In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

  My rocking eases, calmed. Of course, I think, I can always stop.

  “When will that be, Mamá Dedé, when will you have given enough?”

  When did it turn, I wonder, from my being the one who listened to the stories people brought to being the one whom people came to for the story of the Mirabal sisters?

  When, in other words, did I become the oracle?

  My girlfriend Olga and I will sometimes get together for supper at a restaurant. We can do this for ourselves, we tell each other, like we don’t half believe it. Two divorced mujeronas trying to catch up with what our children call the modern times. With her I can talk over these things. I’ve asked her, what does she think.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Olga says. We are at El Almirante, where—we have decided—the waiters must be retired functionaries from the old Trujillo days. They are so self-important and ceremonious. But they do let two women dine alone in peace.

  “I think you deserve your very own life,” she is saying, waving my protest away. “Let me finish. You’re still living in the past, Dedé. You’re in the same old house, surrounded by the same old things, in the same little village, with all the people who have known you since you were this big.”

  She goes over all these things that supposedly keep me from living my own life. And I am thinking, Why, I wouldn’t give them up for the world. I’d rather be dead.

  “It’s still 1960 for you,” she concludes. “But this is 1994, Dedé, 1994!”

  “You’re wrong,” I tell her. “I’m not stuck in the past, I’ve just brought it with me into the present. And the problem is not enough of us have done that. What is that thing the gringos say, if you don’t study your history, you are going to repeat it?”

  Olga waves the theory away. “The gringos say too many things.”

  “And many of them true,” I tell her. “Many of them.” Minou has accused me of being pro-Yanqui. And I tell her, “I am pro whoever is right at any moment in time.”

  Olga sighs. I already know. Politics do not interest her.

  I change the subject back to what the subject was. “Besides, that’s not what I asked you. We were talking about when I became the oracle instead of the listener.”

  “Hmm,” she says. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

  So I tell her what I think.

  “After the fighting was over and we were a broken people”—she shakes her head sadly at this portrait of our recent times—“that’s when I opened my doors, and instead of listening, I started talking. We had lost hope, and we needed a story to understand what had happened to us.”

  Olga sits back, her face attentive, as if she were listening to someone preach something she believes. “That’s really good, Dedé,” she says when I finish. ”You should save that for November when you have to give that speech.“

  I hear Minou dialing, putting in a call to Doroteo, their goodnight tête-à-tête, catching up on all the little news of their separated hours. If I go in now, she’ll feel she has to cut it short and talk to her Mamá Dedé instead.

  And so I come stand by the porch rail, and the minute I do, of course, I can’t help thinking of Manolo and of Minerva before him. We had this game called Dark Passages when we were children. We would dare each other to walk down into the dark garden at night. I only got past this rail once or twice. But Minerva, she’d take off, so that we’d have to call and call, pleading for her to come back. I remember, though, how she would stand right here for a moment, squaring her shoulders, steeling herself. I could see it wasn’t so easy for her either.

  And when she was older, every time she got upset, she would stand at this same rail. She’d look out into the garden as if that dark tangle of vegetation were the new life or question before her.

  Absently, my hand travels to my foam breast and presses gently, worrying an absence there.

  “Mi amor,” I hear Minou say in the background, and I feel goose bumps all up and down my arms. She sounds so much like her mother. “How’s our darling? Did you take her to Helados Bon?”

  I walk off the porch onto the grass, so as not to overhear her conversation, or so I tell myself. For a moment I want to disappear. My legs brushing fragrances off the vague bushes, the dark growing deeper as I walk away from the lights of the house.

  The losses. I can count them up like the list the coroner gave us, taped to the box of things that had been found on their persons or retrieved from the wreck. The silliest things, but they gave me some comfort. I would say them like a catechism, like the girls used to tease and recite “the commandments” of their house arrest.

  One pink powder puff.

  One pair of red high-heeled shoes.

  The two-inch heel from a cream-colored shoe.

  Jaimito went away for a time to New York. Our harvests had failed again, and it looked as if we were going to lose our lands if we didn’t get some cash quick. So he got work in a factoria, and every month, he sent home money. I am ashamed after what came to pass to say so. But it was gringo dollars that saved our farm from going under.

  And when he came back, he was a different man. Rather, he was more who he was. I had become more who I was, too, locked up, as I said, with Mamá and the children my only company. And so, though we lived under the same roof until after Mama died, to spare her another sadness, we had already started on our separate lives.

  One screwdriver.

  One brown leather purse.

  One red patent leather purse with straps missing.

  One pair of yellow nylon underwear.

  One pocket mirror.

  Four lottery tickets.

  We scattered as a family, the men, and later the children, going their separate ways.

  First, Manolo, dead within three years of Minerva.

  Then Pedrito. He had gotten his lands back, but prison and his losses had changed him. He was restless, couldn’t settle down to the old life. He remarried a young girl, and the new woman turned him around, or so Mamá thought. He came by a lot less and then hardly at all. How all of that, beginning with the young girl, would have hurt poor Patria.

