In the Time of the Butterflies
By Julia Alvarez
Plume Books
Copyright © 1995
Julia Alvarez
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0452274427
Chapter One
Dedi
1994
and
circa 1943
She is plucking her bird of paradise of its dead branches, leaning
around the plant every time she hears a car. The woman will never
find the old house behind the hedge of towering hibiscus at the bend of
the dirt road. Not a
gringa dominicana in a rented car with a road map
asking for street names! Dedi had taken the call over at the little
museum this morning.
Could the woman please come over and talk to Dedi about the
Mirabal sisters? She is originally from here but has lived many years in
the States, for which she is sorry since her Spanish is not so good. The
Mirabal sisters are not known there, for which she is also sorry for it is
a crime that they should be forgotten, these unsung heroines of the
underground, et cetera.
Oh dear, another one. Now after thirty-four years, the commemorations
and interviews and presentations of posthumous honors have
almost stopped, so that for months at a time Dedi is able to take up her
own life again. But she's long since resigned herself to Novembers. Every
year as the 25th rolls around, the television crews drive up. There's the
obligatory interview. Then, the big celebration over at the museum, the
delegations from as far away as Peru and Paraguay, an ordeal really, making
that many little party sandwiches and the nephews and nieces not
always showing up in time to help. But this is March,
!Marma Santmsima!
Doesn't she have seven more months of anonymity?
"How about this afternoon? I do have a later commitment," Dedi lies
to the voice. She has to. Otherwise, they go on and on, asking the most
impertinent questions.
There is a veritable racket of gratitude on the other end, and Dedi
has to smile at some of the imported nonsense of this woman's Spanish.
"I am so compromised," she is saying, "by the openness of your warm
manner."
"So if I'm coming from Santiago, I drive on past Salcedo?" the woman
asks.
"
Exactamente. And then where you see a great big anacahuita tree,
you turn left."
"A ... great ... big ... tree ...," the woman repeats. She is writing
all this down! "I turn left. What's the name of the street?"
"It's just the road by the anacahuita tree. We don't name them," Dedi
says, driven to doodling to contain her impatience. On the back of an
envelope left beside the museum phone, she has sketched an enormous
tree, laden with flowers, the branches squirreling over the flap. "You
see, most of the
campesinos around here can't read, so it wouldn't do us
any good to put names on the roads."
The voice laughs, embarrassed. "Of course. You must think I'm so
outside of things."
Tan afuera de la cosa.
Dedi bites her lip. "Not at all," she lies. "I'll see you this afternoon
then."
"About what time?" the voice wants to know.
Oh yes. The gringos need a time. But there isn't a clock time for this
kind of just-right moment. "Any time after three or three-thirty, four-ish."
"Dominican time, eh?" The woman laughs.
"!Exactamente!" Finally, the woman is getting the hang of how things
are done here. Even after she has laid the receiver in its cradle, Dedi
goes on elaborating the root system of her anacahuita tree, shading the
branches, and then for the fun of it, opening and closing the flap of the
envelope to watch the tree come apart and then back together again.
* * *
In the garden, Dedi is surprised to hear the radio in the outdoor
kitchen announce that it is only three o'clock. She has been waiting
expectantly since after lunch, tidying up the patch of garden this American
woman will be able to see from the
galerma. This is certainly one
reason why Dedi shies from these interviews. Before she knows it, she
is setting up her life as if it were an exhibit labeled neatly for those who
can read: THE SISTER WHO SURVIVED.
Usually, if she works it right-a lemonade with lemons from the tree
Patria planted, a quick tour of the house the girls grew up in-usually
they leave, satisfied, without asking the prickly questions that have left
Dedi lost in her memories for weeks at a time, searching for the answer.
Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one
who survived?
She bends to her special beauty, the butterfly orchid she smuggled
back from Hawaii two years ago. For three years in a row Dedi has won
a trip, the prize for making the most sales of anyone in her company
Her niece Minou has noted more than once the irony of Dedi's "new"
profession, actually embarked upon a decade ago, after her divorce. She
is the company's top life insurance salesperson. Everyone wants to buy
a policy from the woman who just missed being killed along with her
three sisters. Can she help it?
The slamming of a car door startles Dedi. When she calms herself
she finds she has snipped her prize butterfly orchid. She picks up the
fallen blossom and trims the stem, wincing. Perhaps this is the only way
to grieve the big things-in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.
