”

  “They call you Lio because you’re always in one fix or another,” Mario reminds his cousin, who laughs good-naturedly.

  “Virgilio Morales ...” Minerva muses aloud. “Your name sounds familiar. Do you know Elsa Sánchez and Sinita Perozo? They’re at the university.”

  “Of course!” Now he is smiling, taking a special interest in Minerva. Soon the two of them are deep in conversation. How did that happen? Dedé wonders. The young man, after all, had headed straight for her, offering his help.

  “How are you, Dedé?” Mario leans confidentially on the counter. He tried courting her a few months back before Dedé set him straight. Mario is just not, not, well, he’s not Jaimito. But then neither is this young doctor.

  “I wish we could get this done.” Dedé sighs, capping her pen and closing the book. Mario apologizes. They have interrupted the girls in their work. Dedé reassures him that it was slow going before the visitors arrived.

  “Maybe it’s the heat,” Mario says, fanning himself with his Panama hat.

  “What do you say we all go for a swim in the lagoon?” Minerva offers. The young men look ready to go, but Dedé reminds Minerva, “What about volleyball?” Jaimito will be looking for her. And if she’s going to end up with Mario, which is no doubt the way things will settle, she’d rather be with the man she intends to marry. So there.

  “Volleyball? Did someone say volleyball?” the young scholar asks. It is nice to see a smile on his pale, serious face. It turns out he has played on several university teams.

  Minerva gets another great idea. Why not play volleyball, and then, when they are hot and sweaty, go jump in the lagoon.

  Dedé marvels at Minerva’s facility in arranging everyone’s lives. And how easily she assumes they can get permission from Papá. Already the volleyball evenings are becoming a problem. Papá does not feel that two sisters make the best chaperones for each other, especially if they are both eager to go to the same place.

  Back at the house, while the young men visit with Mama in the galería, Minerva argues with their father. “But Papá, Mario’s a man you do business with, a man you trust. We’re going to Tío Pepe‘s, our uncle, to play volleyball with our cousins. How much more chaperoned can we be?”

  Papá is dressing before his mirror. He has been looking younger, more handsome, something. He cranes his neck, looking over Minerva’s shoulder. “Who is that young man with Mario?”

  “Just some cousin of Mario’s here for the weekend,” Minerva says too offhandedly. Dedé notes how Minerva is avoiding mentioning Lío’s association with the university.

  And then the coup de grace. “Why don’t you come with us, Papá?”

  Of course, Papa won’t come along. Every evening he tours his property hearing reports from the campesinos about what’s been done that day. He never takes his girls along. “Men’s business,” he always says. That’s what he’s getting ready to do right now.

  “You be back before it’s dark.” He scowls. This is the way Dedé knows he’s granted them permission—when he begins talking of their return.

  Dedé changes quickly, but not fast enough for Minerva. “Come on,” she keeps hurrying Dede. “Before Papa changes his mind!” Dede is not sure her buttons are all buttoned as they head down the driveway to where the young men now wait beside their car.

  Dedé feels the stranger’s eyes on her. She knows she looks especially good in her flowered shinwaist and white sandal heels.

  Lio smiles, amused. “You’re going to play volleyball dressed like that?” Suddenly, Dedé feels foolish, caught in her frivolity as if she were a kitten knotted in yam. Of course, she never plays. Except for Minerva in her trousers and tennis shoes, the girls all sit in the galeria cheering the boys on.

  “I don’t play” she says rather more meekly than she intends. “I just watch.”

  The truth of her words strikes Dedé as she remembers how she stood back and watched the young man open the back door for whoever wanted to sit by him. And Minerva slipped in!

  She remembers a Saturday evening a few weeks later.

  Jaimito and his San Francisco Tigers are playing poorly against the Ojo de Agua Wolves. During a break, he comes up to the galería for a cold beer. “Hola, prima,” he says to Dedé as if they are just cousins. She is still pretending not to give him the time of day, but she checks herself in every reflecting surface. Now her hands clench with tension in the pockets of her fresh dress.

  “Come on and play, cousin.” He tugs at her arm. After all, Minerva has long been working up a sweat on the Ojo de Agua side of the net. “Our team could use some help!”

  “I wouldn’t be much help,” Dedé giggles. Truly, she has always considered sports—like politics—something for men. Her one weakness is her horse Brío, whom she adores riding. Minerva has been teasing her how this Austrian psychiatrist has proved that girls who like riding like sex. “I’m all flan fingers when it comes to volleyball.”

  “You wouldn’t have to play,” he flirts. “Just stand on our side and distract those wolves with your pretty face!”

  Dedé gives him the sunny smile she is famous for.

  “Be nice to us Tigers, Dedé. After all, we did bend the rules for you Wolves.” He indicates over his shoulder where Minerva and Lio are immersed in an intent conversation in a comer of the galería.

  It is true. Although Lío is not from Ojo de Agua, the Tigers have agreed to let him play for the weakling team. Dedé supposes that the Tigers took one look at the bespectacled, pale young man and decided he wouldn’t be much competition. But Lío Morales has turned out to be surprisingly agile. The Ojo de Agua Wolves are now gaining on the San Francisco Tigers.

