In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

He learned about the trial of the murderers on that same radio. He walked from his remote mountain shack with his shoes in a paper sack so as not to wear them out. It must have taken him days. He got a lift or two, here and there, sometimes going the wrong way. He hadn’t traveled much off that mountain. I saw him out the window when he stopped and put on his shoes to show up proper at my door. He gave me the exact hour and made the thundering noise of the tumbling Jeep he graphed with his arcing hand. Then he turned around and headed back to his mountain.

  He came all that way just to tell me that.

  The men got thirty years or twenty years, on paper. I couldn’t keep straight why some of the murderers got less than the others. Likely the one on the road got the twenty years. Maybe another one was sorry in court. I don’t know But their sentences didn’t amount to much, anyway. All of them were set free during our spell of revolutions. When we had them regularly, as if to prove we could kill each other even without a dictator to tell us to.

  After the men were sentenced, they gave interviews that were on the news all the time. What did the murderers of the Mirabal sisters think of this and that? Or so I heard. We didn’t own a TV, and the one at Mamá’s we turned on only for the children’s cartoons. I‘didn’t want them to grow up with hate, their eyes fixed on the past. Never once have the names of the murderers crossed my lips. I wanted the children to have what their mothers would have wanted for them, the possibility of happiness.

  Once in a while, Jaimito brought me a newspaper so I could see all the great doings in the country. But I’d roll it up tight as I could get it and whack at the house flies. I missed some big things that way. The day Trujillo was assassinated by a group of seven men, some of them his old buddies. The day Manolo and Leandro were released, Pedrito having already been freed. The day the rest of the Trujillo family fled the country. The day elections were announced, our first free ones in thirty-one years.

  “Don’t you want to know all about it?” Jaimito would ask, grinning, trying to get me excited. Or more likely, hopeful. I’d smile, grateful for his caring. “Why? When I can hear it all from you, my dear?”

  Not that I was really listening as he went on and on, recounting what was in the papers. I pretended to, nodding and smiling from my chair. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. After all, I listened to everyone else.

  But the thing was, I just couldn’t take one more story.

  In her mother’s old room, I hear Minou, getting ready for bed. She keeps a steady patter through the open window, catching me up on her life since we last talked. The new line of play clothes she designed for her store in the capital; the course she is teaching at the university on poetry and politics; Jacqueline’s beautiful little baby and the remodeling of her penthouse; Manolito, busy with his agricultural projects—all of them smart young men and women making good money. They aren’t like us, I think. They knew almost from the start they had to take on the world.

  “Am I boring you, Mamá Dedé?”

  “Not at all!” I say, rocking in pleasing rhythm to the sound of her voice.

  The little news, that’s what I like, I tell them. Bring me the little news.

  Sometimes they came to tell me just how crazy I was. To say, “Ay, Dedé, you should have seen yourself that day!”

  The night before I hadn’t slept at all. Jaime David was sick and kept waking up, feverish, needing drinks of water. But it wasn’t him keeping me up. Every time he cried out I was already awake. I finally came out here and waited for dawn, rocking and rocking like I was bringing the day on. Worrying about my boy, I thought.

  And then, a soft shimmering spread across the sky. I listened to the chair rockers clacking on the tiles, the isolated cock crowing, and far off, the sound of hoof beats, getting closer, closer. I ran all the way around the galería to the front. Sure enough, here was Mamá’s yardboy galloping on the mule, his legs hanging almost to the ground. Funny, the thing that you remember as most shocking. Not a messenger showing up at that eerie time of early dawn, the dew still thick on the grass. No. What shocked me most was that anybody had gotten our impossibly stubborn mule to gallop.

  The boy didn’t even dismount. He just called out, “Doña Dedé, your mother, she wants you to come right away.”

  I didn’t even ask him why. Did I already guess? I rushed back into the house, into our bedroom, threw open the closet, yanked my black dress off its hanger, ripping the right sleeve, waking Jaimito with my piteous crying.

