In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

A national underground is forming. Everyone and everything has a code name. Manolo is Enriquillo, after the great Taino chieftain, and Minerva, of course, is Mariposa. If I were to say tennis shoes, you’d know we were talking about ammunition. The pineapples for the picnic are the grenades. The goat must die for us to eat at the picnic. (Get it? It’s like a trick language.)

  There are groups all over the island. It turns out Palomino (the man last night) is really an engineer working on projects throughout the country, so he’s the natural to do the traveling and deliveries between groups.

  I told Minerva and Manolo right out, I wanted to join. I could feel my breath coming short with the excitement of it all. But I masked it in front of Minerva. I was afraid she’d get all protective and say that I could be just as useful sewing bandages to put in the supply boxes to be buried in the mountains. I don’t want to be babied anymore. I want to be worthy of Palomino. Suddenly, all the boys I’ve known with soft hands and easy lives seem like the pretty dolls I’ve outgrown and passed on to Minou.

  Monday morning, October 14

  The capital

  I’ve lost all interest in my studies. I just go to classes in order to keep my cover as a second-year architecture student. My true identity now is Mariposa (# 2), waiting daily, hourly, for communications from up north.

  I’ve moved out of Doña Chelito’s with the excuse that I need more privacy to apply myself to my work. It’s really not a lie, but the work I’m doing isn’t what she imagines. My cell has assigned me, along with Sonia, also a university student, to this apartment above a little comer store. We’re a hub, which means that deliveries coming into the capital from up north are dropped off here. And guess who brings them? My Palomino. How surprised he was the first time he knocked, and I opened the door!

  The apartment is in a humble part of town where the poorer students live. I think some of them can tell what Sonia and I are up to, and they look out for us. Certainly some must think the worst, what with men stopping by at all hours. I always make them stay for as long as a cafecito to give the illusion that they are real visitors. I’m a natural for this, really. I’ve always liked men, receiving them, paying them attention, listening to what they have to say. Now I can use my talents for the revolution.

  But I have eyes for one man only, my Palomino.

  Tuesday evening, October 15

  What a way to spend my twenty-second birthday! (If only Palomino would come tonight with a delivery.)

  I have been a little mopey, I admit it. Sonia reminds me we have to make sacrifices for the revolution. Thank you, Sonia. I’m sure this is going to come up in my critica at the end of the month. (God, it seems like I’ll always have a Minerva by my side being a better person than I am.)

  Anyhow, I’ve got to memorize this diagram before we burn the master.

  Thursday night, November 7

  Today we had a surprise visitor. We were in the middle of making diagrams to go with the Nipples kits when there was a knock at our door. Believe me, Sonia and I both jumped like one of the paper bombs had gone off. We’ve got an escape route rigged up a back window, but Sonia kept her wits about her and asked who it was. It was Doña Hita, our landlady dropping in from downstairs for a little visit.

  We were so relieved, we didn’t think to clear off the table with the diagrams. I’m still worried she might have spotted our work, but Sonia says that woman has a different kind of contraband in mind. She hinted that if Sonia and I ever get into trouble, she knows someone who can help us. I blushed so dark Dona Hita must have been baffled that this you-know-who was embarrassed at the mention of you-know-what!

  Thursday afternoon, November 14

  Palomino has been showing up frequently and not always with a delivery to make. We talk and talk. Sonia always makes an excuse and goes out to run an errand. She’s really a much nicer person than I’ve made out. Today she left a little bowl of arroz con leche—Ahem!—for us to eat. It’s a fact, you’ll marry the one you share it with.

  The funniest thing. Doña Hita bumped into Palomino on the stairs and called him Don Juan! She assumes he’s our pimp because he’s the one who comes around all the time. I laughed when he told me. But truly, my face was burning at the thought. We hadn’t yet spoken of our feelings for each other.

  Suddenly, he got all serious, and those beautiful hazel eyes came closer & closer. He kissed me, polite & introductory at first—

  Oh God—I am so deeply in love!

