In the Time of Butterflies (16 page)

Papa returned that night, his face drawn with anger. He ate his supper in silence as if his review of the farm had not gone well. As soon as I could without making Mama more suspicious, I excused myself. I had a throbbing headache, I explained, heading for my room.

In a little while, I heard his knock. “I want to see you outside.” His voice through the door was commanding. I threw water on my face, combed my hands through my hair, and went out to Papa.

He led me down the drive past the dented Ford into the dark garden. The moon was a thin, bright machete cutting its way through patches of clouds. By its sharp light I could see my father stop and turn to face me. With his shrinking and my height, we were now eye to eye.

There was no warning it was coming. His hand slammed into the side of my face as it never had before on any part of my body. I staggered back, stunned more with the idea of his having hit me than with the pain exploding in my head.

“That’s to remind you that you owe your father some respect!”

“I don’t owe you a thing,” I said. My voice was as sure and commanding as his. “You’ve lost my respect.”

I saw his shoulders droop. I heard him sigh. Right then and there, it hit me harder than his slap: I was much stronger than Papá, Mamá was much stronger. He was the weakest one of all. It was he who would have the hardest time living with the shabby choices he’d made. He needed our love.

“I hid them to protect you,” he said. At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I realized he must have discovered the letters missing from his coat pocket.

“I know of at least three of Virgilio’s friends who have disappeared.”

So he was going to pass this off as my fury over his taking my mail. And I knew that in order to go on living under the same roof, I would have to pretend this was our true difference.

That fancy invitation I found in Papá’s pocket caused another uproar—this time from Mamá. It was an invitation to a private party being thrown by Trujillo himself in one of his secluded mansions three hours away. A handwritten note at the end requested that
la señorita
Minerva Mirabal not fail to show.

Now that Papá had become rich, he got invited to a lot of official parties and functions. I always went along as Papa’s partner since Mamá wouldn’t go. “Who wants to see an old woman?” she complained.

“Come on, Mamá,” I argued. “You’re in your prime. A
mujerona
of fifty-one.” I snapped my fingers, jazzing up Mamá’s life. But the truth was, Mama looked old, even older than Papa with his dapper new hat and his linen
guayaberas
and his high black boots, and a debonair cane that seemed more a self-important prop than a walking aid. Her hair had gone steel gray, and she pulled it back in a severe bun that showed off the long-suffering look on her face.

This time, though, Mama didn’t want me to go either. The note at the end scared her. This wasn’t an official do but something personal. In fact, after the last big party, a colonel friend had visited Jaimito’s family asking after the tall, attractive woman Don Enrique Mirabal had brought along. She had caught El Jefe’s eye.

Mama wanted to get me a medical excuse from Doctor Lavandier. After all, migraines and asthma attacks weren’t against the law, were they?

“Trujillo is the law,” Papa whispered, as we all did nowadays when we pronounced the dreaded name.

Finally, Mama relented, but she insisted Pedrito and Patria go along to take care of me, and Jaimito and Dedé go to make sure Patria and Pedrito did their job. María Teresa begged to go, too. But Mama wouldn’t hear of it. Expose another young, single daughter to danger,
¡
No
,
señorita!
Besides, Maria Teresa couldn’t go to night parties until her
quinceañera
next year.

Poor Mate cried and cried. As a consolation prize, I offered to bring her back another souvenir. Last time at the party at Hotel Montana, we all got paper fans with the Virgencita on one side and El Jefe on the other. I kept making Maria Teresa turn the fan around when she sat in front of me, fanning herself. Sometimes it was El Jefe’s probing eyes, sometimes it was the Virgin’s pretty face I couldn’t stand to look at.

With the party a week away, Papá had to get the Ford fixed. The president of our local branch of Trujillo Tillers couldn’t very well arrive at El Jefe’s house in a Jeep. It seemed pretty appropriate to me, but having banged up Papá’s beauty it wasn’t for me to disagree.

While the Ford was at the shop, I drove Papá to his doctor’s appointments in San Francisco. It was sad how the richer he got, the more his health deteriorated. He was drinking too much, even I could see that. His heart was weak and his gout made it painful sometimes for him to move around. Doctor Lavandier had him on treatments twice a week. I’d drop him off, then visit with Dedé and Jaimito at their new ice cream shop until it was time to pick him up.

One morning, Papa told me to go on home. He had some errands to run after his appointment. Jaimito would drive him back later.

“We can run them together,” I offered. When he looked away, I guessed what he was up to. Several days ago, I had driven out to the yellow house and found it all boarded up. Of course! Papá hadn’t broken with this woman but merely moved her off the grounds and into town.

I sat, facing forward, not saying a word.

Finally, he admitted it. “You have to believe me. I only go to see my children. I’m not involved with their mother anymore.”

I waited for things to settle down inside me. Then I said, “I want to meet them. They’re my sisters, after all.”

I could see he was moved by my acknowledging them. He reached over, but I was not ready yet for his hugs. “I’ll be back to pick you up.”

We drove down narrow streets, past row on row of respectable little houses. Finally we came to a stop in front of a pretty turquoise house with the porch and trim painted white. There they were, awaiting Papá, four little girls in look-alike pale yellow gingham dresses. The two oldest must have recognized me, for their faces grew solemn when I got out of the car.