  When Jaimito and I pulled into the drive, there was Mamá and all the kids running out of the house. I didn’t think the girls, right off. I thought, there’s a fire, and I started counting to make sure everybody was out.

  The babies were all crying like they had gotten shots. And here comes Minou tearing away from the others towards the truck so Jaimito had to screech to a stop.

  “Lord preserve us, what is going on?” I ran to them with my arms open. But they hung back, stunned, probably at the horror on my face, for I had noticed something odd.

  “Where are they!?” I screamed.

  And then, Mamá says to me, she says, “Ay, Dedé, tell me it isn’t true, ay, tell me it isn’t true.”

  And before I could even think what she was talking about, I said, “It isn’t true, Mamá, it isn’t true.”

  There was a telegram that had been delivered first thing that morning. Once she’d had it read to her, Mama could never find it again. But she knew what it said.

  There has been a car accident.

  Please come to Jose Maria Cabral Hospital in Santiago.

  And my heart in my rib cage was a bird that suddenly began to sing. Hope! I imagined broken legs strung up, arms in casts, lots of bandages. I rearranged the house where I was going to put each one while they were convalescing. We’d clear the living room and roll them in there for meals.

  While Jaimito was drinking the cup of coffee Tono had made him—I hadn’t wanted to wait at home while the slow-witted Tinita got the fire going—Mamá and I were rushing around, packing a bag to take to the hospital. They would need nightgowns, toothbrushes, towels, but I put in crazy things in my terrified rush, Mate’s favorite earrings, the Vicks jar, a brassiere for each one.

  And then we hear a car coming down the drive. At our spying jalousie—as we called that front window—I recognize the man who delivers the telegrams. I say to Mamá, wait here, let me go see what he wants. I walk quickly up the drive to stop that man from coming any closer to the house, now that we had finally gotten the children calmed down.

  “We’ve been calling. We couldn’t get through. The phone, it’s off the hook or something.” He is delaying, I can see that. Finally he hands me the little envelope with the window, and then he gives me his back because a man can’t be seen crying.

  I tear it open, I pull out the yellow sheet, I read each word.

  I walk back so slowly to the house I don’t know how I ever get there.

  Mama comes to the door, and I say, Mamá, there is no need for the bag.

  At first the guards posted outside the morgue did not want to let me in. I was not the closest living relative, they said. I said to the guards, “I’m going in there, even if I have to be the latest dead relative. Kill me, too, if you want. I don’t care.”

  The guards stepped back. “Ay, Dedé,” the friends will say, “you should have seen yourself.”

  I cannot remember half the things I cried out when I saw them. Rufino and Minerva were on gumeys, Patria and Mate on mats on the floor. I was furious that they didn’t all have gumeys, as if it should matter to them. I remember Jaimito trying to hush me, one of the doctors coming in with a sedative and a glass of water. I remember asking the men to leave while I washed up my girls, and dressed them. A nurse helped me, crying, too. She brought me some little scissors to cut off Mate’s braid. I cannot imagine why in a place with so many sharp instruments for cutting bones and thick tissues, that woman brought me such teeny nail scissors. Maybe she was afraid what I would do with somethin
g sharper.

  Then some friends who had heard the news appeared with four boxes, plain simple pine without even a latch. The tops were just nailed down. Later, Don Gustavo at the funeral parlor wanted us to switch them into something fancy. For the girls, anyhow. Pine was appropriate enough for a chauffeur.

  I remembered Papá’s prediction, Dedé will bury us all in silk and pearls.

  But I said no. They all died the same, let them all be buried the same.

  We stacked the four boxes in the back of the pickup.

  We drove them home through the towns slowly. I didn’t want to come inside the cab with Jaimito. I stayed out back with my sisters, and Rufino, standing proud beside them, holding on to the coffins whenever we hit a bump.