  Saturday night, November 16

  Palomino came again today. We finally exchanged real names, though I think he already knew mine. Leandro Guzmán Rodriguez, what a pretty ring it has to it. We had a long talk about our lives. We laid them side by side and looked at them.

  It turns out his family is from San Francisco not far from where I lived with Dedé while I was finishing up secondary school. Four years ago he came to the capital to finish a doctorate. That’s just when I had come to start my studies! We must have danced back to back at the merengue festival in ‘54. He was there, I was there.

  We sat back, marveling. And then our hands reached out, palm to palm, joining our lifelines.

  Sunday night, December 1

  Palomino stayed last night—on a cot in the munitions room, of course! I didn’t sleep a wink just knowing we were under the same roof.

  Guess whose name was in my right shoe all day?

  He won’t come again for a couple of weeks—training up in the mountains, something like that—he can’t really say. Then his next delivery will be the last. By the end of the month this location has to be vacated. There have been too many raids in this area, and Manolo is worried.

  The munitions room, by the way, is what we’ve started calling the back room where we keep all deliveries and where, by the way, I keep you, wedged between a beam and the casing of the door. I better not forget you there when we move out. I can just see Doña Hita finding you, opening your covers, thinking she’ll discover a whole list of clients, and instead—Lord forbid!—snapping her eyes on the Nipples bomb. Maybe she’ll think it’s some sort of abortion contraption!

  For the hundredth time in the last few months I’ve wondered whether I shouldn’t burn you?

  Sunday afternoon, December 15

  This weekend has been harder than the last two months put together. I’m too nervous even to write. Palomino has not appeared as I expected. And there is no one to talk to as Sonia has already left for .La Romana. I’ll be going home in a few days, and all deliveries and pickups have to be made before I leave.

  I suppose I’m getting cold feet. Everything has gone without a scrape for months, and I’m sure something will happen now. I keep thinking Dona Hita reported the grenade diagrams we left out in the open that time she surprised us. Then I worry that Sonia’s been nabbed leaving town, and I’ll be ambushed when my last delivery comes.

  I’m a bundle of nerves. I never was any good at being brave all by myself.

  Monday morning, December 16

  I wasn’t expecting Palomino last night, and so when I heard a car pulling up in front of the building, I thought, THIS IS IT! I was ready to escape out the back window, diary in hand, but thank God, I ran to the front one to check first. It was him! I took the stairs two at a time and rushed into the street and hugged and kissed him like the kind of woman the neighbors think I am.

  We piled up the boxes he’d brought in the back room, and then we stood a moment, a strange sadness in our eyes. This work of destruction jarred with what was in our hearts. That’s when he told me that he didn’t like the idea of my being alone in the apartment. He was spending every moment too worried about me to pay careful enough attention to the revolution.

  My heart stirred to hear him say so. I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle. I would never be able to give up Leandro to some higher ideal the way I feel Minerva and Manolo would each other if they had to make the supreme sacrifice. And so last night, it touch
ed me, Oh so deeply, to hear him say it was the same for him, too.

  1958

  The Day of Lovers, February 14

  Cloudy morning, here’s hopingfor rain.

  Blessings on my marriage bed, as Mama always says.

  Doña Mercedes Reyes Viuda Mirabal

  announces the wedding of her daughter

  Maria Teresa Mirabal Reyes

  to

  Leandro Guzmán Rodriguez

  son of

  Don Leandro Guzmán and Doña Ana Rodriguez de Guzmán

  on Saturday, February fourteenth

  this nineteen hundred and fifty-eighth year of Our Lord

  Twenty-eighth year of the Era of Trujillo

  at four o‘clock in the afternoon

  San Juan Evangelista Church

  Salcedo

  Mariposa and Palomino, for now!

  Maria Teresa and Leandro, forever!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Patria

  1959

  Build your house upon a rock, He said, do my will. And though the rain fall and the floods come and the winds blow, the good wife’s house will stand.

