I Lived on Butterfly Hill

by Marjorie Agosín

  “Who is this elegant young woman?” Mamá laughs as she watches me model my New Year’s outfit. I am wearing her silver hoop earrings and her blue sundress with yellow flowers that used to belong to her when she was my age. Nana Delfina hemmed it to fit me, and I love how the skirt has a bit of crinoline beneath it so the skirt flounces out below the yellow ribbon at my waist. I have always loved this dress. When I was little, I called it the buttercup dress. “Now just dab on a bit of the red lipstick Abuela Frida gave you—but not enough to make your father frown and pull you back through the door by your skirt.” Mamá, my co-conspirator, grins at me.

  I smile at myself in the mirror. I give a final twirl for my mother and tell her, “Mamá, I am so glad you never throw anything out! I love old-fashioned clothes.” She groans and throws a pillow at my backside.

  “Well, I am so glad you have an antique mother to borrow dresses from,” she teases me with a rueful laugh.

  “You are still known on Butterfly Hill as the beautiful Esmeralda with the firefly smile, and always will be, Mamá.” She squeezes me tight, and I smell her rose-water fragrance. “Mamá, can I wear a bit of your perfume?” I am already dashing down the hall to her bedroom.

  “Just a bit,” she calls out. “It’s on my dresser. Now, remind me of your plan for tonight so I don’t worry about you!” I return smelling like a rose garden.

  “I am going to meet Marisol and Cristóbal at Vergara Pier at eleven. I told Papá I would meet you both back at the statue around three to go home together.”

  I give her a good-bye kiss on both cheeks.

  “I guess that sounds like as challenging a place as any to find you among thousands and thousands of people,” my mother says with a yawn. “Your old-fashioned mamá may need a nap before she goes down to the harbor—either that or the fireworks will wake me up!” Little by little my mother’s fun-loving spirit is returning.

  “Unless you’ve gotten too deaf to hear them, Mamá!” I call up to her.

  “What’s that you said, Querida?”

  I giggle at her silliness. “Welcome back, Mamá,” I whisper.

  * * *

  I make my way down the hills in a cable car filled with people dressed in bright clothes, holding parsley and carnations for good fortune, as well as bunches of grapes for making twelve wishes at midnight.

  I squeeze through throngs of people in the plaza to make it out to Vergara Pier. Maybe it is because I remembered the snowy, quiet New Year’s Eve I spent with Tía Graciela in Maine, or maybe it is because Chile is coming to life again, but the streets seem louder and more raucous than I ever remembered them. People wearing masks, carrying sparklers, candles, and streamers. Women dressed in samba outfits. Men smoking two cigars at a time. Old couples and young couples dancing the cueca with white handkerchiefs in their hands. And children holding so many balloons, you’d think they’d fly away. Along with the aroma of empanadas and humitas, music wafts from every corner of the plaza: tango, rock and roll, African drumming, disco fever, traditional Chilean folk songs.

  I can barely see over the mass of heads, so I climb up on the low roof of Don Jose’s sweet shop. Suddenly I spot Marisol—she is turning heads and causing men’s cigars to drop to the ground, sauntering down the pier in a new red dress. Her arm is entwined with Cristóbal’s. He seems to be propping her up. I can’t see, but I am sure there are red high heels teetering beneath her feet. And someone is behind them. I forgot that Cristóbal had told me he might bring an old friend. As they approach me, I see a girl in a sea-green skirt with her head tilted down, her hair shining gold in the moonlight.

  Cristóbal spots me. “¡Hola, Celeste!”

  Marisol cries out, “It’s time for a new beginning, amiga!” and nearly falls down. She grabs on to Cristóbal, and they almost topple over in laughter. The girl behind them lifts her head and meets my eyes.

  Gloria!

  We stare at each other for a moment. I don’t know what to do or say. Half of me wants to run to her with my arms open wide, and half of me wants to shout at her, “Why didn’t you stand by me? Why did you pretend not to know me? What happened to you?”

  She looks back at me with her bright hazel eyes. Is she thinking the same thoughts about me? Slowly she walks my way and pulls a red carnation from the braided chignon at the nape of her neck. She reaches her hand up, and I reach mine down to take the flower from her. Then I reach my other hand out to her, and she clasps both her hands around it, and I pull to help her climb atop Don Jose’s tin roof.