  “He’s had to be quick,” Jaimito has quipped. “Escaping the police and all.” Jaimito and his buddies knew exactly who Virgilio Morales was the first night he came to play volleyball. They were split between admiration and wariness of his dangerous presence among them.

  Jaimito hits on a way of getting Dede to play. “Girls against guys, what do you say?” he calls out, picking up a fresh bottle of beer. Used to keeping tabs at the family store, Dedé has made note of three large ones for Jaimito already.

  The girls titter, tempted. But what about mussing their dresses, what about spraining their ankles on high heels?

  “Take off your heels, then,” Jaimito says, eyeballing Dedé’s shapely legs, “and whatever else is in your way!”

  “You!” Her face bums with pleasure. She has to admit that she is proud of her nice legs.

  Soon, shawls are flung on chairs, a half dozen pairs of heels are kicked off in a pile at the bottom of the steps. Dress sleeves are rolled up, ponytails tightened, and with squeals of delight, the Amazons—as they’ve christened themselves—step out on the slippery evening grass. The young men whistle and hoot, roused by the sight of frisky young women, girding themselves, ready to play ball. The cicadas have started their trilling, and the bats swoop down and up as if graphing the bristling excitement. Soon it will be too da
rk to see the ball clearly.

  As they are assigning positions, Dedé notices that her sister Minerva is not among them. Now, when they need her help, the pioneer woman player deserts them! She looks towards the galeria, where the two empty chairs facing each other recollect the vanished speakers. She is wondering whether or not to go in search of Minerva when she senses Jaimito’s attention directed her way. Far back, almost in darkness, he is poised to strike. She hears a whack, then startled by the cries of her girlfriends, she looks up and sees a glowing moon coming down into her upraised hands.

  Wasn’t it really an accident? Dedé ponders, rewinding back to the exact moment when she belted that ball. It had sailed over everyone’s heads into the dark hedges where it landed with the thrashing sound of breaking branches, and then, the surprising cry of a startled couple.

  Had she suspected that Minerva and Lio were in the hedges, and her shot was an easy way to flush them out? But why, she asks herself, why would she have wanted to stop them? Thinking back, she feels her heart starting to beat fast.

  Nonsense, so much nonsense the memory cooks up, mixing up facts, putting in a little of this and a little of that. She might as well hang out her shingle like Fela and pretend the girls are taking possession of her. Better them than the ghost of her own young self making up stories about the past!

  There was a fight, that she remembers. Lio came out of the hedges, the ball in his hand. Jaimito made a crude remark, carried away by his three-plus beers and growing uneasiness with Lio’s presence. Then the picture tilts and blurs the memory of Lio throwing the ball at Jaimito’s chest and of it knocking the breath out of him. Of Jaimito having to be held by his buddies. Of the girls hurrying back to their high heels. Of Tio Pepe coming down the steps from inside, shouting, “No more volleyball!”

  But before they could be ushered away, the two men were at the quick of their differences. Jaimito called Lio a troublemaker, accusing him of cooking up plots and then running off to some embassy for asylum, leaving his comrades behind to rot in jail. “You’re exposing us all,” Jaimito accused.

  “If I leave my country, it’s only to continue the struggle. We can’t let Chapita kill us all.”

  Then there had been the silence that always followed any compromising mention of the regime in public. One could never be sure who in a group might report what to the police. Every large household was said to have a servant on double payroll.

  “I said no more volleyball tonight.” Tio Pepe was looking from one to the other young man. “You two shake and be gentlemen. Come on,” he encouraged. Jaimito stuck out his hand.

  Oddly enough, it was Lio, the peace lover, who would not shake at first. Dedé can still picture the long, lanky body holding in tension, not saying a word, and then, finally, Lio reaching out his hand and saying, “We could use men like you, Jaimito.” It was a compliment that allowed the two men to coexist and even to collaborate on romantic matters in the months ahead.

  Such a small incident really. A silly explosion over a foul volleyball. But something keeps Dedé coming back to the night of that fight. And to the days and nights that followed. Something keeps her turning and turning these moments in her mind, something. She is no longer sure she wants to find out what.

  No matter what Mama said later, she was at first very taken with Virgilio Morales. She would sit in the galería, conversing with the young doctor—about the visit of Trygve Lie from the United Nations, the demonstrations in the capital, whether or not there was government in Paradise, and if so what kind it would be. On and on, Mama listened, spoke her mind, Mamá who had always said that all this talking of Minerva’s was unhealthy. After Lío had left, Mamá would say, “What a refined young man.”

  Sometimes Dedé felt a little peevish. After all, her beau had been along, too. But not a word was said about that fine young man Jaimito. How handsome he looked in his Mexican guayabera. What a funny joke he had made about what the coconut said to the drunk man. Mamá had known him since he was a kindred swelling of her first cousin’s belly. What was there to say about him but, “That Jaimito!”

