In the Time of Butterflies (46 page)

“We are trying to get him to come. All loyal citizens are writing letters.”

Clip-clip went Dedé’s shears, as if to drown out anything I might be thinking.

“El Jefe has been very generous to you girls. It would be nice if you composed a letter of thanks for his leniency.”

He glanced at me and Mate, resting his eyes on Patria last. We gave him nothing with our faces. Poor nervous Dedé, who had edged up the patio towards us and was rewatering all the plants, said that yes, that would be wise. “I mean nice,” she corrected herself quickly, and Patria, Mate, and I bowed our heads to hide our smiles.

After Pena left there was a fight. The others wanted to go ahead and write the damn letter. But I was against it. Thank Trujillo for punishing us!

“But what harm can a little letter do?” Mate argued. It was no longer so easy for me to talk that one into anything.

“People look to us to be an example, we’ve got a responsibility!” I spoke so fiercely, they looked a little sheepish. My old self was putting on quite a show.

“Now, Minerva,” Patria reasoned. “You know if he publishes the silly thing everyone will know why we wrote it.”

“Just go along with us this one time,” Mate pleaded with me.

It reminded me of that time in Inmaculada when I had not wanted to perform for Trujillo with my friends. But I had given in to them, and we had almost met our end, too, with Sinita’s bow-and-arrow assassination attempt.

What finally convinced me was Patria’s argument that the letter might help free the men. A grateful note from the Mirabal sisters might just soften El Jefe’s heart towards our husbands.

“Heart?” I said, making a face. Then, sitting down to our task, I made it perfectly clear: “This is against my better principles.”

“Someone needs to have less principles and more sense,” Dedé murmured, but without much fight in her voice. I think she was relieved to see a little spark of the old Minerva again.

Afterwards I felt small with what I’d done. “We’ve got to do something,” I kept muttering.

“Calm down, Minerva. Here,” Dedé said, pulling down Gandhi from the shelf. Elsa had given me this book when I first got out of prison to show me, she said, that being passive and gentle could be revolutionary. Dedé had approved wholeheartedly.

Today, Gandhi would not do. What I needed was a shot of Fidel’s fiery rhetoric. He would have agreed with me. We had to do something, soon!

“We have to accept this cross is what we have to do,” Patria said.

“Like hell we do!” I said. I was on a rampage.

It lasted only until the end of that day.

We were already in bed when I heard them talking loudly on the porch. They were everywhere—the dark glasses, the ironed pants, the pomaded hair. They stayed on the road until night, when they drew close to the house like moths drawn towards the light.

Usually I covered my head with my pillow and after a while fell asleep. But tonight I couldn’t ignore them. I got up from bed, not even bothering to throw a shawl over my nightgown.

Dedé caught me going out the door. She tried to hold me back, but weak though I still was, I pushed her aside easily. Dedé was still Dedé, without much conviction in her fighting.

Two SIM agents were sitting on our rockers as comfortable as you please.
“Compañeros,”
I said, startling them in mid-rock with the revolutionary greeting. “I’m going to have to ask you to please keep your voices down. You’re right under our bedroom windows. Remember, you are guards, not guests here.”

Neither of them said a word.

“Well, if there’s nothing else, good night then,
compañeros.”

I had turned back towards the door when one of them called out, “
i
Viva Trujillo!”
the “patriotic” way of beginning and closing the day. But I wasn’t going to invoke the devil’s name in my own yard.

After a short pause in which she was probably waiting to see if I’d answer, Dedé called from inside the house,
“
¡
Viva
Trujillo!”

“
¡
Viva Trujillo!”
Mate took it up.

And then a couple of more voices added their good wishes to our dictator, until what had been a scared compliance became, by the exaggeration of repetition, a joke. But I could feel the men listening specifically for my loyalty call.

“Viva—” I began and felt ashamed as I took a deep breath and pronounced the hated name.

Just in case I should go on a rampage again, Mama confiscated the old radio. “What we need to know, we’ll know soon enough!” And she was right, too. Little bits of news leaked in, sometimes from the least likely people.