  “Ay! Celeste! Help!” We both nearly fall as I hear her making a soft sound between laughter and sobbing. I pull her into a hug, a hug that I hope tells her everything I don’t know how to say. That despite our parents’ differences, despite everything that happened, she is still my friend.

  “Amiga, what happened to you?” I whisper.

  “I should be asking that of you,” she replies. Suddenly two more pairs of arms wrap around us. “Can we join you?” Marisol laughs. And the four of us sit on the sloping roof of Don José’s shop on Vergara Pier with our arms around one another’s shoulders. We share a bag of fried sunflower seeds and see who can spit the shells farthest into the water below, and wait for the clock to strike midnight.

  “Cristóbal, don’t fall asleep now!” Gloria jabs him in the ribs.

  “Have you noticed he only falls asleep once or twice a day now?!” Marisol comes to his defense. “Unless that older girl María Carlota Fuentes is anywhere nearby, then he’s wide-awake!”

  Cristóbal is blushing beet red. Marisol and Gloria are rocking back and forth with laughter. I think of Lucila. Right now she would be saying, “Oh, leave poor Cristóbal alone! He can’t help it that that girl is so flirty and wears black mascara that makes her eyes trap him like a fly in a spiderweb!” So I say it for her. I feel her near us. A soft breeze rises from over the harbor. Marisol reaches over and squeezes my hand. She must feel her cousin too. It sends shivers through my body.

  “Chicas!” Cristóbal takes his father’s watch from his jacket pocket. “It’s one minute to midnight!” He quickly hands us the bunches of grapes his mother packed so that we could put one in our mouth as the clock strikes midnight. Each grape represents a wish for the new year. And suddenly all of Valparaíso rings out as a single voice. “¡Feliz Año Nuevo! Happy New Year in the city and the sea!”

  Bong. Bong. Bong! As the clock counts out each hour, I bite a juicy grape and make a wish: truth for all those who seek it, light like that found in agates by the shore for those who are sad, courage to write with an open heart . . .

  “Come on, Celeste!” My friends pull me down from the roof to join the masses of revelers dancing on the pier. Someone hands me a cup of lemonade that tastes more like champagne, and I gulp it down, thirsty and elated. Boom! Boom! The fireworks burst in the sky—turquoise, violets, golds—to cheers and waving hands below. Voices begin to call out, “Long live Valparaíso! Long live Chile!” Cristóbal shouts, “¡Que viva Chile! ¡Viva la libertad! ¡Y que viva la Presidente Espinoza!”

  And I hear Gloria softly murmur, “¡Que viva!”

  The Secret Library

  “Check on your abuela, please, Celeste. And then can you come help Delfina peel potatoes?”

  “Sí, Delfina.”

  I walk slowly into the parlor. “Abuela, would you like some lemons?” I ask to tempt her. Her appetite is poor lately.

  But Abuela Frida shakes her head. “I can’t taste their tartness anymore,” she tells me.

  Mamá and Papá moved Abuela Frida’s bed, with its bedposts carved into vines and roses, into the parlor so she could watch the harbor from the window. During the days she lies beneath her blue bedspread, propped up with as many pillows as Delfina can fit behind her without them falling off the bed. The sunlight streams through the open window like a blossom blooming before her face. And she watches.

  She is so small and narrow in her wide bed. I sit next to her and sometimes we talk, but most of the time we jus
t look out the window at our garden and the path that leads down Butterfly Hill from our doorway, and in the distance the harbor with its billowing sails. “Abuela, your hair grows more and more by the minute,” I tell her as I softly brush her curls with the small ivory comb she brought here from Austria when she was just a year older than I am now.

  I wind her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, the elegant way she has worn it every day I have known her. Then I help her powder her cheeks and nose with the fine rice powder she loves. She blinks her eyes and says, “Celeste of my soul, give me your hands.” I hold them out to her, covered with rice powder. She takes them in her own frail hands and gives mine a squeeze. Her sudden burst of strength surprises me.