  I did as He said. At sixteen I married Pedrito González and we settled down for the rest of our lives. Or so it seemed for eighteen years.

  My boy grew into a man, my girl long and slender like the blossoming mimosa at the end of the drive. Pedrito took on a certain gravity became an important man around here. And I, Patria Mercedes? Like every woman of her house, I disappeared into what I loved, coming up now and then for air. I mean, an overnight trip by myself to a girlfriend‘s, a special set to my hair, and maybe a yellow dress.

  I had built my house on solid rock, all right.

  Or I should say, Pedrito’s great-grandfather had built it over a hundred years back, and then each first son had lived in it and passed it on. But you have to understand, Patria Mercedes was in those timbers, in the nimble workings of the transoms, she was in those wide boards on the floor and in that creaky door opening on its old hinges.

  My sisters were so different! They built their homes on sand and called the slip and slide adventure.

  Minerva lived in a little nothing house—or so Mate had described it to me—in that godforsaken town of Monte Cristi. It’s a wonder her babies didn’t both die of infections.

  Mate and Leandro had already had two different addresses in a year of marriage. Renters, they called themselves, the city word for the squatters we pity here in the country.

  Dede and Jaimito had lost everything so many times, it was hard to keep up with their frequent moves. Now they were in our old house in Ojo de Agua, and Mama had built her up-to-date cottage on the main road from Santiago, complete with aluminum jalousies and an indoor toilet she called “the sanitary.”

  And me, Patria Mercedes, like I said, I had settled down for life in my rocksure house. And eighteen years passed by.

  My eighteenth year of marriage the ground of my well-being began to give a little. Just a baby’s breath tremor, a hairline crack you could hardly see unless you were looking for trouble.

  New Year’s Eve we gathered in Mamá’s new house in Conuco, the sisters and all the husbands, a first since Maria Teresa’s wedding a year ago this February. We stayed late, celebrating being together more than the new year, I think. There wasn’t much talk of politics so as not to worry Mamá. Also Jaimito had grown adamant—he didn’t want Dedé involved in whatever trouble Minerva and the others were cooking up.

  Still, all of us were praying for a change this new year. Things had gotten so bad, even people like me who didn’t want anything to do with politics were thinking about it all the time. See, now I had my grown son to nail me to the hard facts. I assigned him to God’s care and asked San José and the Virgencita to mind him as well, but still I worried all the time.

  It was after one in the morning when Pedrito and Noris and I started back to our house. Nelson had stayed at Mamá‘s, saying he was going to bring in the new year talking to his uncles. As we rode home, I saw the lamp at the window of the young widow’s house, and I knew he’d be bringing it in with more than talk. Rumor had it my “boy” was sowing wild oats along with his father’s cacao crop. I had asked Pedrito to talk to our son, but you know how the men are. He was proud of Nelson for proving himself a macho before he was even a grown man.

  We hadn’t been asleep but a couple of hours when that bedroom was blazing with light. My first thought was of angels descending, their burning brands flashing, their fierce wings stirring up things. But as I came fully awake, I saw it was a car aiming its lights at our bedroom window. iAy, Dios mío! I shook Pedrito awake and flew out of that bed terrified that something had happened to my boy. I know what Pedrito says, that I’m overly protective. But ever since I lost my baby thirteen years ago, my deepest fear is that I will have to put another one in the ground. This time I don’t think I could go on.

  It was Minerva and Manolo and Leandro and, yes, Nelson, all very drunk. They could hardly contain their excitement till they got inside. They had just tuned into Radio Rebelde to hear the New Year’s news, and they had been greeted by the triumphant announcement. Batista had fled! Fidel, his brother Raúl, and Ernesto they call Che had entered Havana and liberated the country. ¡Cuba libre! ¡Cuba libre!

  Minerva started singing our anthem and the others joined in. I kept hushing them, and they finally sobered up when I reminded them we were not libre yet. The roosters were already crowing as they left to spread the news to all their friends in the area. Nelson wanted to go along, but I put my foot down. Next year when he was eighteen, he could stay out till the cacao needed picking. But this year—he was too dead tired to argue. I walked him to his room and, as if he were still a child, undressed him and tucked him in.