But really, this woman should shut car doors with less violence. Spare
an aging woman's nerves. And I'm not the only one, Dedi thinks. Any
Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot
sound.
* * *
She walks the woman quickly through the house,
Mama's bedroom, mine
and Patria's, but mostly mine since Patria married so young, Minerva and
Marma Teresa's. The other bedroom she does not say was her father's after
he and Mama stopped sleeping together. There are the three pictures of
the girls, old favorites that are now emblazoned on the posters every
November, making these once intimate snapshots seem too famous to
be the sisters she knew.
Dedi has placed a silk orchid in a vase on the little table below them.
She still feels guilty about not continuing Mama's tribute of a fresh blossom
for the girls every day But the truth is, she doesn't have the time
anymore, with a job, the museum, a household to run. You can't be a
modern woman and insist on the old sentimentalities. And who was
the fresh orchid for, anyway? Dedi looks up at those young faces, and
she knows it is herself at that age she misses the most.
The interview woman stops before the portraits, and Dedi waits for
her to ask which one was which or how old they were when these were
taken, facts Dedi has at the ready, having delivered them so many times.
But instead the thin waif of a woman asks, "And where are you?"
Dedi laughs uneasily It's as if the woman has read her mind. "I have
this hallway just for the girls," she says. Over the woman's shoulder, she
sees she has left the door to her room ajar, her nightgown flung with
distressing abandon on her bed. She wishes she had gone through the
house and shut the doors to the bedrooms.
"No, I mean, where are you in the sequence, the youngest, the oldest?"
So the woman has not read any of the articles or biographies around.
Dedi is relieved. This means that they can spend the time talking about
the simple facts that give Dedi the illusion that hers was just an ordinary
family, too-birthdays and weddings and new babies, the peaks in that
graph of normalcy.
Dedi goes through the sequence.
"So fast in age," the woman notes, using an awkward phrase.
Dedi nods. "The first three of us were born close, but in other ways,
you see, we were so different."
"Oh?" the woman asks.
"Yes, so different. Minerva was always into her wrongs and rights."
Dedi realizes she is speaking to the picture of Minerva, as if she were
assigning her a part, pinning her down with a handful of adjectives, the
beautiful, intelligent, high-minded Minerva. "And Maria Teresa,
ay,
Dios," Dedi sighs, emotion in her voice in spite of herself. "Still a girl
when she died,
pobrecita, just turned twenty-five." Dedi moves on to
the last picture and rights the frame. "Sweet Patria, always her religion
was so important."
"Always?" the woman says, just the slightest challenge in her voice.
"Always," Dedi affirms, used to this fixed, .monolithic language
around interviewers and mythologizers of her sisters. "Well, almost
always."
* * *
She walks the woman out of the house into the
galerma where the rocking
chairs wait. A kitten lies recklessly under the runners, and she shoos
it away "What is it you want to know?" Dedi asks bluntly. And then
because the question does seem to ruddy call the woman to account
for herself, she adds, "Because there is so much to tell."
The woman laughs as she says, "Tell me all of it."
Dedi looks at her watch as a polite reminder to the woman that the
visit is circumscribed. "There are books and articles. I could have Tono
at the museum show you the letters and diaries."
"That would be great," the woman says, staring at the orchid Dedi is
still holding in her hand. Obviously, she wants more. She looks up,
shyly. "I just have to say, it's really so easy to talk to you. I mean, you're
so open and cheerful How do you keep such a tragedy from taking you
under? I'm not sure I am explaining myself?"
Dedi sighs. Yes, the woman is making perfect sense. She thinks of an
article she read at the beauty salon, by a Jewish lady who survived a
concentration camp. "There were many many happy years. I remember
those. I try anyhow. I tell myself, Dedi, concentrate on the positive! My
niece Minou tells me I am doing some transcending meditation, something
like that. She took the course in the capital.
"I'll tell myself, Dedi, in your memory it is such and such a day, and
I start over, playing the happy moment in my head. This is my
movies-I have no television here."
"It works?"
"Of course," Dedi says, almost fiercely. And when it doesn't work, she
thinks, I get stuck playing the same bad moment. But why speak of that.
"Tell me about one of those moments," the woman asks, her face
naked with curiosity. She looks down quickly as if to hide it.
