In the Time of Butterflies (29 page)

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 says 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.

“I’ll make it fine,” the woman claims, looking up at the sky “Wow, the light is almost gone.”

Night has fallen. Out on the road, they hear the sound of a car hurrying home. The interview woman bids Dedé farewell, and together they walk through the darkened garden to the side of the house where the rented Datsun is parked.

A car nears and turns into the drive, its headlights beaming into their eyes. Dedé and the woman stand paralyzed like animals caught in the beams of an oncoming car.

“Who could this be?” Dedé wonders aloud.

“Your next compromiso, no?” the interview woman says.

Dedé is reminded of her lie. “Yes, of course,” she says as she peers into the dark.
“¡Buenas!”
she calls out.

“It’s me, Mamá Dedé,” Minou calls back. The car door slams—Dedé jumps. Footsteps hurry towards them.

“What on earth are you doing here? I’ve told you a thousand times!” Dede scolds her niece. She doesn’t care anymore if she is betraying her lie. Minou knows, all of her nieces know, that Dedé can’t bear for them to be on the road after dark. If their mothers had only waited until the next morning to drive back over that deserted mountain road, they might still be alive to scold their own daughters about the dangers of driving at night.

“Ya,
ya, Mama Dedé.” Minou bends down to kiss her aunt. Having taken after both her mother and father, she is a head taller than Dedé. “It just so happens I was off the road an hour ago.” There is a pause, and Dedé already guesses what Minou is hesitating to say, for therein awaits another scold. “I was over at Fela’s.”

“Any messages from the girls?” Dedé says smartly. Beside her, she can feel the eager presence of the interview woman.

“Can’t we sit down first,” Minou says. There is some emotion in her voice Dedé can’t quite make out. She has soured her niece’s welcome, scolding her the minute she gets out of her car. “Come, come, you’re right. Forgive your old aunt’s bad manners. Let’s go have a
limonada.”

“I was just on my way out,” the interview woman reminds Dedé. To Minou, she adds, “I hope to see you again—”

“We haven’t even met.” Minou smiles.

Dedé apologizes for her oversight and introduces the woman to her niece. Oh dear, what a mishmash of gratitude follows. The interview woman is delirious at the good fortune of meeting both sister and daughter of the heroine of the Fourteenth of June underground. Dedé cringes. She had better cut this off. Unlike their aunt, the children won’t put up with this kind of overdone gush.

But Minou is chuckling away. “Come see us again,” she offers, and Dedé, forced to rise to this politeness, adds, “Yes, now you know the way.”

“I went to see Fela,” Minou begins after she is settled with a fresh lemonade.

Dedé hears her niece swallow some emotion. What could be wrong? Dedé wonders. Gently now, she prods Minou, “Tell me what the girls had to say today?”

“That’s just it,” Minou says, her voice still uneven. “They wouldn’t come. Fela says they must finally be at rest. It was strange, hearing that. I felt sad instead of glad.”

Her last tie, however tenuous, to her mother. So that’s what the emotion is all about, Dedé thinks. Then it strikes her. She knows exactly why Fela was getting a blackout this afternoon. “Don’t you worry.” Dedé pats her niece’s hand. “They’re still around.”

Minou scowls at her aunt. “Are you making fun again?”

Dedé shakes her head. “I swear they’ve been here. All afternoon.”

Minou is watching her aunt for any sign of irony. Finally, she says, “All right, can I ask you anything just like I do Fela?”