In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  The shelling happened in a flash, but it seemed the chaos went on for hours. I heard moans, but when I lowered my chair, I could make out nothing in the smoke-filled room. My eyes stung, and I realized that in my fear I had wet my pants. Lord, I prayed, Lord God, let this cup pass. When the air finally cleared, I saw a mess of glass and rubble on the floor, bodies huddled everywhere. A wall had tumbled down and the tile floor was all torn up. Beyond, through the jagged hole where the window had been, the closest mountainside was a raging inferno.

  Finally, there was an eerie silence, interrupted only by the sound of far-off gunfire and the nearby trickle of plaster from the ceiling. Padre de Jesus gathered us in the most sheltered comer, where we assessed our damages. The injuries turned out to look worse than they were, just minor cuts from flying glass, thank the Lord. We ripped up our slips and bandaged the worst. Then for spiritual comfort, Brother Daniel led us through a rosary. When we heard gunfire coming close again, we kept right on praying.

  There were shouts, and four, then five, men in camouflage were running across the grounds towards us. Behind them, the same campesinos we’d seen on our walk and a dozen or more guardias were advancing, armed with machetes and machine guns. The hunted men crouched and careened this way and that as they headed towards the cover of the motherhouse.

  They made it to the outdoor deck. I could see them clearly, their faces bloodied and frantic. One of them was badly wounded and hobbling, another had a kerchief tied around his forehead. A third was shouting to two others to stay down, and one of them obeyed and threw himself on the deck.

  But the other must not have heard him for he kept on running towards us. I looked in his face. He was a boy no older than Noris. Maybe that’s why I cried out, “Get down, son! Get down!” His eyes found mine just as the shot hit him square in the back. I saw the wonder on his young face as the life drained out of him, and I thought, Oh my God, he’s one of mine!

  Coming down that mountain, I was a changed woman. I may have worn the same sweet face, but now I was carrying not just my child but that dead boy as well.

  My stillborn of thirteen years ago. My murdered son of a few hours ago.

  I cried all the way down that mountain. I looked out the spider-webbed window of that bullet-riddled car at brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, one and all, my human family. Then I tried looking up at our Father, but I couldn’t see His Face for the dark smoke hiding the tops of those mountains.

  I made myself pray so I wouldn’t cry. But my prayers sounded more like I was trying to pick a fight.

  I’m not going to sit back and watch my babies die, Lord, even if that’s what You in Your great wisdom decide.

  They met me on the road coming into town, Minerva, Maria Teresa, Mama, Dedé, Pedrito, Nelson. Noris was weeping in terror. It was after that I noticed a change in her, as if her soul had at last matured and begun its cycles. When I dismounted from that car, she came running towards me, her arms out like a person seeing someone brought back from the dead. All of them were sure I had been singed to nothing from what they’d heard on the radio about the bombing.

  No, Patria Mercedes had come back to tell them all, tell them all.

  But I couldn’t speak. I was in shock, you could say, I was mourning that dead boy.

  It was all over the papers the next day. Forty-nine men and boys martyred in those mountains. We had seen the only four saved, and for what? Tortures I don’t want to think of.

  Six days later, we knew when the second wave of the invasion force hit on the beaches north of here. We saw the planes flying low, looking like hornets. And afterwards we read in the papers how one boat with ninety-three on board had been bombed before it could land; the other with sixty-seven landed, but the army with the help of local campesinos hunted those poor martyrs down.

  I didn’t keep count how many had died. I kept my hand on my stomach, concentrating on what was alive.

  Less than a month before I was due, I attended the August gathering of our Christian Cultural Group in Salcedo. It was the first meeting since our disastrous retreat. Padre de Jesus and Brother Daniel had been down in the capital throughout July conferring with other clergy. To the Salcedo gathering, they invited only a few of us old members whom—I saw later—they had picked out as ready for the Church Militant, tired of the Mother Church in whose skirts they once hid.

