In the Time of Butterflies (57 page)

Not long ago, I met Lio at a reception in honor of the girls. Despite what Minou thinks, I don’t like these things. But I always make myself go.

Only if I know he will be there, I won’t go. I mean our current president who was the puppet president the day the girls were killed. “Ay, Dedé,” acquaintances will sometimes try to convince me. “Put that behind you. He’s an old, blind man now.”

“He was blind when he could see,” I’ll snap. Oh, but my blood bums just thinking of shaking that spotted hand.

But most things I go to. “For the girls,” I always tell myself.

Sometimes I allow myself a shot of rum before climbing into the car, not enough to scent the slightest scandal, just a little thunder in the heart. People will be asking things, well meaning but nevertheless poking their fingers where it still hurts. People who kept their mouths shut when a little peep from everyone would have been a chorus the world couldn’t have ignored. People who once were friends of the devil. Everyone got amnesty by telling on everyone else until we were all one big rotten family of cowards.

So I allow myself my shot of rum.

At these things, I always try to position myself near the door so I can leave early. And there I was about to slip away when an older man approached me. On his arm was a handsome woman with an open, friendly face. This old fool is no fool, I’m thinking. He has got himself his young nurse wife for his old age.

I put out my hand, just a reception line habit, I guess. And this man reaches out both hands and clasps mine. “Dedé, caramba, don’t you know who I am?” He holds on tight, and the young woman is beaming beside him. I look again.

“
i
Dios santo, Lío!”
And suddenly, I have to sit down.

The wife gets us both drinks and leaves us alone. We catch up, back and forth, my children, his children; the insurance business, his practice in the capital; the old house I still live in, his new house near the old presidential palace. Slowly, we are working our way towards that treacherous past, the horrible crime, the waste of young lives, the throbbing heart of the wound.

“Ay, Lío,” I say, when we get to that part.

And bless his heart, he takes my hands and says, “The nightmare is over, Dedé. Look at what the girls have done.” He gestures expansively.

He means the free elections, bad presidents now put in power properly, not by army tanks. He means our country beginning to prosper, Free Zones going up everywhere, the coast a clutter of clubs and resorts. We are now the playground of the Caribbean, who were once its killing fields. The cemetery is beginning to flower.

“Ay, Lío,” I say it again.

I follow his gaze around the room. Most of the guests here are young. The boy-businessmen with computerized watches and walkie-talkies in their wives’ purses to summon the chauffeur from the car; their glamorous young wives with degrees they do not need; the scent of perfume; the tinkle of keys to the things they own.

“Oh yes,” I hear one of the women say “we spent a revolution there.”

I can see them glancing at us, the two old ones, how sweet they look under that painting of Bido. To them we are characters in a sad story about a past that is over.

All the way home, I am trembling, I am not sure why.

It comes to me slowly as I head north through the dark countryside-the only lights are up in the mountains where the prosperous young are building their getaway houses, and of course, in the sky, all the splurged wattage of the stars. Lío is right. The nightmare is over; we are free at last. But the thing that is making me tremble, that I do not want to say out loud-and I’ll say it once only and it’s done.

Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?

“Mamá Dedé! Where are you?” Minou must be off the phone. Her voice has that exasperated edge our children get when we dare wander from their lives.
Why aren’t you where I left you?
“Mamá Dedé!”

I stop in the dark depths of the garden as if I’ve been caught about to do something wrong. I turn around. I see the house as I saw it once or twice as a child: the roof with its fairytale peak, the verandah running along three sides, the windows lighted up, glowing with lived life, a place of abundance, a magic place of memory and desire. And quickly I head back, a moth attracted to that marvelous light.

I tuck her in bed and turn off her light and stay a while and talk in the dark.

She tells me all the news of what Camila did today. Of Doroteo’s businesses, of their plans to build a house up north in those beautiful mountains.

I am glad it is dark, so she cannot see my face when she says this.
Up north in those beautiful mountains where both your mother and father were murdered!

But all this is a sign of my success, isn’t it? She’s not haunted and full of hate. She claims it, this beautiful country with its beautiful mountains and splendid beaches—all the copy we read in the tourist brochures.