  “These hands are so small, yet they do so much good. Use them to write, always. And . . .” Her eyes sparkle with girlish excitement. “I have another job for them.”

  “What is it, Abuela?”

  “An important task. One I started, and which you will finish.”

  I’m so curious, and impatient for her to tell me, that I shift back and forth, jiggling the mattress a bit. “Ay, Celeste, I’m too old to have you bouncing on the bed like when you were a little girl!” Abuela Frida laughs at her own joke. “Bring me my shawl from the rocking chair, Querida, the one that looks like an onion skin, and I’ll tell you all you need to know.”

  I drape the gauzy peach-colored shawl over my grandmother’s shoulders, then gently sit down on the bed by her side.

  “Now then, where was I?” Abuela Frida clears her throat and begins, “During the years you lived on Juliette Cove, many people knocked on our door with their arms full of books, asking me to hide the books and keep them safe. As you know, the Dictator had ordered soldiers to raid all the homes on all the hills and to burn any books he called ‘dangerous.’ That meant books with ideas he didn’t like—ideas about individual freedom and expression, especially. These people asked me to save these books so that no matter what happened in the present, future generations could read them. I hid all sorts of books—old and new, poetry and astronomy, history and psychology . . .”

  “Abuela Frida!” I exclaim. “What a dangerous—what a brave—thing to do! Banned books hidden here? How could you have kept this a secret all this time? Who else knows about this?”

  I have so many questions, but Abuela Frida calmly tells me, “Celeste of my soul, listen and all will be revealed in its time.”

  “Si, Abuela.” I sit, alert, my back straight against the headboard of her bed. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “Ahem!” Abuela Frida continues her story in German. “Celeste, I never had the heart to tell you this until today, but soldiers invaded our house too while you were on Juliette Cove. They turned everything helter-skelter with their snapping dogs and dirty boots. But they never found anything but two old women, one sitting in her rocker knitting a blue scarf, and the other in the kitchen shucking corn. I know I always tell you to be ladylike, but I confess that I spit lemon seeds at them, and I am proud of it. For Delfina and me, a Mapuche peasant and an Austrian Jewess, the time to fear ignorance dressed up in a uniform already passed long ago.”

  “Soldiers? Here? Oh, Abuela, no!” I shake my head, unwilling to think of soldiers storming in on Nana Delfina and my grandmother! Unwilling to think of what could have happened to them.

  Abuela Frida pats my hand. “There, there, Celeste. You already know that I am an old lady, with too much experience with these sorts of things.”

  “Si, Abuela. I know.” I rub my eyes and sniffle.

  “Now save your tears for happy times, and listen: When I was your age, the Nazis burned books, and I learned to hide them. I never thought I would have to rely on this skill again. But, Celeste, I hid all the books given to me by the people of Valparaíso, along with our own, in a part of the house you don’t even know exists. Yes, even you—who hid under tables to eavesdrop as a child—don’t know of a small hiding place beneath the stairs. Your parents didn’t either, until I told them last night—I told them the story I’m telling you now, and about the important task I am giving you. Your Abuelo José and I had the house built this way, with a secret place only we two knew, because the fear from the Shoah was still fresh within us.”

  I shake my head some more. “I can’t believe that in all these years of hiding all over this house I never saw a thing! And Mamá, too? After all her years living here?”

  “Well.” Abuela Frida wears the smile of a mischievous girl. “It was expertly built, as a secret that was meant to be kept. The door is small. You have to crouch down to find it, and it’s hidden by the wallpaper. There is no knob. You just carefully peel back a small flap of wallpaper, insert a key in the keyhole, and push the door open.”

  Abuela Frida points to the drawer in the nightstand beside the bed. I open it and pull out a large, old-fashioned copper key. I stare from the key to my grandmother, speechless with wonder.

  She beams proudly and continues, “Every day while you were gone we would have to rip down the wallpaper and put it back up. Cristóbal would come with paste and plaster and help us with that often. Ask him about it. I am sure he hasn’t told you yet because I asked him not to. Cristóbal will grow up to be a fine man someday, Celeste.”

  “Cristóbal? Really?” The story that Abuela Frida is telling me is just so unexpected, and even more wonderful.