  They picked right, all right. I was ready, big as I looked, heavy as I was.

  The minute I walked into that room, I knew something had changed in the way the Lord Jesus would be among us. No longer was there the liturgical chatter of how San Zenón had made the day sunny for a granddaughter’s wedding or how Santa Lucia had cured the cow’s pinkeye. That room was silent with the fury of avenging angels sharpening their radiance before they strike.

  The priests had decided they could not wait forever for the pope and the archbishop to come around. The time was now, for the Lord had said, I come with the sword as well as the plow to set at liberty them that are bruised.

  I couldn’t believe this was the same Padre de Jesus talking who several months back hadn’t known his faith from his fear! But then again, here in that little room was the same Patria Mercedes, who wouldn’t have hurt a butterfly, shouting, “Amen to the revolution.”

  And so we were born in the spirit of the vengeful Lord, no longer His lambs. Our new name was Acción Clero-Cultural. Please note, action as the first word! And what was our mission in ACC?

  Only to organize a powerful national underground.

  We would spread the word of God among our brainwashed campesinos who had hunted down their own liberators. After all, Fidel would never have won over in Cuba if the campesinos there hadn’t fed him, hidden him, lied for him, joined him.

  The word was, we were all brothers and sisters in Christ. You could not chase after a boy with your machete and enter the kingdom of heaven. You could not pull that trigger and think there was even a needle hole for you to pass through into eternity.

  I could go on.

  Padre de Jesus walked me out when the meeting was over. He looked a little apologetic when he glanced at my belly, but he went on and asked me. Did I know of any one who would like to join our organization ? No doubt he had heard about the meetings Manolo and Minerva were conducting on our property.

  I nodded. I knew of at least six, I said, counting Pedrito and Nelson among my two sisters and their husbands. And in a month’s time, seven. Yes, once my son was born, I’d be out there recruiting every campesino in Ojo de Agua, Conuco, Salcedo to the army of Our Lord.

  “Patria Mercedes, how you’ve changed!”

  I shook my head back at him, and I didn’t have to say it. He was laughing, putting on his glasses after wiping them on his cassock, his vision—like mine—clean at last.

  Next time they gathered under the shade of the thatch, I went out there, carrying my week-old prize.

  “Hola, Patria,” the men called. “That’s quite a macho you got there!” When they picked him out of my arms to look him over, my boy howled. He was a crier from the start, that one. “What you call that bawling little he-man?”

  “Raúl Emesto,” Minerva said meaningfully, bragging on her nephew.

  I nodded and smiled at their compliments. Nelson looked away when I looked at him. He was probably thinking I had come out there to get him. “Come on inside now,” I said. “I have something to talk to you about.”

  He thought I meant him, but I was looking around at the whole group. “Come on.”

  Minerva waved away my invitation. “Don’t you worry about us.”

  I said, “Come on in, now. I mean it this time.”

  They looked from one to the other, and something in my voice let them know I was with them. They picked up their drinks, and I could have been leading the children out of bondage, the way they all followed me obediently into my house.

  Now it was Pedrito who began to worry. And the worry came where he was most vulnerable.

  The same month we
met in Padre de Jesús’ rectory, a new law was passed. If you were caught harboring any enemies of the regime even if you yourself were not involved in their schemes, you would be jailed, and everything you owned would become the property of the government.

  His land! Worked by his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. His house like an ark with beams where he could see his great-grandfather’s mark.

  We had not fought like this in our eighteen years of marriage. In that bedroom at night, that man, who had never raised his voice to me, unleashed the fury of three ancestors at me. “You crazy, mujer, to invite them into the house! You want your sons to lose their patrimony, is that what you want?”

  As if he were answering his father, Raúl Ernesto began to cry. I gave him the breast and long after he was done, I cradled him there to help coax out the tenderness in his father. To remind him there was some for him as well.

