In the Time of Butterflies (13 page)

“If I leave my country, it’s only to continue the struggle. We can’t let Chapita kill us
all.”

Then there had been the silence that always followed any compromising mention of the regime in public. One could never be sure who in a group might report what to the police. Every large household was said to have a servant on double payroll.

“I said no more volleyball tonight.” Tio Pepe was looking from one to the other young man. “You two shake and be gentlemen. Come on,” he encouraged. Jaimito stuck out his hand.

Oddly enough, it was Lio, the peace lover, who would not shake at first. Dedé can still picture the long, lanky body holding in tension, not saying a word, and then, finally, Lio reaching out his hand and saying, “We could use men like you, Jaimito.” It was a compliment that allowed the two men to coexist and even to collaborate on romantic matters in the months ahead.

Such a small incident really. A silly explosion over a foul volleyball. But something keeps Dedé coming back to the night of that fight. And to the days and nights that followed. Something keeps her turning and turning these moments in her mind, something. She is no longer sure she wants to find out what.

No matter what Mama said later, she was at first very taken with Virgilio Morales. She would sit in the
galería,
conversing with the young doctor—about the visit of Trygve Lie from the United Nations, the demonstrations in the capital, whether or not there was government in Paradise, and if so what kind it would be. On and on, Mama listened, spoke her mind, Mamá who had always said that all this talking of Minerva’s was unhealthy. After Lío had left, Mamá would say, “What a refined young man.”

Sometimes Dedé felt a little peevish. After all, her beau had been along, too. But not a word was said about that fine young man Jaimito. How handsome he looked in his Mexican
guayabera.
What a funny joke he had made about what the coconut said to the drunk man. Mamá had known him since he was a kindred swelling of her first cousin’s belly. What was there to say about him but, “That Jaimito!”

Dedé and Jaimito would wander off, unnoticed, stealing kisses in the garden. They’d play How Much Meat, Butcher?, Jaimito pretending to saw off Dedé’s shoulder, and instead getting to touch her sweet neck and bare arms. Soon they’d hear Mama calling them from the galeria, a scold in her voice. Once when they did not appear immediately (the butcher had been wanting the whole animal), Mama put a limit to how much Jaimito could come calling—Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays only

But who could control Jaimito, only son of his doting mother, unquestioned boss of his five sisters! He appeared on Mondays to visit Don Enrique, on Tuesdays and Thursdays to help with any loading or unloading at the store, on Fridays to bring what his mother had sent. Mamá sighed, accepting the coconut flan or bag of cherries from their backyard tree. “That Jaimito!”

Then one Sunday afternoon Mate was reading Mamá the newspaper out loud. It was no secret to Dedé that Mama couldn’t read, though Mama still persisted in her story that her eyesight was bad. When Dedé read Mama the news, she was careful to leave out anything that would worry her. But that day, Mate read right out how there had been a demonstration at the university, led by a bunch of young professors, all members of the Communist party. Among the names listed was that of Virgilio Morales! Mamá looked ashen. “Read that over again, slowly,” she commanded.

Mate reread the paragraph, this time realizing what she was reading. “But that isn’t our Lío, is it?”

“Minerva!” Mama called out. From her bedroom, the book she was reading still in hand, appeared the death of them all. “Sit down, young lady, you have some explaining to do.”

Minerva argued eloquently that Mama herself had heard Lío’s ideas, and she had even agreed with them.

“But I didn’t know they were communist ideas!” Mama protested.

That night when Papa came home from doing his man’s business about the farm, Mamá took him to her room and closed the door. From the
galería
where Dedé visited with Jaimito, they could hear Mamá’s angry voice. Dedé could only make out snatches of what Mamá was saying—“ Too busy chasing ... to care ... your own daughter.” Dedé looked at Jaimito, a question in her face. But he looked away. “Your mother shouldn’t blame your father. She might as well blame me for not saying anything.”

“You knew?” Dedé asked.

“What do you mean, Dedé?” He seemed surprised at her plea of innocence. “You knew, too. Didn’t you?”

Dedé could only shake her head. She didn’t really know Lío was a communist, a subversive, all the other awful things the editorial had called him. She had never known an enemy of state before. She had assumed such people would be self-serving and wicked, low-class criminals. But Lío was a fine young man with lofty ideals and a compassionate heart. Enemy of state? Why then, Minerva was an enemy of state. And if she, Dedé, thought long and hard about what was right and wrong, she would no doubt be an enemy of state as well.

