In the Time of Butterflies (50 page)

I felt the hair rising on my arms. Mate began to cry.

“Now, now, it’s no reason to get alarmed.” Tío Pepe tried to sound like his usual cheerful self. “If he was really going to do something, he wouldn’t have announced it. That’s the whole point. He was giving me a warning to deliver back to you.”

“But we aren’t doing anything,” Mate said in a weary voice. “We’re locked up here all week except for visiting the men. And it’s not like we don’t have permission from Pena himself.”

“Maybe—for a while, anyhow—you should think about not going out at all.”

So Trujillo was no longer saying Minerva Mirabal was a problem, but that all the Mirabal sisters were. I wondered whether Dedé would be implicated now that I had dragged her with me to Monte Cristi.

Patria hadn’t said a word the whole time. Finally she spoke up. “We can’t desert the men, Tío.”

Just then, the light from the children’s bedroom that gave on the garden went out. As we stood in the dark a while longer, calming ourselves, I had this eerie feeling that we were already dead and looking longingly at the house where our children were growing up without us.

The next morning, Thursday, we stopped as required at SIM headquarters on our way down to La Victoria. Rufino came back to the car without the papers. “He wants to see you.”

Inside, Peña was waiting for us, the fat spider at the center of his web.

“What’s wrong?” I asked the minute we sat down where he pointed. I should have kept my mouth shut and let Patria do the talking.

“You don’t want to make a useless trip, do you?” He waited a long second for the grim possibilities of his statement to sink in.

My nerves were worn thin after the bad night we’d spent. I leapt up—and thank God, Peña’s desk was in the way, for I could have slapped the fat, smug look off his face. “What have you done to our husbands?”

The door opened, a guard peeked in. I recognized Albertico, our village mechanic’s youngest boy. The look of concern was for us, not Pena. “I heard shouts,” he explained.

Peña whirled about at that. “What do you think,
pendejo?,
That I can’t manage a bunch of women by myself?” He shouted obscenities at the scared boy, and ordered him to close the door and to pay attention to his business or he’d have business on his hands he wouldn’t want to pay attention to.

The door closed immediately in a flurry of apologies.

“Sit, sit.” Peña motioned me impatiently towards the bench where my two sisters already sat, rigid, clutching their hands in silent prayer.

“You have to understand,” Patria said in a placating voice. “We’re worried about our husbands. Where are they, Captain?”

“Your husband”—he pointed to her—“is at La Victoria, I have your pass right here.”

With a trembling hand Patria took the paper he offered her. “And Manolo and Leandro?”

“They are being moved.”

“Where?” Mate asked, her pretty face perking up with ridiculous hope.

“To Puerto Plata—”

“Why on earth?” I confronted Peña. I felt Patria squeezing my hand as if to say, watch that tone of voice, girl.

“Why, I thought you would be pleased. Less distance for the butterflies to travel.” Peña spoke with sarcastic emphasis. I wasn’t all that surprised he knew our code name the way people were bruiting it about. Still, I didn’t like the sound of it in his mouth. “Visiting days in Puerto Plata are Fridays,” Peña was explaining to the others. “If you women want to see your men more often, we can arrange for other days as well.”

Certainly there was something suspicious in his granting us these privileges. But all I felt was numb, resigned, sitting in that stuffy office. Not only was there nothing in the world we could do to save the men, there was nothing in the world we could do to save ourselves either.

The soldier was standing on the side of the road with his thumb out, dressed in a camouflage uniform and black, laced-up boots. The sky was low with clouds, a storm coming. On this lonely mountain road, I felt sorry for him.

“What do you say?” I asked the others.

We were evenly divided. I said yes, Mate said no, Patria said whatever.

 

“You decide,” we told Rufino. He was fast becoming our protector and guide. None of Bournigal’s other drivers would take us over the pass.

Mate had grown suspicious of everyone since Tio José’s visit. “He is a soldier,” she reminded us. On my side of the argument I added, “So? We’ll be all the safer.”