  But he didn’t want me. It was the first time Pedrito González had turned me away. That hurt deep in the heart’s tender parts. I was going through that empty period after the baby is born when you ache to take it back into yourself. And the only solace then is the father coming back in, making himself at home.

  “If you had seen what I saw on that mountain,” I pleaded with him, weeping all over again for that dead boy. “Ay, Pedrito, how can we be true Christians and turn our back on our brothers and sisters—”

  “Your first responsibility is to your children, your husband, and your home!” His face was so clouded with anger, I couldn’t see the man I loved. “I’ve already let them use this place for months. Let them meet over on your own Mirabal farm from now on!”

  It’s true, our family farm would have been a logical alternative, but Dedé and Jaimito were living on it now. I had already approached Dedé, and she had come back without Jaimito’s permission.

  “But you believe in what they’re doing, Pedrito,” I reminded him. And then I don’t know what got into me. I wanted to hurt the man in front of me. I wanted to break this smaller version of who he was and release the big-hearted man I’d married. And so I told him. His first born did not want this patrimony. Nelson had already put in his application for the university in the fall. And what was more, I knew for a fact he was already in the underground along with his uncles. “It’s him you’ll be throwing to the SIM!”

  Pedrito wiped his face with his big hands and bowed his head, resigned. “God help him, God help him,” he kept mumbling till my heart felt wrong hurting him as I’d done.

  But later in the dark, he sought me out with his old hunger. He didn’t have to say it, that he was with us now. 1 knew it in the reckless way he took me with him down into the place where his great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had met their women before him.

  So it was that our house became the motherhouse of the movement.

  It was here with the doors locked and the front windows shuttered that the ACC merged with the group Manolo and Minerva had started over a year ago. There were about forty of us. A central committee was elected. At first, they tried to enlist Minerva, but she deferred to Manolo, who became our president.

  It was in this very parlor where Noris had begun receiving callers that the group gave themselves a name. How they fought over that one like schoolgirls arguing over who will hold whose hand! Some wanted a fancy name that would touch all the high spots, Revolutionary Party of Dominican Integrity. Then Minerva moved swiftly through the clutter to the heart of the matter. She suggested we name ourselves after the men who had died in the mountains.

  For the second time in her quiet life, Patria Mercedes (alias Mariposa #3) shouted out, “Amen to the revolution!”

  So it was between these walls hung with portraits, including El Jefe‘s, that the Fourteenth of June Movement was founded. Our mission was to effect an internal revolution rather than wait for an outside rescue.

  It was on this very Formica table where you could still see the egg stains from my family’s breakfast that the bombs were made. Nipples, they were called. It was the shock of my life to see Maria Teresa, so handy with her needlepoint, using tweezers and little scissors to twist the fine wires together.

  It was on this very bamboo couch where my Nelson had, as a tiny boy, played with the wooden gun his grandfather had made him that he sat now with Padre de Jesús, counting the ammunition for the .32 automatics we would receive in a few weeks at a prearranged spot. The one named Ilander we called Eagle had arranged the air drop with the exiles.

  It was on that very rocker where I had nursed every one of my babies that I saw my sister Minerva looking through the viewfinder of an M-1 carbine—a month ago I would not have known it from a shotgun. When I followed her aim out the window, I cried out, startling her, “No, no, not the mimosa!”

  I had sent Noris away to her grandmother’s in Conuco. I told her we were making repairs to her room. And in a way, we were, for it was in her bedroom that we assembled the boxes. It was among her crocheted pink poodles and little perfume bottles and snapshots of her quinceañera party that we stashed our arsenal of assorted pistols and revolvers, three .38 caliber Smith and Wesson pistols, six .30 caliber M-1 carbines, four M-3 machine guns, and a .45 Thompson stolen from a guardia. I know, Mate and I drew up the list ourselves in the pretty script we’d been taught by the nuns for writing out Bible passages.