Dedi hesitates, but her mind is already racing backwards, year by
year by year, to the moment she has fixed in her memory as zero.
* * *
She remembers a clear moonlit night before the future began. They are
sitting in the cool darkness under the anacahuita tree in the front yard,
in the rockers, telling stories, drinking guanabana juice. Good for the
nerves, Mama always says.
They're all there, Mama, Papa, Patria-Minerva-Dedi. Bang-bang-bang,
their father likes to joke, aiming a finger pistol at each one, as if he
were shooting them, not boasting about having sired them. Three girls,
each born within a year of the other! And then, nine years later, Marma
Teresa, his final desperate attempt at a boy misfiring.
Their father has his slippers on, one foot hooked behind the other.
Every once in a while Dedi hears the clink of the rum bottle against the
rim of his glass.
Many a night, and this night is no different, a shy voice calls out of
the darkness, begging their pardon. Could they spare a
calmante for a
sick child out of their stock of kindness? Would they have some tobacco
for a tired old man who spent the day grating yucca?
Their father gets up, swaying a little with drink and tiredness, and
opens up the store. The
campesino goes off with his medicine, a couple
of cigars, a few mints for the godchildren. Dedi tells her father
that she doesn't know how they do as well as they do, the way he
gives everything away. But her father just puts his arm around her,
and says, "Ay, Dedi, that's why I have you. Every soft foot needs a
hard shoe.
"She'll bury us all," her father adds, laughing, "in silk and pearls."
Dedi hears again the clink of the rum bottle. "Yes, for sure, our Dedi
here is going to be the millionaire in the family."
"And me, Papa, and me?" Marma Teresa pipes up in her little girl's
voice, not wanting to be left out of the future.
"You,
mi qapita, you'll be our little coquette. You'll make a lot of
men's -"
Their mother coughs her correcting-your-manners cough.
"-a lot of men's mouths water? their father concludes.
Marma Teresa groans. At eight years old, in her long braids and checkered
blouse, the only future the baby wants is one that will make
her
own mouth water, sweets and gifts in big boxes that clatter with something
fun inside when she shakes them.
"What of me, Papa?" Patria asks more quietly It is difficult to imagine
Patria unmarried without a baby on her lap, but Dedi's memory is playing
dolls with the past. She has sat them down that clear, cool night
before the future begins, Mama and Papa and their four pretty girls, no
one added, no one taken away Papa calls on Mama to help him out
with his fortune-telling. Especially-though he doesn't say this-if
she's going to censor the clairvoyance of his several glasses of rum.
"What would you say, Mama, about our Patria?"
"You know, Enrique, that I don't believe in fortunes," Mama says
evenly. "Padre Ignacio says fortunes are for those without faith." In her
mother's tone, Dedi can already hear the distance that will come
between her parents. Looking back, she thinks,
Ay, Mama, ease up a little
on those commandments. Work out the Christian math of how you
give a little and you get it back a hundredfold. But thinking about her
own divorce, Dedi admits the math doesn't always work out. If you
multiply by zero, you still get zero, and a thousand heartaches.
"I don't believe in fortunes either," Patria says quickly She's as religious
as Mama, that one. "But Papa isn't really telling fortunes."
Minerva agrees. "Papa's just
confessing what he thinks are our
strengths." She stresses the verb
confessing as if their father were actually
being pious in looking ahead for his daughters. "Isn't that so, Papa?"
"Sm, seqorita," Papa burps, slurring his words. It's almost time to go
in.
"Also," Minerva adds, "Padre Ignacio condemns fortunes only if you
believe a human being knows what only God can know." That one can't
leave well enough alone.
"Some of us know it all," Mama says curtly.
Marma Teresa defends her adored older sister. "It isn't a sin, Mama, it
isn't. Berto and Razl have this game from New York. Padre Ignacio
played it with us. It's a board with a little glass you move around, and it
tells the future!" Everybody laughs, even their mother, for Marma Teresa's
voice is bursting with gullible excitement. The baby stops, suddenly, in
a pout. Her feelings get hurt so easily On Minerva's urging, she goes on
in a little voice. "I asked the talking board what I would be when I grew
up, and it said a lawyer."
Continues...
Excerpted from In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
Copyright © 1995 by Julia Alvarez.
Excerpted by permission.
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