  “Really!” She laughs. “Now listen closely, Celeste. The hiding place is filled with what I hope will become a library. The books are in fruit boxes from Cristóbal’s mother, and wrapped in blankets and my blue scarves. Celeste, I want you to organize them into a traveling library for the people of Valparaíso.”

  “Abuela, they built their library themselves, without even knowing it!”

  “Exactly.” Abuela Frida winks at me. “And now I want these little hands”—she reaches out and gives them a squeeze—“to tackle a big job.”

  Treasures

  It’s like entering a labyrinth. The hideaway beneath the stairs is full to the brim with overstuffed boxes. Old blankets and cloaks are haphazardly strewn over the various shapes. I recognize a crimson blanket that Delfina brought with her from her home in the south. It smells like smoke and cinnamon, and when I lift it up, I see beneath a collection of books written by a British scientist named Charles Darwin. I kneel down and flip through the pages excitedly. Señorita Alvarado taught us about Darwin and his voyage on the Beagle to the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador, and how he developed his theory of evolution when he noticed differences among the finches on each island.

  Over one box I recognize the calico dress Abuela Frida wears in the photograph where she is holding Tía Graciela days after she was born. Wrapped inside are books of poetry by the Indian Rabindranath Tagore and Chile’s beloved Gabriela Mistral. There is also a novel for young adults called Heart by an Italian named Edmondo De Amicis. And at the very back of the hideaway, wrapped in silk shawls like those of a Hindu princess, I find One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folktales.

  How many times must Abuela Frida have climbed in here to hide these books? I stay there in the hideaway for a long time, lifting one book and then another into my hands and turning through the pages. Abuela Frida left me the history of the world in these boxes! I decide to start with one and pull a box covered in blue scarves out into the hallway. I look through the various titles. Mapuche Medicine, Mysticism, the cello music to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the famous “Ode to Joy.”

  I really should unpack the books in Abuela Frida’s parlor so she can watch. She’d want to see all the treasures she saved. Besides, I want to hear the story behind each one.

  I heave the heavy box into my arms, letting loose the thin layer of dust that had settled upon it. My nose twitches as I struggle to carry the box down the hallway. Finally I reach the entrance to the parlor, and I lean in the doorway to catch my breath. The lights are dim—Abuela Frida always lowers them this time of the day so she can se
e the sunset in the harbor from her window.

  “Abuela Frida, these are amazing,” I tell my grandmother, huddled under her shawl in her rocking chair. “I promise they will fall into the hands of people who will treat them like treasures . . .

  “Abuela Frida?”

  “Zzzzzzzzz.”

  I take a few steps closer, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and stifle a giggle. Abuela Frida has fallen asleep in her rocking chair, snoring softly, as always, like the letter Z .

  I put the box of treasures down quietly at her feet.

  “Gute nacht,” I whisper. “Good night, Abuela. Thank you for this gift.”

  The last tendrils of sunlight shimmer on the window. And I watch as the colors of dusk rise to dance upon her face.

  The Skin of an Onion

  I like to borrow Abuela Frida’s shawl—the one that’s like the skin of an onion—when I am sorting the books. It reminds me of what she always says about people being like onions: When you begin peeling away the layers, you discover who they really are. Some have long roots, and others are only empty skin, without history or flavor. And maybe a person can be like a cardboard box? I wonder as I pry open a particularly well-sealed one. Who knows what words, what wisdom, might fill it?

  Thinking of onions makes me think of the boy with the big appetite, who helped my grandmother with the books. I leave her room and walk to the telephone in the hallway. It is late, but I call Cristóbal anyway. He answers with a sleepy voice. “Cristóbal? I know what you did to help my Abuela Frida. Amigo, what would we all do without you?”

  “Celeste, it was nothing.” Cristóbal’s voice is shy.

  “Cristóbal, tomorrow will you help me carry books to Café Iris? I can already imagine el mago reading poems out loud. And I will take some to the community center.”

  “And maybe we could find a way to make my mother’s fruit crates waterproof so that we could leave books at the cable car stops and on the stairs that go up and down the hills?” Cristóbal suggests.