In the Time of Butterflies (8 page)

So, late that night, they knocked on the convent door. Sor Asunción appeared, in her night dress, wearing a nightcap, and Minerva told her the problem.

Minerva said she still doesn’t know if Sor Asunción agreed to help Hilda out of the goodness of her heart or because this was a perfect lesson to teach that fresh girl. Imagine! Hilda, who doesn’t even believe in God!

The police have been here again today. They passed right by Sor Hilda with her hands tucked in her sleeves and her head bowed before the statue of the Merciful Mother. If I weren’t so scared, I’d be laughing.

 

Dear Little Book,

Minerva graduated this last Sunday. Everyone went to La Vega to watch her get her diploma. Even Patria with her stomach big as a house. She is expecting any day now.

We are home for the summer. I can’t wait to go swimming. Minerva says she’s taking me to our lagoon and diving right in herself in her “temptation” swimsuit. She says why keep her promesa when Mamá and Papá still won’t let her go to law school in the capital?

I’m going to spend the summer learning things I really want to learn! Like (1) doing embroidery from Patria (2) keeping books from Dedé (3) cooking cakes from my Tía Flor (I’ll get to see more of my cute cousin Berto, and Raúl, too!!!) (4) spells from Fela (I better not tell Mama!) (5) how to argue so I’m right, and anything else Minerva wants to teach me.

 

Sunday, July 20

Oh Little Book,

We all just got back from the cemetery burying Patria’s baby boy that was born dead yesterday.

Patria is very sad and cries all the time. Mama keeps repeating that the Lord knows what he does and Patria nods like she doesn’t half believe it. Pedrito just cracks his knuckles and consoles her by saying that they can have another one real soon. Imagine making such a gross promise to someone who is already having a hard enough time.

They are going to stay with us until she feels better. I am trying to be brave, but every time I think of that pretty baby dead in a box like it doesn’t have a soul at all, I just start to cry.

I better stop till I get over my emotions.

 

Wednesday, in a hurry

My dearest Little Book, Oh my dearest,

Minerva asks if I’m ready to hand you over. I say, give me a minute to explain things and say goodbye.

Hilda has been caught! She was grabbed by the police while trying to leave the convent. Everyone in Don Horacio’s meeting group has been told to destroy anything that would make them guilty.

Minerva is burying all her poems and papers and letters. She says she hadn’t meant to read my diary, but it was lying around, and she noticed Hilda’s name. She says it was not really right to read it, but sometimes you have to do something wrong for a higher good. (Some more of that lawyer talk she likes so much!) She says we have to bury you, too.

It won’t be forever, my dear Little Book, I promise. As soon as things are better, Minerva says we can dig up our treasure box. She’s told Pedrito about our plan and he’s already found a spot among his cacao where he’s going to dig a hole for us to bury our box.

So, my dearest, sweetest Little Book, now you know.

Minerva was right. My soul has gotten deeper since I started writing in you. But this is what I want to know that not even Minerva knows.

What do I do now to fill up that hole?

CHAPTER FOUR

Patria

1946

 

 

 

 

From the beginning, I felt it, snug inside my heart, the pearl of great price. No one had to tell me to believe in God or to love everything that lives. I did it automatically like a shoot inching its way towards the light.

Even being born, I was coming out, hands first, as if reaching up for something. Thank goodness, the midwife checked Mamá at the last minute and lowered my arms the way you fold in a captive bird’s wings so it doesn’t hurt itself trying to fly.

So you could say I was born, but I wasn’t really here. One of those spirit babies,
alelá,
as the country people say. My mind, my heart, my soul in the clouds.

It took some doing and undoing to bring me down to earth.

From the beginning, I was so good, Mamá said she’d forget I was there. I slept through the night, entertaining myself if I woke up and no one was around. Within the year, Dedé was born, and then a year later Minerva came along, three babies in diapers! The little house was packed tight as a box with things that break. Papa hadn’t finished the new bedroom yet, so Mama put me and Dedé in a little cot in the hallway. One morning, she found me changing Dedé’s wet diaper, but what was funny was that I hadn’t wanted to disturb Mama for a clean one, so I had taken off mine to put on my baby sister.

“You’d give anything away, your clothes, your food, your toys. Word got around, and while I was out, the country people would send their kids over to ask you for a cup of rice or a jar of cooking oil. You had no sense of holding on to things.

“I was afraid,” she confessed, “that you wouldn’t live long, that you were already the way we were here to become.”

Padre Ignacio finally calmed her fears. He said that maybe I had a calling for the religious life that was manifesting itself early on. He said, with his usual savvy and humor, “Give her time, Dona Chea, give her time. I’ve seen many a little angel mature into a fallen one.”