  And Leandro. While Manolo was alive, Leandro was by his side, day and night. But when Manolo took off to the mountains, Leandro stayed home. Maybe he sensed a trap, maybe Manolo had become too radical for Leandro, I don’t know. After Manolo died, Leandro got out of politics. Became a big builder in the capital. Sometimes when we’re driving through the capital, Jacqueline points out one impressive building or another and says, “Papá built that.” She is less ready to talk about the second wife, the new, engrossing family, stepbrothers and sisters the age of her own little one.

  One receipt from El Gallo.

  One missal held together with a rubber band.

  One man’s wallet, 56 centavos in the pocket.

  Seven rings, three plain gold bands, one gold with a small diamond stone, one gold with an opal and four pearls, one man’s ring with garnet and eagle insignia, one silver initial ring.

  One scapular of our Lady of Sorrows.

  One Saint Christopher’s medal.

  Mama hung on twenty years. Every day I wasn’t staying over, I visited her first thing in the morning and always with an orchid from my garden for the girls. We raised the children between us. Minou and Manolito and Raulito, she kept. Jacqueline and Nelson and Noris were with me. Don’t ask me why we divided them that way. We didn’t really. They would wander from house to house, they had their seasons, but I’m talking about where they most often slept.

  What a time Mama had with those teenage granddaughters. She wanted them locked up like nuns in a convent, she was always so afraid. And Minou certainly kept her—and me—in worries. She took off, a young sixteen-year-old, by herself to study in Canada. Then it was Cuba for several years. ¡Ay, Dios! We pinned enough Virgencitas and azabaches and hung enough scapulars around that girl’s neck to charm away the men who were always wanting to get their hands on that young beauty.

  I remember Minou t
elling me about the first time she and Doroteo “got involved”—what she called it. I imagined, of course, the bedside scene behind the curtain of that euphemism. He stood with his hands under his arms as if he were not going to give in to her charms. Finally, she said, “Doroteo, what’s wrong?” And Doroteo said, “I feel like I’d be desecrating the flag.”

  He had a point there. Imagine, the daughter of two national heroes. All I said to Minou was “I like that young man.”

  But not Mama. “Be smart like your mother,” she kept saying. “Study and marry when you’re older.” And all I could think of was the hard time Mama had given Minerva when she had done just that!

  Poor Mamá, living to see the end of so many things, including her own ideas. Twenty years, like I said, she hung on. She was waiting until her granddaughters were past the dangerous stretch of their teen years before she left them to fend for themselves.

  And then fourteen years ago this last January, I came into her bedroom one morning, and she was lying with her hands at her waist, holding her rosary, quiet, as if she were praying. I checked to make sure she was gone. It was strange how this did not seem a real death, so unlike the others, quiet, without rage or violence.

  I put the orchid I had brought the girls in her hands. I knew that, unless my destiny was truly accursed and I survived my children, this was the last big loss I would have to suffer. There was no one between me and the dark passage ahead—I was next.

  The complete list of losses. There they are.

  And it helps, I’ve found, if I can count them off, so to speak. And sometimes when I’m doing that, I think, Maybe these aren’t losses. Maybe that’s a wrong way to think of them. The men, the children, me. We went our own ways, we became ourselves. Just that. And maybe that is what it means to be a free people, and I should be glad?

  Not long ago, I met Lio at a reception in honor of the girls. Despite what Minou thinks, I don’t like these things. But I always make myself go.

  Only if I know he will be there, I won’t go. I mean our current president who was the puppet president the day the girls were killed. “Ay, Dedé,” acquaintances will sometimes try to convince me. “Put that behind you. He’s an old, blind man now.”

  “He was blind when he could see,” I’ll snap. Oh, but my blood bums just thinking of shaking that spotted hand.

  But most things I go to. “For the girls,” I always tell myself.

  Sometimes I allow myself a shot of rum before climbing into the car, not enough to scent the slightest scandal, just a little thunder in the heart. People will be asking things, well meaning but nevertheless poking their fingers where it still hurts. People who kept their mouths shut when a little peep from everyone would have been a chorus the world couldn’t have ignored. People who once were friends of the devil. Everyone got amnesty by telling on everyone else until we were all one big rotten family of cowards.

  So I allow myself my shot of rum.

  At these things, I always try to position myself near the door so I can leave early. And there I was about to slip away when an older man approached me. On his arm was a handsome woman with an open, friendly face. This old fool is no fool, I’m thinking. He has got himself his young nurse wife for his old age.

  I put out my hand, just a reception line habit, I guess. And this man reaches out both hands and clasps mine. “Dedé, caramba, don’t you know who I am?” He holds on tight, and the young woman is beaming beside him. I look again.

  “iDios santo, Lío!” And suddenly, I have to sit down.

  The wife gets us both drinks and leaves us alone. We catch up, back and forth, my children, his children; the insurance business, his practice in the capital; the old house I still live in, his new house near the old presidential palace. Slowly, we are working our way towards that treacherous past, the horrible crime, the waste of young lives, the throbbing heart of the wound.

  “Ay, Lío,” I say, when we get to that part.

  And bless his heart, he takes my hands and says, “The nightmare is over, Dedé. Look at what the girls have done.” He gestures expansively.