The minute Papá was on the sidewalk, they darted towards him and dug the mints out of his pockets. I felt a pang of jealousy seeing them treat Papá in the same way my sisters and I had.

“This is my big girl, Minerva,” he introduced me. Then, putting a hand on each one’s head, he presented them to me. The oldest, Margarita, was about ten, then three more with about three years’ difference between them down to the baby with her pacifier on a dirty ribbon round her neck. While Papá went inside the house with an envelope, I waited on the porch, asking them questions they were too shy to answer.

As we were leaving, I saw the mother peeking at me from behind the door. I beckoned for her to come out. “Minerva Mirabal,” I said, offering her my hand.

The woman hung her head and mumbled her name, Carmen something. I noticed she was wearing a cheap ring, the adjustable kind that children buy at any street corner from the candy vendors. I wondered if she was trying to pass herself off as a respectable married lady in this, one of the nicer barrios of San Francisco.

As we drove back to Ojo de Agua, I was working out what had been happening ten years back that might have driven Papa into the arms of another woman. Patria, Dedé, and I had just gone away to Inmaculada Concepción, and Maria Teresa would have been all of four years old. Maybe, I told myself, Papa had missed us so much that he had gone in search of a young girl to replace us? I looked over at him and instantly he looked my way.

“That was very fine of you,” he said, smiling hesitantly.

“I know the clouds have already rained,” I said, “but, Papa, why did you do it?”

His hands gripped his cane until his knuckles whitened.
“Cosas de los hombres,”
he said. Things a man does. So that was supposed to excuse him, macho that he was!

Before I could ask him another question, Papa spoke up. “Why’d you do what you just did?”

Quick as my reputation said my mouth was, I couldn’t come up with an answer, until I remembered his own words. “Things a woman does.”

And as I said those words my woman’s eyes sprang open.

All the way home I kept seeing them from the comers of my eyes, men bending in the fields, men riding horses, men sitting by the side of the road, their chairs tipped back, nibbling on a spear of grass, and I knew very well I was looking at what I wanted at last.

By the time we find the party, we’re an hour late. All the way here Papá and Pedrito and Jaimito have been working out the details of their story. “You say how we started out early this morning to give us plenty of time, and then you say we didn’t know the way.” Papa assigns the different facts to his sons-in-law

“And you”—he looks around at me in the back seat—“you keep quiet.”

“You don’t have to plan anything when you’re telling the truth,” I remind them. But no one listens to me. Why should they? They’re probably thinking I got them into this.

Here is the truth. We arrived in San Cristóbal late this afternoon and got a room at the local hotel and changed. By then, our dresses were a mess from riding around on our laps all day. “The worse you look, the better for you,” Patria said when I complained that I looked like I’d gotten here on a donkey.

Then we climbed back in the car and drove forever. As a man who
always
knows where he’s going, Jaimito couldn’t very well stop to ask for directions. Soon we were lost on the back roads somewhere near Baní. At a checkpoint, a
guardia
finally convinced Jaimito that we were going the wrong way. We headed back, an hour late.

Jaimito parks the Ford at the end of the long driveway, facing the road. “In case we have to take off quickly,” he says in a low voice. He’s been a bundle of nerves about this whole outing. I guess we all have.

It’s a hike to the house. Every few steps we have to stop at a checkpoint and flash our invitation. The driveway is well lit, so at least we can see the puddles before we splash into them. It’s been raining on and off all day, the usual October hurricane weather. This year, though, the rains seem more severe than ever, everyone says so. My theory is that the god of thunder Huracán always acts up around the holiday of the Conquistador, who killed off all his Taino devotees. When I suggest this to Patria as we walk up the drive, she gives me her pained Madonna look.
“Ay, Minerva, por
Dios, keep that tongue in check tonight.”

Manuel de Moya is pacing back and forth at the entrance. I recognize him from the last party, and of course his picture is always in the papers. “Secretary of state,” people say, winking one eye. Everyone knows his real job is rounding up pretty girls for El Jefe to try out. How they get talked into it, I don’t know. Manuel de Moya is supposed to be so smooth with the ladies, they probably think they’re following the example of the Virgencita if they bed down with the Benefactor of the Fatherland.

Papa starts in on our explanation, but Don Manuel cuts him off. “This is not like him. The Spanish ambassador has been waiting.” He checks his watch, holding it to his ear as if it might whisper El Jefe’s whereabouts. “You didn’t see any cars on the way?” Papa shakes his head, his face full of exaggerated concern.

Don Manuel snaps his fingers, and several officers rush forward for instructions. They are to keep a sharp lookout while he escorts the Mirabals to their table. We wonder at this special attention, and Papa begs Don Manuel not to go to so much bother. “This,” he says, offering me his arm, “is all my pleasure.”

We go down a long corridor, and into a courtyard hung with lanterns. The crowd hushes as we enter. The band leader stands up but then sits back down when he realizes it’s not El Jefe. Luis Alberti moved his whole orchestra from the capital just to be on call at Casa de Caoba. This is supposed to be El Jefe’s favorite party mansion, where he keeps his favorite of the moment. At the last few parties the excited gossip in the powder rooms has been that at present the house is vacant.