  It was in those old and bountiful fields that Pedrito and his son and a few of the other men buried the boxes once we got them loaded and sealed. In among the cacao roots Pedrito lowered the terrible cargo. But he seemed at peace now with the risks he was taking. This was a kind of farming, too, he told me later, one that he could share with his Nelson. From those seeds of destruction, we would soon—very soon—harvest our freedom.

  It was on that very coffee table on which Noris had once knocked a tooth out tussling with her brother that the plans for the attack were drawn. On January 21st, the day of the Virgin of Highest Grace, the different groups would gather here to arm themselves and receive their last-minute instructions.

  It was down this very hall and in and out of my children’s bedrooms and past the parlor and through the back galería to the yard that I walked those last days of 1959, worrying if I had done the right thing exposing my family to the SIM. I kept seeing that motherhouse up in the mountains, its roof caving in, its walls crumbling like a foolish house built on sand. I could, by a trick of terror, turn that vision into my own house tumbling down.

  As I walked, I built it back up with prayer, hung the door on its creaky hinges, nailed the floorboards down, fitted the transoms. “God help us,” I kept saying. “God help us.” Raulito was almost always in my arms, crying something terrible, as I paced, trying to settle him, and myself, down.

  III

  1960

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dedé

  1994

  and

  1960

  When Dedé next notices, the garden’s stillness is deepening, blooming dark flowers, their scent stronger for the lack of color and light. The interview woman is a shadowy face slowly losing its features.

  “And the shades of night begin to fall, and the traveler hurries home, and the campesino bids his fields farewell,” Dedé recites.

  The woman gets up hurriedly from her chair as if she has just been shown the way out. “I didn’t realize it was this late.”

  “No, no, I wasn’t throwing you an indirecta.” Dedé laughs, motioning the woman to sit back down. “We have a few more minutes.” The interviewer perches at the edge of her chair as if she knows the true interview is over.

  “That poem always goes through my head this time of day,” Dedé explains. “Minerva used to recite it a lot those last few months when she and Mate and Patria were living over at Mamá’s. The husbands were in prison,” she adds, for the woman’s face registers surprise at this change of address. “All except Jaimito.”

  “How lucky,” her guest notes.

  “It wasn’t luck,” Dedé s
ays right out. “It was because he didn’t get directly involved.”

  “And you?”

  Dedé shakes her head. “Back in those days, we women followed our husbands.” Such a silly excuse. After all, look at Minerva. “Let’s put it this way,” Dedé adds. “I followed my husband. I didn’t get involved.”

  “I can understand that,” the interview woman says quickly as if protecting Dedé from her own doubts. “It’s still true in the States. I mean, most women I know, their husband gets a job in Texas, say well, Texas it’s going to be.”

  “I’ve never been to Tejas,» Dedé says absently. Then, as if to redeem herself, she adds, ”I didn’t get involved until later.“

  “When was that?” the woman asks.

  Dedé admits it out loud: “When it was already too late.”

  The woman puts away her pad and pen. She digs around in her purse for her keys, and then she remembers—she stuck them in the ashtray of the car so she could find them easily! She is always losing things. She says it like a boast. She gives several recent examples in her confused Spanish.

  Dedé worries this woman will never find her way back to the main road in the dark. Such a thin woman with fly-about hair in her face. What ever happened to hairspray? Her niece Minou’s hair is the same way. All this fussing about the something layer in outer space, and meanwhile, they walk around looking like something from outer space.

  “Why don’t I lead you out to the anacahuita turn,” she offers the interview woman.

  “You drive?”

  They are always so surprised. And not just the American women who think of this as an “underdeveloped” country where Dedé should still be riding around in a carriage with a mantilla over her hair, but her own nieces and nephews and even her sons tease her about her little Subaru. Their Mama Dedé, a modem woman, ¡Epa! But in so many other things I have not changed, Dedé thinks. Last year during her prize trip to Spain, the smart-looking Canadian man approached her, and though it’d been ten years already since the divorce, Dedé just couldn’t give herself that little fling.