  He means the free elections, bad presidents now put in power properly, not by army tanks. He means our country beginning to prosper, Free Zones going up everywhere, the coast a clutter of clubs and resorts. We are now the playground of the Caribbean, who were once its killing fields. The cemetery is beginning to flower.

  “Ay, Lío,” I say it again.

  I follow his gaze around the room. Most of the guests here are young. The boy-businessmen with computerized watches and walkie-talkies in their wives’ purses to summon the chauffeur from the car; their glamorous young wives with degrees they do not need; the scent of perfume; the tinkle of keys to the things they own.

  “Oh yes,” I hear one of the women say “we spent a revolution there.”

  I can see them glancing at us, the two old ones, how sweet they look under that painting of Bido. To them we are characters in a sad story about a past that is over.

  All the way home, I am trembling, I am not sure why.

  It comes to me slowly as I head north through the dark countryside-the only lights are up in the mountains where the prosperous young are building their getaway houses, and of course, in the sky, all the splurged wattage of the stars. Lío is right. The nightmare is over; we are free at last. But the thing that is making me tremble, that I do not want to say out loud-and I’ll say it once only and it’s done.

  Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?

  “Mamá Dedé! Where are you?” Minou must be off the phone. Her voice has that exasperated edge our children get when we dare wander from their lives. Why aren’t you where I left you? “Mamá Dedé!”

  I stop in the dark depths of the garden as if I’ve been caught about to do something wrong. I turn around. I see the house as I saw it once or twice as a child: the roof with its fairytale peak, the verandah running along three sides, the windows lighted up, glowing with lived life, a place of abundance, a magic place of memory and desire. And quickly I head back, a moth attracted to that marvelous light.

  I tuck her in bed and turn off her light and stay a while and talk in the dark.

  She tells me all the news of what Camila did today. Of Doroteo’s businesses, of their plans to build a house up north in those beautiful mountains.

  I am glad it is dark, so she cannot see my face when she says this. Up north in those beautiful mountains where both your mother and father were murdered!

  But all this is a sign of my success, isn’t it? She’s not haunted and full of hate. She claims it, this beautiful country with its beautiful mountains and splendid beaches—all the copy we read in the tourist brochures.

  We make our plans for tomorrow. We’ll go on a little outing to Santiago where I’ll help her pick up some fabrics at El Gallo. They’re having a big sale before they close the old doors and open under new management. A chain of El Gallos is going up all over the island with attendants in rooster-red uniforms and registers that announce how much you are spending. Then we’ll go to the museum where Minou can get some cuttings from Tono for the atrium in her apartment. Maybe Jaime David can have lunch with us. The big important senator from Salcedo better have time for her, Minou warns me.

  Fela’s name comes up. “Mamá Dedé, what do you think it means that the girls might finally be at rest?”

  That is not a good question for going to bed, I think. Like bringing up a divorce or a personal problem on a postcard. So I give her the brief, easy answer. “That we can let them go, I suppose.”

  Thank God, she is so tired and does not push me to say more.

  Some nights when I cannot sleep, I lie in bed and play that game Minerva taught me, going back in my memory to this or that happy moment. But I’ve been doing that all afternoon. So tonight I start thinking of what lies ahead instead.

  Specifically, the prize trip I’ve as good as won again this year.

  The boss has been dropping hints. “You know, Dedé, t
he tourist brochures are right. We have a beautiful paradise right here. There’s no need to travel far to have a good time.”

  Trying to get by cheap this year!

  But if I’ve won the prize trip again, I’m going to push for what I want. I’m going to say, “I want to go to Canada to see the leaves.”

  “The leaves?” I can just see the boss making his professional face of polite shock. It’s the one he uses on all the tutumpotes when they come in wanting to buy the cheaper policies. Surely your life is worth a lot more, Don Fulano.

  “Yes,” I’ll say, “leaves. I want to see the leaves.” But I’m not going to tell him why. The Canadian man I met in Barcelona, on last year’s prize trip, told me about how they turn red and gold. He took my hand in his, as if it were a leaf, spreading out the fingers. He pointed out this and that line in my palm. “Sugar concentrates in the veins.” I felt my resolve to keep my distance melting down like the sugar in those leaves. My face I knew was burning.

  “It is the sweetness in them that makes them burn,” he said, looking me in the eye, then smiling. He knew an adequate Spanish, good enough for what he had to say. But I was too scared yet to walk into my life that bold way. When he finished the demonstration, I took back my hand.

  But already in my memory, it has happened and I am standing under those blazing trees—flamboyants in bloom in my imagination, not having seen those sugar maples he spoke of. He is snapping a picture for me to bring back to the children to prove that it happens, yes, even to their old Mama Dedé.

  It is the sweetness in them that makes them burn.

  Usually, at night, I hear them just as I’m falling asleep.

  Sometimes, I lie at the very brink of forgetfulness, waiting, as if their arrival is my signal that I can fall asleep.

  The settling of the wood floors, the wind astir in the jasmine, the deep released fragrance of the earth, the crow of an insomniac rooster.