His suggestion was what got the ball rolling. I was called, even I thought so. When we played make-believe, I’d put a sheet over my shoulders and pretend I was walking down long corridors, saying my beads, in my starched vestments.

I’d write out my religious name in all kinds of script—
Sor Mercedes
—the way other girls were trying out their given names with the surnames of cute boys. I’d see those boys and think, Ah yes, they will come to Sor Mercedes in times of trouble and lay their curly heads in my lap so I can comfort them. My immortal soul wants to take the whole blessed world in! But, of course, it was my body, hungering, biding its time against the tyranny of my spirit.

At fourteen, I went away to Inmaculada Concepción, and all the country people around here thought I was entering the convent. “What a pity,” they said, “such a pretty girl.”

That’s when I started looking in the mirror. I was astonished to find, not the child I had been, but a young lady with high firm breasts and a sweet oval face. She smiled, dimpling prettily, but the dark, humid eyes were full of yearning. I put my hands up against the glass to remind her that she, too, must reach up for the things she didn’t understand.

At school the nuns watched me. They saw the pains I took keeping my back straight during early mass, my hands steepled and held up of my own volition, not perched on the back of a pew as if petition were conversation. During Lent, they noted no meat passed my lips, not even a steaming broth when a bad catarrh confined me to the infirmary.

I was not yet sixteen that February when Sor Asunción summoned me to her office. The flamboyants,.I remember, were in full bloom. Entering that sombre study, I could see just outside the window the brilliant red flames lit in every tree, and beyond, some threatening thunderclouds.

“Patria Mercedes,” Sor Asunción said, rising and coming forward from behind her desk. I knelt for her blessing and kissed the crucifix she held to my lips. I was overcome and felt the heart’s tears brimming in my eyes. Lent had just begun, and I was always in a state during those forty days of the passion of Christ.

“Come, come, come”—she helped me up—“we have much to speak of.” She led me, not to the stiff chair set up, interrogative style, in front of her desk, but to the plush crimson cushion of her window seat.

We sat one at each end. Even in the dimming light I could see her pale gray eyes flecked with knowing. I smelled her wafer smell and I knew I was in the presence of the holy. My heart beat fast, scared and deeply excited.

“Patria Mercedes, have you given much thought to the future?” she asked me in a whispery voice.

Surely it would be pride to claim a calling at my young age! I shook my head, blushing, and looked down at my palms, marked, the country people say, with a map of the future.

“You must pray to the Virgencita for guidance,” she said.

I could feel the tenderness of her gaze, and I looked up. Beyond her, I saw the first zigzag of lightning, and heard, far off, the rumble of thunder. “I do, Sister, I pray at all times to know His will so it can be done.”

She nodded. “We have noticed from the first how seriously you take your religious obligations. Now you must listen deeply in case He is calling. We would welcome you as one of us if that is His Will.”

I felt the sweet release of tears. My face was wet with them. “Now, now,” she said, patting my knees. “Let’s not be sad.”

“I’m not sad, Sister,” I said when I had regained some composure. “These are tears of joy and hope that He will make His will known to me.”

“He will,” she assured me. “Listen at all times. In wakefulness, in sleep, as you work and as you play.”

I nodded and then she added, “Now let us pray together that soon, soon, you will know.” And I prayed with her, a Hail Mary and an Our Father, and I tried hard but I could not keep my eyes from straying to the flame trees, their blossoms tumbling in the wind of the coming storm.

There was a struggle, but no one could tell. It came in the dark in the evil hours when the hands wake with a life of their own. They rambled over my growing body, they touched the plumping of my chest, the mound of my belly, and on down. I tried reining them in, but they broke loose, night after night.

For Three Kings, I asked for a crucifix for above my bed. Nights, I laid it beside me so that my hands, waking, could touch his suffering flesh instead and be tamed from their shameful wanderings. The ruse worked, the hands slept again, but other parts of my body began to wake.

My mouth, for instance, craved sweets, figs in their heavy syrup, coconut candy, soft golden flans. When those young men whose surnames had been appropriated for years by my mooning girlfriends came to the store and drummed their big hands on the counter, I wanted to take each finger in my mouth and feel their calluses with my tongue.

My shoulders, my elbows, my knees ached to be touched. Not to mention my back and the hard cap of my skull. “Here’s a peseta,” I’d say to Minerva. “Play with my hair.” She’d laugh, and combing her fingers through it, she’d ask, “Do you really believe what the gospel says? He knows how many strands of hair are on your head?”

“Come, come, little sister,” I’d admonish her. “Don’t play with the word of God.”

“I’m going to count them,” she’d say. “I want to see how hard His work is.”