  People came out of their houses. They had already heard the story we were to pretend to believe. The Jeep had gone off the cliff on a bad turn. But their faces knew the truth. Many of the men took off their hats, the women made the sign of the cross. They stood at the very edge of the road, and when the truck went by, they threw flowers into the bed. By the time we reached Conuco, you couldn’t see the boxes for the wilting blossoms blanketing them.

  When we got to the SIM post at the first little town, I cried out, “Assassins! Assassins!”

  Jaimito gunned the motor to drown out my cries. When I did it again at the next town, he pulled over and came to the back of the pickup. He made me sit down on one of the boxes. “Dedé, mujer, what is it you want—to get yourself killed, too?”

  I nodded. I said, “I want to be with them.”

  He said—I remember it so clearly—he said, “This is your martyrdom, Dede, to be alive without them.”

  “What are you thinking, Mama Dedé?” Minou has come to the window. With her arms folded on the sill, she looks like a picture.

  I smile at her and say, “Look at that moon.” It is not a remarkable moon, waning, hazy in the cloudy night. But as far as I’m concerned, a moon is a moon, and they all bear remarking. Like babies, even homely ones, each a blessing, each one born with—as Mama used to say—its loaf of bread under its arm.

  “Tell me about Camila,” I ask her. “Has she finished growing that new tooth?”

  With first-time-mother exactitude Minou tells me everything, down to how her little girl feeds, sleeps, plays, poops.

  Later the husbands told me their stories of that last afternoon. How they tried to convince the girls not to go. How Minerva refused to stay over with friends until the next morning. “It was the one argument she should have lost,” Manolo said. He would stand by the porch rail there for a long time, in those dark glasses he was always wearing afterwards. And I would leave him to his grief.

  This was after he got out. After he was famous and riding around with bodyguards in that white Thunderbird some admirer had given him. Most likely a woman. Our Fidel, our Fidel, everyone said. He refused to run for president for those first elections. He was no politician, he said. But everywhere he went, Manolo drew adoring crowds.

  He and Leandro were transferred back to the capital the Monday following the murder. No explanation. At La Victoria, they rejoined Pedrito, the three of them alone in one cell. They were extremely nervous, waiting for Thursday visiting hours to find out what was going on. “You had no idea?” I asked Manolo once. He turned around right there, with that oleander framing him. Minerva had planted it years back when she was cooped up here, wanting to get out and live the bigger version of her life. He took off those glasses, and it seemed to me that for the first time I saw the depth of his grief.

  “I probably knew, but in prison, you can’t let yourself know what you know.” His hands clenched the porch rail there. I could see he was wearing his class ring again, the one that had been on Minerva’s hand.

  Manolo tells how that Thursday they were taken out of their cell and marched down the hall. For a brief moment they were hopeful that the girls were all right after all. But instead of the visitors’ room, they were led downstairs to the officers’ lounge. Johnny Abbes and Cándido Torres and other top SIM cronies were waiting, already quite drunk. This was going to be a special treat, by invitation only, a torture session of an unusual nature, giving the men the news.

  I didn’t want to listen anymore. But I made myself listen—it was as if Manolo had to say it and I had to hear it—so that it could be human, so that we could begin to forgive it.

  There are pictures of me at that time where even I can’t pick myself out. Thin like my little finger. A twin of my skinny Noris. My hair cropped short like Minerva’s was that last year, held back by bobby pins. Some baby or other in my arms, another one tugging at my dress. And you never see me looking at the camera. Always I am looking away.

  But slowly—how does it happen?—I came back from the dead. In a photo I have of the day our new president came to visit the monument, I’m standing in front of the house, all made up, my hair in a bouffant style. Jacqueline is in my arms, already four years old. Both of us are waving little flags.

  Afterwards, the president dropped in for a visit. He sat right there in Papa’s old rocker, drinking a frozen limonada, telling me his story. He was going to do all sorts of things, he told me. He was going to get rid of the old generals with their hands still dirty with Mirabal blood. All those properties they had stolen he was going to distribute among the poor. He was going to make us a nation proud of ourselves, not run by the Yanqui imperialists.

