In the Time of Butterflies (31 page)

“This isn’t what we came for,” Patria reminded Minerva, who stood and walked to the porch rail and stared out into the garden.

Dedé raked her eyes over the yard, half-afraid her sister was finding fault there, too. But the crotons were lusher than ever and the variegated bougainvilleas she hadn’t thought would take were heavy with pink blossoms. All the beds were neat and weedless. Everything in its place. Only in the new bed where she’d just been working did the soil look torn up. And it was disturbing to see—among the established plantings—the raw brown earth like a wound in the ground.

“We want you with us. That’s why we’re here.” Minerva’s eyes as she fixed them on her sister were full of longing.

“What if I can’t?” Dedé’s voice shook. “Jaimito thinks it’s suicide. He’s told me he’ll have to leave me if I get mixed up in this thing.” There, she’d said it. Dedé felt the hot flush of shame on her face. She was hiding behind her husband’s fears, bringing down scorn on him instead of herself.

“Our dear cousin,” Minerva said sarcastically. But she stopped herself on a look from Patria.

“Everyone has their own reasons for the choices they make,” Patria said, defusing the charged atmosphere, “and we have to respect that.”

Blessed are the peacemakers, Dedé thought, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what the prize was that had been promised them.

“Whatever you decide, we’ll understand,” Patria concluded, looking around at her sisters.

Mate nodded, but Minerva could never leave well enough alone. As she climbed in the car, she reminded Dedé, “Next Sunday at Patria’s around three. In case you change your mind,” she added.

As she watched them drive away, Dedé felt strangely mingled surges of dread and joy. Kneeling at the new bed helped calm the shaking in her knees. Before she had finished smoothing the soil and laying out a border of little stones, she had worked out her plan. Only much later did she realize she had forgotten to put any seeds in the ground.

She would leave him.

Next to that decision, attending the underground meeting over at Patria’s was nothing but a small step after the big turn had been taken. All week she refined the plan for it. As she beat the mattresses and fumigated the baseboards for red ants, as she chopped onions for the boys’ breakfast mangú and made them drink
limonsillo
tea to keep away the cold going around, she plotted. She savored her secret, which tasted deliciously of freedom, as she allowed his weight on her in the dark bedroom and waited for him to be done.

Next Sunday, while Jaimito was at his
gallera,
Dedé would ride over to the meeting. When he came back, he would find the note propped on his pillow.

I feel like I’m buried alive. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.

Their life together had collapsed. From puppydog devotion, he had moved on to a moody bossiness complicated with intermittent periods of dogged remorse that would have been passion had there been less of his hunger and more of her desire in it. True to her nature, Dedé had made the best of things, eager for order, eager for peace. She herself was preoccupied—by the births of their sons, by the family setbacks after Papa was jailed, by Papá’s sad demise and death, by their own numerous business failures. Perhaps Jaimito felt broken by these failures and her reminders of how she had tried to prevent them. His drinking, always social, became more solitary.

It was natural to blame herself. Maybe she hadn’t loved him enough. Maybe he sensed how someone else’s eyes had haunted her most of her married life.

Lío! What had become of him? Dedé had asked Minerva several times, quite casually, about their old friend. But Minerva didn’t know a thing. Last she’d heard Lio had made it to Venezuela where a group of exiles was training for an invasion.

Then, recently, without her even asking, Minerva had confided to Dedé that their old friend was alive and kicking. “Tune into Radio Rumbos, 99 on your dial.” Minerva knew Jaimito would be furious if he found Dedé listening to that outlawed station, yet her sister taunted her.

One naughty night, Dedé left Jaimito sleeping heavily after sex and stole out to the far end of the garden to the little shack where she kept the garden tools. There, in the dark, sitting on a sack of bark chips for her orchids, Dedé had slowly turned the dial on Jaimito Enrique’s transistor radio. The static crackled, then a voice, very taken with itself, proclaimed, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!”

Fidel’s speech was played endlessly at these off hours, as Dedé soon found out. But night after night, she kept returning to the shack, and twice she was rewarded with the unfamiliar, blurry voice of someone introduced as Comrade Virgilio. He spoke his high-flown talk which had never been what had appealed to Dedé. Even so, night after night, she returned to the shed, for these excursions were what mattered now. They were her secret rebellion, her heart hungering, her little underground of one.

Now, planning her exodus, Dedé tried to imagine Lio’s surprise at hearing Dedé had joined her sisters. He would know that she, too, was one of the brave ones. His sad, sober eyes that had hung before her mind’s eye for so many years melted into the ones that looked back at her now from the mirror.
I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.

As the day drew closer, Dedé was beset by doubts, particularly when she thought about her boys.

Enrique, Rafael, David, how could she possibly leave them?

Jaimito would never let her keep them. He was more than possessive with his sons, claiming them as if they were parts of himself. Look at how he had named them all with his first name as well as his last! Jaime Enrique Fernández. Jaime Rafael Fernández. Jaime David Fernández. Only their middle names, which perforce became their given names, were their own.

