In the Time of Butterflies (55 page)

When we got to the SIM post at the first little town, I cried out, “Assassins! Assassins!”

Jaimito gunned the motor to drown out my cries. When I did it again at the next town, he pulled over and came to the back of the pickup. He made me sit down on one of the boxes. “Dedé,
mujer,
what is it you want—to get yourself killed, too?”

I nodded. I said, “I want to be with them.”

He said—I remember it so clearly—he said, “This is your martyrdom, Dede, to be alive without them.”

“What are you thinking, Mama Dedé?” Minou has come to the window. With her arms folded on the sill, she looks like a picture.

I smile at her and say, “Look at that moon.” It is not a remarkable moon, waning, hazy in the cloudy night. But as far as I’m concerned, a moon is a moon, and they all bear remarking. Like babies, even homely ones, each a blessing, each one born with—as Mama used to say—its loaf of bread under its arm.

“Tell me about Camila,” I ask her. “Has she finished growing that new tooth?”

With first-time-mother exactitude Minou tells me everything, down to how her little girl feeds, sleeps, plays, poops.

Later the husbands told me their stories of that last afternoon. How they tried to convince the girls not to go. How Minerva refused to stay over with friends until the next morning. “It was the one argument she should have lost,” Manolo said. He would stand by the porch rail there for a long time, in those dark glasses he was always wearing afterwards. And I would leave him to his grief.

This was after he got out. After he was famous and riding around with bodyguards in that white Thunderbird some admirer had given him. Most likely a woman. Our Fidel, our Fidel, everyone said. He refused to run for president for those first elections. He was no politician, he said. But everywhere he went, Manolo drew adoring crowds.

He and Leandro were transferred back to the capital the Monday following the murder. No explanation. At La Victoria, they rejoined Pedrito, the three of them alone in one cell. They were extremely nervous, waiting for Thursday visiting hours to find out what was going on. “You had no idea?” I asked Manolo once. He turned around right there, with that oleander framing him. Minerva had planted it years back when she was cooped up here, wanting to get out and live the bigger version of her life. He took off those glasses, and it seemed to me that for the first time I saw the depth of his grief.

“I probably knew, but in prison, you can’t let yourself know what you know.” His hands clenched the porch rail there. I could see he was wearing his class ring again, the one that had been on Minerva’s hand.

Manolo tells how that Thursday they were taken out of their cell and marched down the hall. For a brief moment they were hopeful that the girls were all right after all. But instead of the visitors’ room, they were led downstairs to the officers’ lounge. Johnny Abbes and Cándido Torres and other top SIM cronies were waiting, already quite drunk. This was going to be a special treat, by invitation only, a torture session of an unusual nature, giving the men the news.

I didn’t want to listen anymore. But I made myself listen—it was as if Manolo had to say it and I had to hear it—so that it could be human, so that we could begin to forgive it.

There are pictures of me at that time where even I can’t pick myself out. Thin like my little finger. A twin of my skinny Noris. My hair cropped short like Minerva’s was that last year, held back by bobby pins. Some baby or other in my arms, another one tugging at my dress. And you never see me looking at the camera. Always I am looking away.

But slowly—how does it happen?—I came back from the dead. In a photo I have of the day our new president came to visit the monument, I’m standing in front of the house, all made up, my hair in a bouffant style. Jacqueline is in my arms, already four years old. Both of us are waving little flags.

Afterwards, the president dropped in for a visit. He sat right there in Papa’s old rocker, drinking a frozen
limonada,
telling me his story. He was going to do all sorts of things, he told me. He was going to get rid of the old generals with their hands still dirty with Mirabal blood. All those properties they had stolen he was going to distribute among the poor. He was going to make us a nation proud of ourselves, not run by the Yanqui imperialists.

Every time he made one of these promises, he’d look at me as if he needed me to approve what he was doing. Or really, not me, but my sisters whose pictures hung on the wall behind me. Those photos had become icons, emblazoned on posters—already collectors’ pieces.
Bring back the butterflies!

At the end, as he was leaving, the president recited a poem he’d composed on the ride up from the capital. It was something patriotic about how when you die for your country, you do not die in vain. He was a poet president, and from time to time Manolo would say,
“Ay,
if Minerva had lived to see this.” And I started to think, maybe it was for something that the girls had died.

Then it was like a manageable grief inside me. Something I could bear because I could make sense of it. Like when the doctor explained how if one breast came off, the rest of me had a better chance. Immediately, I began to live without it, even before it was gone.

I set aside my grief and began hoping and planning.

When it all came down a second time, I shut the door. I did not receive any more visitors. Anyone had a story, go sell it to
Vanidades,
go on the Talk to
Felix Show.
Tell them how you felt about the coup, the president thrown out before the year was over, the rebels up in the mountains, the civil war, the landing of the marines.

I overheard one of the talk shows on the radio Tinita kept turned on in the outdoor kitchen all the time. Somebody analyzing the situation. He said something that made me stop and listen.

“Dictatorships,” he was saying, “are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece of himself in every one of us.”

Ah, I thought, touching the place above my heart where I did not yet know the cells were multiplying like crazy. So this is what is happening to us.

Manolo’s voice sounds blurry on the memorial tape the radio station sent me,
In memory of our great hero. When you die for your country, you do not die in vain.

It is his last broadcast from a hidden spot in the mountains. “Fellow Dominicans!” he declaims in a grainy voice. “We must not let another dictatorship rule us!” Then something else lost in static. Finally, “Rise up, take to the streets! Join my comrades and me in the mountains! When you die for your country, you do not die in vain!”

But no one joined them. After forty days of bombing, they accepted the broadcast amnesty. They came down from the mountains with their hands up, and the generals gunned them down, every one.

I was the one who received the seashell Manolo sent Minou on his last day. In its smooth bowl he had etched with a penknife,
For my little Minou, at the end of a great adventure,
then the date he was murdered, December 21, 1963. I was furious at his last message. What did he mean,
a great adventure. A disgrace
was more like it.

I didn’t give it to her. In fact, for a while, I kept his death a secret from her. When she’d ask, I’d tell her, “
Sí
,
si,
Papi is up in the mountains fighting for a better world.” And then, you see, after about a year or so of that story it was an easy next step for him to be up in heaven with her Mami and her Tía Patria and her Tía Mate living in a better world.

She looked at me when I told her this—she must have been eight by then—and her little face went very serious. “Mamá Dedé,” she asked, ”is Papi dead?“

I gave her the shell so she could read his goodbye for herself.

“That was a funny woman,” Minou is saying. “At first I thought you were friends or something. Where did you pick her up, Mama Dedé?”

“Me? Pick her up! You seem to forget,
mi amor,
that the museum is just five minutes away and everyone shows up there wanting to hear the story, firsthand.” I am rocking harder as I explain, getting angrier. Everyone feels they can impose. The Belgian movie maker who had me pose with the girls’ photos in my hands; the Chilean woman writing a book about women and politics; the schoolchildren who want me to hold up the braid and tell them why I cut it off in the first place.