  Every time he made one of these promises, he’d look at me as if he needed me to approve what he was doing. Or really, not me, but my sisters whose pictures hung on the wall behind me. Those photos had become icons, emblazoned on posters—already collectors’ pieces. Bring back the butterflies!

  At the end, as he was leaving, the president recited a poem he’d composed on the ride up from the capital. It was something patriotic about how when you die for your country, you do not die in vain. He was a poet president, and from time to time Manolo would say, “Ay, if Minerva had lived to see this.” And I started to think, maybe it was for something that the girls had died.

  Then it was like a manageable grief inside me. Something I could bear because I could make sense of it. Like when the doctor explained how if one breast came off, the rest of me had a better chance. Immediately, I began to live without it, even before it was gone.

  I set aside my grief and began hoping and planning.

  When it all came down a second time, I shut the door. I did not receive any more visitors. Anyone had a story, go sell it to Vanidades, go on the Talk to Felix Show. Tell them how you felt about the coup, the president thrown out before the year was over, the rebels up in the mountains, the civil war, the landing of the marines.

  I overheard one of the talk shows on the radio Tinita kept turned on in the outdoor kitchen all the time. Somebody analyzing the situation. He said something that made me stop and listen.

  “Dictatorships,” he was saying, “are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece of himself in every one of us.”

  Ah, I thought, touching the place above my heart where I did not yet know the cells were multiplying like crazy. So this is what is happening to us.

  Manolo’s voice sounds blurry on the memorial tape the radio station sent me, In memory of our great hero. When you die for your country, you do not die in vain.

  It is his last broadcast from a hidden spot in the mountains. “Fellow Dominicans!” he declaims in a grainy voice. “We must not let another dictatorship rule us!” Then something else lost in static. Finally, “Rise up, take to the streets! Join my comrades and me in the mountains! When you die for your country, you do not die in vain!”

  But no one joined them. After forty days of bombing, they accepted the broadcast amnesty. They came down from the mountains with their hands up, and the generals gunned them down, every one.

  I was the one who received the seashell Manolo sent Minou on his last day. In its smooth bowl he had etched with a penknife, For my little Minou, at the end of a great adven
ture, then the date he was murdered, December 21, 1963. I was furious at his last message. What did he mean, a great adventure. A disgrace was more like it.

  I didn’t give it to her. In fact, for a while, I kept his death a secret from her. When she’d ask, I’d tell her, “Sí, si, Papi is up in the mountains fighting for a better world.” And then, you see, after about a year or so of that story it was an easy next step for him to be up in heaven with her Mami and her Tía Patria and her Tía Mate living in a better world.

  She looked at me when I told her this—she must have been eight by then—and her little face went very serious. “Mamá Dedé,” she asked, ”is Papi dead?“

  I gave her the shell so she could read his goodbye for herself.

  “That was a funny woman,” Minou is saying. “At first I thought you were friends or something. Where did you pick her up, Mama Dedé?”

  “Me? Pick her up! You seem to forget, mi amor, that the museum is just five minutes away and everyone shows up there wanting to hear the story, firsthand.” I am rocking harder as I explain, getting angrier. Everyone feels they can impose. The Belgian movie maker who had me pose with the girls’ photos in my hands; the Chilean woman writing a book about women and politics; the schoolchildren who want me to hold up the braid and tell them why I cut it off in the first place.

  “But, Mama Dedé,” Minou says. She is sitting on the sill now, peering out from her lighted room into the galería whose lights I’ve turned off against the mosquitoes. “Why don’t you just refuse. We’ll put the story on cassette, a hundred and fifty pesos, with a signed glossy photograph thrown in for free.”

  “Why, Minou, the idea!” To make our tragedy—because it is our tragedy, really, the whole country‘s—to make it into a money-making enterprise. But I see she is laughing, enjoying the deliciously sacrilegious thought. I laugh, too. “The day I get tired of doing it, I suppose I’ll stop.”