It wasn’t just that she couldn’t bear losing her boys, although that in itself was a dread large enough to stop her in her tracks. She also couldn’t desert them. Who would stand between them and the raised hand when their father lost his temper? Who would make them
mangú
the way they liked it, cut their hair so it looked right, and sit in the dark with them when they were scared and the next morning not remind them she had been there?

She needed to talk to someone, outside her sisters. The priest! She’d gotten lax in her church attendance. The new militancy from the pulpit had become like so much noise in a place you had come to hear soothing music. But now that noise seemed in harmony with what she was feeling inside. Maybe this new young priest Padre de Jesus would have an answer for her.

She arranged for a ride that Friday with Mamá’s new neighbors, Don Bernardo and his wife Doña Belén, old Spaniards who had been living down in San Cristóbal for years. They had decided to move to the countryside, Don Bernardo explained, hoping the air would help Dona Belen. Something was wrong with the frail, old woman—she was forgetting the simplest things, what a fork was for, how to button her dress, was it the seed or the meat of the mango you could eat. Don Bernardo was taking her to Salcedo for yet another round of tests at the clinic. “We won’t be coming back until late afternoon. I hope that won’t inconvenience you very much?” he apologized. The man was astonish ingly courtly

“Not at all,” Ded6 assured him. She could just be dropped off at the church.

“What have you got to do all day in church?” Doña Belen had a disconcerting ability to suddenly tune in quite clearly, especially to what was none of her business.

“Community work,” Dede lied.

“You Mirabal girls are so civic-minded,” Don Bernardo observed. No doubt he was thinking of Minerva, or his favorite, Patria.

It was harder to satisfy Jaimito’s suspicions. “If you need to go to Salcedo, I’ll take you tomorrow.” He had come into the bedroom as she was getting dressed that Friday morning.

“Jaimito,
por Dios
!
”
she pleaded. He had already forbidden her to go about with her sisters, was he now going to keep her from accompanying a poor old woman to the doctor?

“Since when has Dona Belén been a preoccupation of yours?” Then he said the thing he knew would make her feel the guiltiest. “And what about leaving the boys when they’re sick?”

“All they have is colds, for God’s sake. And Tinita’s here with them.”

Jaimito blinked in surprise at her sharp tone. Was it really this easy Dede wondered, taking command?

“Do as you please then!” He was giving her little knowing nods, his hands curling into fists. “But remember, you’re going over my head!”

Jaimito did not return her wave as they drove away from Ojo de Agua. Something threatening in his look scared her. But Dedé kept reminding herself she need not be afraid. She was going to be leaving him. She told herself to keep that in mind.

No one answered her knock at the rectory, although she kept coming back every half hour, all morning long. In between times, she idled in shops, remembering Jaimito’s look that morning, feeling her resolve draining away. At noon, when everything closed up, she sat under a shade tree in the square and fed the pieces of the pastry she’d bought to the pigeons. Once she thought she saw Jaimito’s pickup, and she began making up stories for why she had strayed from Dona Belén at the clinic.

Midafternoon, she spotted a green panel truck pulling up to the rectory gates. Padre de Jesus was in the passenger seat, another man was driving, a third jumped out from the back, unlocked the courtyard gates, and closed them after the truck pulled in.

Dedé hurried across the street. There was only a little time left before she had to meet up with Don Bernardo and Doña Belén at the clinic, and she had to talk to the priest. All day, the yeses and noes had been swirling inside her, faster, faster, until she felt dizzy with indecision. Waiting on that bench, she had promised herself that the priest’s answer would decide it, once and for all.

She knocked several times before Padre de Jesus finally came to the door. Many apologies, he was unloading the truck, hadn’t heard the knocker until just now. Please, please come in. He would be right with her.

He left her sitting in the small vestibule while he finished up with the delivery Dedé could hear going on in the adjoining choir room. Over his shoulder as he departed, Dedé caught a glimpse of some pine boxes, half-covered by a tarpaulin. Something about their color and their long shape recalled an incident in Patria’s house last fall. Dedé had come over to help paint the baby’s room. She had gone into Noris’s room in search of some old sheets to lay on the floor, and there, in the closet, hidden behind a row of dresses, she’d seen several boxes just like these, standing on end. Patria had come in, acting very nervous, stammering about those boxes being full of new tools. Not too long after, when Patria had come with her request to hide some boxes, Dedé had understood what tools were inside them.

My God, Padre de Jesus was one of them! He would encourage her to join the struggle. Of course, he would. And she knew, right then and there, her knees shaking, her breath coming short, that she could not go through with this business. Jaimito was just an excuse. She was afraid, plain and simple, just as she had been afraid to face her powerful feelings for Lío. Instead, she had married Jaimito, although she knew she did not love him enough. And here she’d always berated him for his failures in business when the greater bankruptcy had been on her part.