“He’s so young,” Patria noted as we approached the shoulder where he stood. It was just an observation, but it tipped the scales, and Rufino stopped to offer the boy a ride.

He sat in front with Rufino, twisting his cap in his hands. The uniform was too large, and the starched shoulders stuck out in crisp, unnatural angles. For a minute, it worried me that he seemed so uncomfortable, maybe he was up to something. But as I studied the closely cropped head and the boyish slenderness of his neck, I decided he was just not used to riding around with ladies. So I made conversation, asking him what he thought of this and that.

He was headed back to Puerto Plata after a three-night furlough to meet his newborn son in Tamboril. We offered him our congratulations, though I thought he was much too young to be a father. Or a soldier, for that matter. Someone was going to have to take in that uniform. Maybe we could do alterations in our new shop.

I remembered the camouflage fatigues I’d sewn for myself last November. Ages ago, it seemed now. The exercises I used to do to get in shape for the revolution! Back then, we believed we’d be in these mountains as guerrillas before the year was over.

And here it was late November, a year later, and we were riding over the pass in a rented Jeep to visit our husbands in prison. The three butterflies, two of them too skittish to sit next to the windows facing the steep drop just inches from the slippery road. One of them, just as scared, but back to her old habits of pretending there was nothing to fear, as el señor Roosevelt had said, but being afraid.

I made myself look down the side of the mountain at the gleaming rocks below. The dangerous possibilities, the fumes from the bad muffler, the bumpiness of the road—I felt a queasiness in my stomach. “Give me one of those Chiclets, after all,” I asked Mate. She’d been chomping on hers ever since we started to climb the mountain on this curving stretch of road.

It was our fourth trip to see them since their transfer to Puerto Plata. We had left the children home this time. They’d already been on the previous Friday to see their daddies, and every one of them had gotten car sick on the way there and back. This mountain road made everyone queasy.

“Tell me something,” I asked the young soldier in the front seat. “What’s it like being posted in Puerto Plata?” The fort there was one of the biggest, most strategic in the country. Its walls stretched out gray and ominous for miles, and its spotlights beamed even into the Atlantic. It was a popular coast for invasions, therefore heavily guarded. “Have you seen any action yet?”

The young soldier half turned in his seat, surprised that a woman should interest herself in such things. “I just joined last February when the call went out. So far I’ve only done prison detail.”

I exchanged a glance with my sisters in the back seat. “You must get some important prisoners from time to time?”

Patria dug her elbow in my ribs, biting her lip so as not to smile.

He nodded gravely, wanting to impress us with his own importance as their guard. “Two politicals came just this last month.”

“What’d they do?” Mate asked in an impressed voice.

The boy hesitated. “I’m not really sure.”

Patria took both Mate’s and my hands in her own. “Are they going to be executed, you think?”

“I don’t believe so. I heard they were going to be moved back to the capital in a few weeks.”

How odd, I thought. Why go to all the trouble of transferring the boys up north only to ship them back in a month? We had already decided on moving to Puerto Plata and opening a store, and this news would ruin that plan. But then, this was just a boy in a too-big uniform. What did he know?

The storm started up about then. Rufino let down the canvas flaps and told the soldier how to do his side. We snapped the back panels in place. The inside of the Jeep grew dark and stuffy.

Soon the downpour was upon us. The heavy rain hit the canvas top with the sound of slaps. I could barely hear Patria or Mate talking, much less Rufino and the young soldier up front.

“Maybe we should think it over,” Patria was saying.

Before our prison visit today, we had planned to look at some rental houses Manolo’s friend Rudy and his wife Pilar had lined up for us. It had all been decided. We would be moving to Puerto Plata with the children by the first of December, opening up a little store at the front of the house. The reaction to our traveling had finally become too disturbing. Every time we left the house, people came out on the road and blessed us. When we got back, we felt obliged to blow the horn, as if to say, “We’re here, safe and sound!”

Dedé and Mamá got weepy every time we started out.

“Those are just rumors,” I’d say, trying to comfort them.

“Talk of the people, voice of God,” Mama would answer, reminding me of the old saying.