In the Time of Butterflies (35 page)

Over and over again, I saw the SIM approaching, I saw Nelson and Pedrito hurrying out the back way, Noris’s stricken face. I saw the throng of men at the door, I heard the stomping, the running, the yelling. I saw the house burning.

I saw tiny cells with very little air and no light. I heard doors open, I saw hands intrusive and ugly in their threats. I heard the crack of bones breaking, the thud of a body collapsing. I heard moans, screams, desperate cries.

Oh my sisters, my Pedrito, oh my little lamb!

My crown of thorns was woven of thoughts of my boy. His body I had talcumed, fed, bathed. His body now broken as if it were no more than a bag of bones.

“I’ve been good,” I’d start screaming at the sky, undoing the “recovery.”

And then, Mama would have to send for Dedé. Together Dedé and I would pray a rosary. Afterwards we played our old childhood game, opening the Bible and teasing a fortune out of whatever verse our hands landed on.

And on the third day He rose again...

It was odd living in Mamá’s new house. Everything from the old house was here, but all rearranged. Sometimes I’d find myself reaching for a door that wasn’t there. In the middle of the night, however fearful I was about waking the children, I had to turn on a light to go to the sanitary. Otherwise, I’d end up crashing into the cabinet that never used to be in the hallway in the old house.

In the entryway hung the required portrait of El Jefe, except it wasn’t our old one of Trujillo as a young captain that used to hang next to the Good Shepherd. Mama had acquired this latest portrait and hung it all by itself, out as far as she could get it from the rest of the house. He was older now—heavier, his jowls thicker, the whole face tired out, someone who had had too much of all the bad things in life.

Maybe because I was used to the Good Shepherd and Trujillo side by side in the old house, I caught myself praying a little greeting as I walked by.

Then another time, I came in from outside with my hands full of anthuriums. I looked up at him, and I thought why not. I set up a vase on the table right under his picture.

It seemed natural to add a nice little lace cloth for the table.

I don’t know if that’s how it started, but pretty soon, I was praying to him, not because he was worthy or anything like that. I wanted something from him, and prayer was the only way I knew to ask.

It was from raising children I learned that trick. You dress them in their best clothes and they behave their best to match them.

Nelson, my devil! When he was little, he was always tormenting Noris, always getting into things. I’d call him in, give him a bath. But instead of putting him in his pajamas and sending him to bed in the middle of the day where he’d get bored and mean, I’d dress him up in his gabardine trousers and little linen
guayabera
I’d made him just like his father’s. And then I’d take him with me to Salcedo for an afternoon novena and a coconut ice afterwards. That dressed-up boy acted like an angel!

So, I thought, why not? Treat
him
like a spirit worthy of my attention, and maybe he would start behaving himself.

Every day I changed the flowers and said a few words. Mama thought I was just putting on a show for Peña and his SIM who came by often to check on the family. But Fela understood, except she thought I was trying to strike a deal with the evil one. I wasn’t at all. I wanted to turn him towards his better nature. If I could do that, the rest would follow.

Jefe, I would say, remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.

(That one never worked with him.)

Hear my cry, Jefe. Release my sisters and their husbands and mine. But most especially, I beg you, oh Jefe, give me back my son.

Take me instead, I’ll be your sacrificial lamb.

I hung my Sacred Heart, a recent gift from Don Bernardo, in the bedroom. There I offered, not my trick prayers, but my honest-to-God ones.

I wasn’t crazy, after all. I knew who was
really
in charge.

I had let go of my hard feelings, for the most part, but there was some lingering bitterness. For instance, I had offered myself to El Jefe to do with as he wanted, but I hadn’t extended the same courtesy to God.

I guess I saw it as a clear-cut proposition I was making El Jefe. He would ask for what he always asked for from women. I could give
that.
But there would be no limit to what our Lord would want of Patria Mercedes, body and soul and all the etceteras besides.

With a baby still tugging at my breast, a girl just filling out, and my young-man son behind bars, I wasn’t ready to enter His Kingdom.

In the midst of my trials, there were moments. I can’t say they were moments of Grace. But they were moments of knowing I was on the right track.

One day soon after Mate was taken, Peña showed up. That man gave me a creepy feeling, exactly the same as the one I’d felt in the presence of the devil in the old days, fooling with my hands at night. The children were out on the patio with me. They kept their distance from Pena, refusing the candies he offered them unless I took them from him, in my hands, first. When he reached for Minou to ride on his knee, all of them ran away.

“Lovely children,” he said, to mask the obvious rejection. Are they all yours?“

“No, the boy and the little girl are Minerva‘s, and the baby girl is María Teresa’s.” I said the names very clearly. I wanted it to sink in that he was making these children orphans. “The baby boy and the young girl are mine.”

“Don Pedrito must love those children of his.”

My blood went cold. “What makes you say so, Captain?” I tried to keep my voice even.

“The SIM made your husband an offer, but he wouldn’t take it.”

So, he was still alive! Three times, Dedé and Mama and Jaimito had been down to headquarters, only to be told that there was no record of our prisoners.

“Don’t you want to know what the offer was?” Peña seemed miffed. I had noted that he got some thrill out of having me plead for information.

“Yes, please, captain.”

“Your husband was offered his freedom and his farm back—”

My heart leapt!

“—if he proved his loyalty to El Jefe by divorcing his Mirabal wife.”

“Oh?” I could feel my heart like a hand making a fist in my chest.

Peña’s sharp, piglike eyes were watching me. And then he had his dirty little say. “You Mirabal women must be something else”—he fondled himself—“to keep a man interested when all he can do with his manhood is pass water!”

I had to say two Glory Be’s to myself before I could speak aloud. Even so, my voice threw sparks. “Captain Pena, no matter what you do to my husband, he will always be ten times the man you are!” That evil man threw back his head and laughed, then picked up his cap from his lap and stood to leave. I saw the lump he’d gotten by working me up to this state.

I went in search of the children to calm myself down. I found Minou digging a hole in the ground and burying all the candies Pena had brought. When I asked her why she was wasting her candies, she said she was burying them like the box her Mama and Papá had buried in their yard that was bad to touch.

“This is bad candy,” she said to me.

“Yes, it is,” I said and got down on my knees to help her finish burying it.

Pena’s mention of Pedrito was the first news we had had of any of our prisoners. Then, a few days later, Dedé and Mamá came back from another trip to the capital with the “good news” that the girls’ names, along with those of the men and my Nelson, had appeared on the latest list of three hundred and seventy-two detained. Oh, how relieved we were! As long as the SIM admitted they were in custody, our prisoners stood less of a chance of being disappeared.

Dark as it was, I went out into the garden with Mamá’s scissors. I cut by scent more than sight so that I didn’t know exactly what I had until I was back inside. I arranged his spray of jasmine and stems of gardenias in a vase on the little table, then took the rest of the flowers into my bedroom.

And on the third day, He rose again.

We were already working on the third week. Still, there were moments, like I said—resurrection gathering speed.