“I didn’t know,” she said again. What she meant was she didn’t understand until that moment that they were really living—as Minerva liked to say—in a police state.

A new challenge sounded in Dedé’s life. She began to read the paper with pointed interest. She looked out for key names Lío had mentioned. She evaluated and reflected over what she read. How could she have missed so much before? she asked herself. But then a harder question followed: What was she going to do about it now that she did know?

Small things, she decided. Right now, for instance, she was providing Minerva with an alibi. For after finding out who Lío was exactly, Mamá had forbidden Minerva to bring him into the house. Their courtship or friendship or whatever it was went underground. Every time Jaimito took Dedé out, Minerva, of course, came along as their chaperone, and they picked up Lio along the way.

And after every outing, Dedé would slip into the bedroom Minerva shared with Mate when their little sister was home from school. She’d lie on Mate’s bed and talk and talk, trying to bring herself down from the excitement of the evening. “Did you eat parrot today?” Minerva would say in a sleepy voice from her bed. That one had nerves of steel. Dedé would recount her plans for the future—how she would marry Jaimito; what kind of ceremony they would have; what type house they would buy; how many children they would have—until Minerva would burst out laughing. “You’re not stocking the shelves in the store! Don’t plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.”

“Tell me about you and Lío, then.”

“Ay,
Dedé, I’m so sleepy. And there’s nothing to tell.”

That perplexed Dedé. Minerva claimed she was not in love with Lío. They were comrades in a struggle, a new way for men and women to be together that did not necessarily have to do with romance. Hmm. Dedé shook her head. No matter how interesting-minded she wanted to be, as far as she was concerned, a man was a man and a woman was a woman and there was a special charge there you couldn’t call revolution. She put off her sister’s reticence to that independent streak of hers.

Dedé’s own romance with Jaimito acquired a glamorous, exciting edge with Lío and Minerva always by their side. Most nights when there was no place “safe” to go—a new thrilling vocabulary of danger had entered Dedé’s speech—they’d drive around in Jaimito’s father’s Chevy or Papa’s Ford, Jaimito and Dedé and Minerva visible, Lío hidden in the back of the car. They’d go out to the lagoon, past a military post, and Dedé’s heart would beat fast. They would all talk a while, then Minerva and Lío would grow very quiet, and the only sounds from the back seat were those coming from the front as well. Intent whispers and little giggles.

Maybe that’s why Jaimito went along with these dangerous sallies. Like most people, he avoided anything that might cause trouble. But he must have sensed that engaging in one illegality sort of loosened other holds on Dedé. The presence of Lío gave her the courage to go further with Jaimito than ever before.

But without a plan Dedé’s courage unraveled like a row of stitches not finished with a good, sturdy knot. She couldn’t bear reading in the papers how the police were rounding up people left and right. She couldn’t bear hearing high-flown talk she didn’t understand. Most of all she couldn’t bear having her head so preoccupied and nothing useful to do with her hands.

One night, she asked Lío right out: “How is it you mean to accomplish your goals?”

Thinking back, Dedé remembers a long lecture about the rights of the campesinos, the nationalization of sugar, and the driving away of the Yanqui imperialists. She had wanted something practical, something she could use to stave off her growing fears.
First, we mean to depose the dictator in this and this way. Second, we have arranged for a provisional government. Third, we mean to set up a committee of private citizens to oversee free elections.
She would have understood talk like that.

“Ay,
Lío, ”she said at last, weary with so much hope, so little planning. “Where is it you get your courage?”

“Why, Dedé,” he said, “it’s not courage. It’s common sense.”

Common sense? Sitting around dreaming while the secret police hunted you down! To keep from scolding him, Dedé noted that she liked his shirt. He ran his hand down one side, his eyes far away, “It was Freddy‘s,” he said in a thick voice. Freddy, his comrade, had just been found hanging in his prison cell, a supposed suicide. It seemed weird to Dedé that Lío would wear the dead man’s shirt, and even weirder that he would admit it. In so many ways, Lío was beyond her.

Lio’s name started to appear regularly in the papers. His opposition party had been outlawed. “A party for homosexuals and criminals,” the papers accused. One afternoon, the police came to the Mirabal residence, asking after Virgilio Morales. “We just want him to clear up a little matter,” the police explained. Mama, of course, swore she hadn’t seen Virgilio Morales in months, and furthermore, that he wasn’t allowed in her house.