  Dedé and Jaimito would wander off, unnoticed, stealing kisses in the garden. They’d play How Much Meat, Butcher?, Jaimito pretending to saw off Dedé’s shoulder, and instead getting to touch her sweet neck and bare arms. Soon they’d hear Mama calling them from the galeria, a scold in her voice. Once when they did not appear immediately (the butcher had been wanting the whole animal), Mama put a limit to how much Jaimito could come calling—Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays only

  But who could control Jaimito, only son of his doting mother, unquestioned boss of his five sisters! He appeared on Mondays to visit Don Enrique, on Tuesdays and Thursdays to help with any loading or unloading at the store, on Fridays to bring what his mother had sent. Mamá sighed, accepting the coconut flan or bag of cherries from their backyard tree. “That Jaimito!”

  Then one Sunday afternoon Mate was reading Mamá the newspaper out loud. It was no secret to Dedé that Mama couldn’t read, though Mama still persisted in her story that her eyesight was bad. When Dedé read Mama the news, she was careful to leave out anything that would worry her. But that day, Mate read right out how there had been a demonstration at the university, led by a bunch of young professors, all members of the Communist party. Among the names listed was that of Virgilio Morales! Mamá looked ashen. “Read that over again, slowly,” she commanded.

  Mate reread the paragraph, this time realizing what she was reading. “But that isn’t our Lío, is it?”

  “Minerva!” Mama called out. From her bedroom, the book she was reading still in hand, appeared the death of them all. “Sit down, young lady, you have some explaining to do.”

  Minerva argued eloquently that Mama herself had heard Lío’s ideas, and she had even agreed with them.

  “But I didn’t know they were communist ideas!” Mama protested.

  That night when Papa came home from doing his man’s business about the farm, Mamá took him to her room and closed the door. From the galería where Dedé visited with Jaimito, they could hear Mamá’s angry voice. Dedé could only make out snatches of what Mamá was saying—“ Too busy chasing ... to care ... your own daughter.” Dedé looked at Jaimito, a question in her face. But he looked away. “Your mother shouldn’t blame your father. She might as well blame me for not saying anything.”

  “You knew?” Dedé asked.

  “What do you mean, Dedé?” He seemed surprised at her plea of innocence. “You knew, too. Didn’t you?”

  Dedé could only shake her head. She didn’t really know Lío was a communist, a subversive, all the other awful things the editorial had called him. She had never known an enemy of state before. She had assumed such people would be self-serving and wicked, low-class criminals. But Lío was a fine young man with lofty ideals and a compassionate heart. Enemy of state? Why then, Minerva was an enemy of state. And if she, Dedé, thought long and hard about what was right and wrong, she would no doubt be an enemy of state as well.

  “I didn’t know,” she said again. What she meant was she didn’t understand until that moment that they were really living—as Minerva liked to say—in a police state.

  A new challenge sounded in Dedé’s life. She began to read the paper with pointed interest. She looked out for key names Lío had mentioned. She evaluated and reflected over what she read. How could she have missed so much before? she asked herself. But then a harder question followed: What was she going to do about it now that she did know?

  Small things, she decided. Right now, for instance, she was providing Minerva with an alibi. For after finding out who Lío was exactly, Mamá had forbidden Minerva to bring him into the house. Their courtship or friendship or whatever it was went underground. Every time Jaimito took Dedé out, Minerva, of course, came along as their chaperone, and they picked up Lio along the way.

  And after every outing, Dedé would slip into the bedroom Minerva shared with Mate when their little sister was home
from school. She’d lie on Mate’s bed and talk and talk, trying to bring herself down from the excitement of the evening. “Did you eat parrot today?” Minerva would say in a sleepy voice from her bed. That one had nerves of steel. Dedé would recount her plans for the future—how she would marry Jaimito; what kind of ceremony they would have; what type house they would buy; how many children they would have—until Minerva would burst out laughing. “You’re not stocking the shelves in the store! Don’t plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.”

  “Tell me about you and Lío, then.”

  “Ay, Dedé, I’m so sleepy. And there’s nothing to tell.”

  That perplexed Dedé. Minerva claimed she was not in love with Lío. They were comrades in a struggle, a new way for men and women to be together that did not necessarily have to do with romance. Hmm. Dedé shook her head. No matter how interesting-minded she wanted to be, as far as she was concerned, a man was a man and a woman was a woman and there was a special charge there you couldn’t call revolution. She put off her sister’s reticence to that independent streak of hers.

  Dedé’s own romance with Jaimito acquired a glamorous, exciting edge with Lío and Minerva always by their side. Most nights when there was no place “safe” to go—a new thrilling vocabulary of danger had entered Dedé’s speech—they’d drive around in Jaimito’s father’s Chevy or Papa’s Ford, Jaimito and Dedé and Minerva visible, Lío hidden in the back of the car. They’d go out to the lagoon, past a military post, and Dedé’s heart would beat fast. They would all talk a while, then Minerva and Lío would grow very quiet, and the only sounds from the back seat were those coming from the front as well. Intent whispers and little giggles.

  Maybe that’s why Jaimito went along with these dangerous sallies. Like most people, he avoided anything that might cause trouble. But he must have sensed that engaging in one illegality sort of loosened other holds on Dedé. The presence of Lío gave her the courage to go further with Jaimito than ever before.