  But Pedrito was still wanting to celebrate. And you know him, strong emotion takes him and he knows only one way to express it if I’m close by.

  He entered me, and it took some weeks before I realized. But I’d like to think, since my cycles stopped in January, that Raúl Ernesto began his long campaign into flesh the first day of this hopeful new year.

  When I told Pedrito I’d missed two months already, he said, “Maybe you’re going through the change early, you think?” Like I said, it’d been thirteen years and I hadn’t borne fruit. “Let me go in there and see what I can find,” he said, leading me by the hand into our bedroom. Our Nelson grinned. He understood now about siestas.

  I went on like this another month, and I missed again.

  “Pedrito,” I said, “I’m pregnant, I’m sure of it.”

  “How can that be, Mami?” He teased. “We’re ready for our grandchildren.” He indicated our grown son and daughter, playing dominoes, listening in on our secrets.

  Noris leapt out of her chair. “Ay, Mami, is it true, really?” Fourteen going on fifteen, she had finally outgrown her dolls and was two, three, who knows, ten years away from her own babies. (The way young women wait these days, look at Minerva!) But Noris was like me, she wanted to give herself to things, and at her tender age, she could only imagine giving herself to children.

  “Why don’t you have one of your own?” Nelson teased, poking his sister where she’d already told him a thousand times it hurt to be poked. “Maybe Marcelino wants to be a daddy?”

  “Stop that!” Noris whined.

  “Stop that,” Nelson mimicked her. Sometimes, I wondered how my son could be with a woman and then come home and nag his sister so miserably.

  Pedrito scowled. “That Marcelino gets near you and he won’t know what hit him.”

  “Help me think of a name,” I suggested, using the baby to distract them from a silly argument.

  I looked down at my belly as if Our Lord might write out the name on my cotton housedress. And suddenly it was as if His tongue spoke in my mouth. On my own, I would never have thought of naming my son after revolutionaries. “Ernesto,” I said, “I’m going to name him Raúl Emesto.”

  “Ernesto?” Noris said,
making a face.

  But Nelson’s face lit up in a way that made me nervous. “We’ll call him Che for short.”

  “Che!” Noris said, holding her nose. “What kind of a name is that?”

  Like I said, it must have been the Lord’s tongue in my mouth because back then, I was running scared. Not for myself but for those I loved. My sisters—Minerva, Mate—I was sick sometimes with fear for them, but they lived at a distance now, so I hid the sun with a finger and chose not to see the light all around me. Pedrito didn’t worry me. I knew he would always have one hand in the soil and the other somewhere on me. He wouldn’t wander far into trouble if I wasn’t along. But my son, my first born!

  I had tried to shelter him, Lord knows. To no avail. He was always tagging along behind his Tío Manolo and his new Tio Leandro, men of the world who had gone to the university and who impressed him more than his country father. Any chance he got, he was off to the capital “to see Tía Mate and the baby Jacqueline,” or to Monte Cristi “to visit Tia Minerva and Minou and the new baby Manolito.” Yes, a whole new crop of Mirabals was coming up. That was another possible explanation for my pregnancy—suggestion. After all, whenever we were together for a while under the same roof, our cycles became as synchronized as our watches.

  I knew my boy. He wanted to be a man outside the bedroom where he had already proven himself. That widow woman could have started a school in there, the way I understood it. But I didn’t resent her, no. She delivered my son gently into manhood from his boyhood, something a mother cannot possibly do. , And so I thought of a way for Nelson to be in the capital, under supervision so he wouldn’t be running wild with women or his rebel uncles. I talked to Padre de Jesus López, our new priest, who promised to talk to Padre Fabré about letting Nelson enroll in Santo Tomás de Aquino in the capital. It was a seminary, but there was no obligation to the priesthood.