My old friend Elsa. She had married the journalist Roberto Suárez, who was assigned to the National Palace and, though critical of the regime, wrote the flowery feature articles required of him. One night long ago, he had kept Manolo and me, as well as Elsa, in stitches with tales of his journalistic escapades. He had been held in prison once for three days for printing a picture in which Trujillo’s bare leg showed between the cuff of his pants and the top of his sock. Another time, in a misprint he hadn’t caught, Roberto’s article had stated that Senator Smathers had delivered an elegy, instead of a eulogy, of Trujillo before the joint members of the United States Congress. That time Roberto was put in jail for a month.

I had thought for sure the Suarezes would join our movement. So when Leandro moved to the capital to coordinate the cells there, I mentioned the Suarezes to him as a likely couple. Elsa and Roberto were contacted and declared themselves “friendly,” but did not want to join.

Now, in my hard times, my old friend sprang to my side. Every week since our release in August, Elsa had driven up from the capital to visit her elderly grandfather in La Vega. She would then swing up to Santiago, butter up Pena (she was good at this), and get a pass to come see me. Knowing we were in straitened circumstances, she brought bags of “old” clothes that looked fairly new to me. She claimed she couldn’t fit into anything after her babies had been born and she’d gotten big as a cow.

Elsa... always exaggerating. She had the same good figure as always—as far as I could tell. “But look at these hips, please, just look at these legs!” she’d remind me.

Once she asked me, “How do you stay so trim?” Her eyes ran over my figure in an appraising way.

“Prison,” I said flatly. She didn’t mention my figure again.

Elsa and Roberto owned a boat, and every weekend they took it out. “To fish.” Elsa winked. At sea they picked up Swan broadcasts from a little island south of Cuba as well as Radio Rebelde in Cuba and Radio Rumbos from Venezuela. “It’s a regular newsroom out there,” said Elsa, every visit catching me up on the latest news.

One day Elsa appeared, her face flushed with excitement. She couldn’t sit down for a minute, not even for her favorite
pastelito
snack. She had news to tell me that required an immediate walk in the garden. “What is it?” I said, clutching her arm when we were halfway down the anthuriums.

“The OAS has imposed sanctions! Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela,” Elsa counted them off with her fingers, “even the gringos. They’ve all broken relations!” She and Roberto had been out on the boat Sunday and seen an American warship on the horizon.

“The capital is like this!” Elsa rubbed her fingers together. “Roberto says by next year—”

“Next year!” I was alarmed. “By then, who knows what can happen.”

We walked a little while in silence. Far off, I could hear the shouts of the children playing with the big, bright beach ball their Tía Elsa had brought them from the capital. “Dedé tells me I shouldn’t talk to you about all this. But I said to her, Dedé, it’s in Minerva’s blood. I told her about that time you almost shot Trujillo with a toy arrow, remember? I had to step in and pretend it was part of our play.”

I wondered which of us had revised the past to suit the lives we were living now. “
Ay
, Elsa, that’s not how it happened.”

“Well, anyhow, she told me about the time you freed your father’s rabbits because you didn’t think it was right to have them caged.”

That story was remembered my way, but I felt diminished hearing it. “And look at me now.”

“What do you mean? You’ve gained a little weight. You’re looking great!” She ran her eyes over me, nodding in approval. “Minerva, Minerva, I am so proud of you!”

How much I wanted at that moment to unburden myself to my old friend. To confess that I didn’t feel the same as before prison. That I wanted my own life back again.

But before I could say a thing, she grabbed my hands.
“
¡
Viva la Mariposa!”
she whispered with feeling.

I gave her the bright brave smile she also required of me.

Our spirits were so high with the good news we couldn’t wait for Thursday to tell the men. The night before, we were almost festive as we rolled our hair in the bedroom so it would curl for our men the next day. We always did this, no matter how gloomy we were feeling. And they noticed it, too. It was a fact—we had all compared notes—that our men got more romantic the longer they were in prison. Patria claimed that Pedrito, a man of few words if there ever was one, was composing love poems for her and reciting them during visiting hours. The most embarrassing part, she admitted, was that this made her start feeling that way right there in the middle of the prison hall surrounded by guards.

Dedé sat by, watching our preparations with displeasure. She had gotten into the habit of staying over the nights before our visits. She said she had to be at Mamá’s early the next day anyhow to help with all the children once we left. But really, she was there to convince us not to go.

“You’re exposing yourselves to an accident by going down all together,” Dedé began, “that’s what you’re doing.”

We all knew what kind of accident she meant. Just a month ago Mar rero had been found at the foot of a cliff, having supposedly lost control of his car.