We make our plans for tomorrow. We’ll go on a little outing to Santiago where I’ll help her pick up some fabrics at El Gallo. They’re having a big sale before they close the old doors and open under new management. A chain of El Gallos is going up all over the island with attendants in rooster-red uniforms and registers that announce how much you are spending. Then we’ll go to the museum where Minou can get some cuttings from Tono for the atrium in her apartment. Maybe Jaime David can have lunch with us. The big important senator from Salcedo better have time for her, Minou warns me.

Fela’s name comes up. “Mamá Dedé, what do you think it means that the girls might finally be at rest?”

That is not a good question for going to bed, I think. Like bringing up a divorce or a personal problem on a postcard. So I give her the brief, easy answer. “That we can let them go, I suppose.”

Thank God, she is so tired and does not push me to say more.

Some nights when I cannot sleep, I lie in bed and play that game Minerva taught me, going back in my memory to this or that happy moment. But I’ve been doing that all afternoon. So tonight I start thinking of what lies ahead instead.

Specifically, the prize trip I’ve as good as won again this year.

The boss has been dropping hints. “You know, Dedé, the tourist brochures are right. We have a beautiful paradise right here. There’s no need to travel far to have a good time.”

Trying to get by cheap this year!

But if I’ve won the prize trip again, I’m going to push for what I want. I’m going to say, “I want to go to Canada to see the leaves.”

“The leaves?” I can just see the boss making his professional face of polite shock. It’s the one he uses on all the
tutumpotes
when they come in wanting to buy the cheaper policies
. Surely your life is worth a lot more, Don Fulano.

“Yes,” I’ll say, “leaves. I want to see the leaves.” But I’m not going to tell him why. The Canadian man I met in Barcelona, on last year’s prize trip, told me about how they turn red and gold. He took my hand in his, as if it were a leaf, spreading out the fingers. He pointed out this and that line in my palm. “Sugar concentrates in the veins.” I felt my resolve to keep my distance melting down like the sugar in those leaves. My face I knew was burning.

“It is the sweetness in them that makes them burn,” he said, looking me in the eye, then smiling. He knew an adequate Spanish, good enough for what he had to say. But I was too scared yet to walk into my life that bold way. When he finished the demonstration, I took back my hand.

But already in my memory, it has happened and I am standing under those blazing trees—flamboyants in bloom in my imagination, not having seen those sugar maples he spoke of. He is snapping a picture for me to bring back to the children to prove that it happens, yes, even to their old Mama Dedé.

It is the sweetness in them that makes them burn.

Usually, at night, I hear them just as I’m falling asleep.

Sometimes, I lie at the very brink of forgetfulness, waiting, as if their arrival is my signal that I can fall asleep.

The settling of the wood floors, the wind astir in the jasmine, the deep released fragrance of the earth, the crow of an insomniac rooster.

Their soft spirit footsteps, so vague I could mistake them for my own breathing.

Their different treads, as if even as spirits they retained their personalities, Patria’s sure and measured step, Minerva’s quicksilver impatience, Mate’s playful little skip. They linger and loiter over things. Tonight, no doubt, Minerva will sit a long while by her Minou and absorb the music of her breathing.

Some nights I’ll be worrying about something, and I’ll stay up past their approaching, and I’ll hear something else. An eerie, hair-raising creaking of riding boots, a crop striking leather, a peremptory footstep that makes me shake myself awake and turn on lights all over the house. The only sure way to send the evil thing packing.

But tonight, it is quieter than I can remember.

Concentrate, Dedé, I say. My hand worries the absence on my left side, a habitual gesture now. My pledge of allegiance, I call it, to all that is missing. Under my fingers, my heart is beating like a moth wild in a lamp shade. Dedé, concentrate!

But all I hear is my own breathing and the blessed silence of those cool, clear nights under the anacahuita tree before anyone breathes a word of the future. And I see them all there in my memory, as still as statues, Mamá and Papá, and Minerva and Mate and Patria, and I’m thinking something is missing now. And I count them all twice before I realize-it’s me, Dedé, it’s me, the one who survived to tell the story.

A Postscript

On August 6, 1960, my family arrived in New York City, exiles from the tyranny of Trujillo. My father had participated in an underground plot that was cracked by the SIM, Trujillo’s famous secret police. At the notorious torture chamber of La Cuarenta (La 40), it was just a matter of time before those who were captured gave out the names of other members.