In the Time of Butterflies (54 page)

After the men were sentenced, they gave interviews that were on the news all the time. What did the murderers of the Mirabal sisters think of this and that? Or so I heard. We didn’t own a TV, and the one at Mamá’s we turned on only for the children’s cartoons. I‘didn’t want them to grow up with hate, their eyes fixed on the past. Never once have the names of the murderers crossed my lips. I wanted the children to have what their mothers would have wanted for them, the possibility of happiness.

Once in a while, Jaimito brought me a newspaper so I could see all the great doings in the country. But I’d roll it up tight as I could get it and whack at the house flies. I missed some big things that way. The day Trujillo was assassinated by a group of seven men, some of them his old buddies. The day Manolo and Leandro were released, Pedrito having already been freed. The day the rest of the Trujillo family fled the country. The day elections were announced, our first free ones in thirty-one years.

“Don’t you want to know all about it?” Jaimito would ask, grinning, trying to get me excited. Or more likely, hopeful. I’d smile, grateful for his caring. “Why? When I can hear it all from you, my dear?”

Not that I was really listening as he went on and on, recounting what was in the papers. I pretended to, nodding and smiling from my chair. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. After all, I listened to everyone else.

But the thing was, I just couldn’t take one more story.

In her mother’s old room, I hear Minou, getting ready for bed. She keeps a steady patter through the open window, catching me up on her life since we last talked. The new line of play clothes she designed for her store in the capital; the course she is teaching at the university on poetry and politics; Jacqueline’s beautiful little baby and the remodeling of her penthouse; Manolito, busy with his agricultural projects—all of them smart young men and women making good money. They aren’t like us, I think. They knew almost from the start they had to take on the world.

“Am I boring you, Mamá Dedé?”

“Not at all!” I say, rocking in pleasing rhythm to the sound of her voice.

The little news, that’s what I like, I tell them. Bring me the little news.

Sometimes they came to tell me just how crazy I was. To say, “Ay, Dedé, you should have seen yourself that day!”

The night before I hadn’t slept at all. Jaime David was sick and kept waking up, feverish, needing drinks of water. But it wasn’t him keeping me up. Every time he cried out I was already awake. I finally came out here and waited for dawn, rocking and rocking like I was bringing the day on. Worrying about my boy, I thought.

And then, a soft shimmering spread across the sky. I listened to the chair rockers clacking on the tiles, the isolated cock crowing, and far off, the sound of hoof beats, getting closer, closer. I ran all the way around the
galería
to the front. Sure enough, here was Mamá’s yardboy galloping on the mule, his legs hanging almost to the ground. Funny, the thing that you remember as most shocking. Not a messenger showing up at that eerie time of early dawn, the dew still thick on the grass. No. What shocked me most was that anybody had gotten our impossibly stubborn mule to gallop.

The boy didn’t even dismount. He just called out, “Doña Dedé, your mother, she wants you to come right away.”

I didn’t even ask him why. Did I already guess? I rushed back into the house, into our bedroom, threw open the closet, yanked my black dress off its hanger, ripping the right sleeve, waking Jaimito with my piteous crying.

When Jaimito and I pulled into the drive, there was Mamá and all the kids running out of the house. I didn’t think
the girls,
right off. I thought, there’s a fire, and I started counting to make sure everybody was out.

The babies were all crying like they had gotten shots. And here comes Minou tearing away from the others towards the truck so Jaimito had to screech to a stop.

“Lord preserve us, what is going on?” I ran to them with my arms open. But they hung back, stunned, probably at the horror on my face, for I had noticed something odd.

“Where are they!?” I screamed.

And then, Mamá says to me, she says,
“Ay,
Dedé, tell me it isn’t true, ay, tell me it isn’t true.”

And before I could even think what she was talking about, I said, “It isn’t true, Mamá, it isn’t true.”

There was a telegram that had been delivered first thing that morning. Once she’d had it read to her, Mama could never find it again. But she knew what it said.

There has been a car accident.

Please come to Jose Maria Cabral Hospital in Santiago.

And my heart in my rib cage was a bird that suddenly began to sing. Hope! I imagined broken legs strung up, arms in casts, lots of bandages. I rearranged the house where I was going to put each one while they were convalescing. We’d clear the living room and roll them in there for meals.

While Jaimito was drinking the cup of coffee Tono had made him—I hadn’t wanted to wait at home while the slow-witted Tinita got the fire going—Mamá and I were rushing around, packing a bag to take to the hospital. They would need nightgowns, toothbrushes, towels, but I put in crazy things in my terrified rush, Mate’s favorite earrings, the Vicks jar, a brassiere for each one.

And then we hear a car coming down the drive. At our spying jalousie—as we called that front window—I recognize the man who delivers the telegrams. I say to Mamá, wait here, let me go see what he wants. I walk quickly up the drive to stop that man from coming any closer to the house, now that we had finally gotten the children calmed down.

“We’ve been calling. We couldn’t get through. The phone, it’s off the hook or something.” He is delaying, I can see that. Finally he hands me the little envelope with the window, and then he gives me his back because a man can’t be seen crying.

I tear it open, I pull out the yellow sheet, I read each word.

I walk back so slowly to the house I don’t know how I ever get there.

Mama comes to the door, and I say, Mamá, there is no need for the bag.

At first the guards posted outside the morgue did not want to let me in. I was not the closest living relative, they said. I said to the guards, “I’m going in there, even if I have to be the latest dead relative. Kill me, too, if you want. I don’t care.”

The guards stepped back. “Ay, Dedé,” the friends will say, “you should have seen yourself.”

I cannot remember half the things I cried out when I saw them. Rufino and Minerva were on gumeys, Patria and Mate on mats on the floor. I was furious that they didn’t all have gumeys, as if it should matter to them. I remember Jaimito trying to hush me, one of the doctors coming in with a sedative and a glass of water. I remember asking the men to leave while I washed up my girls, and dressed them. A nurse helped me, crying, too. She brought me some little scissors to cut off Mate’s braid. I cannot imagine why in a place with so many sharp instruments for cutting bones and thick tissues, that woman brought me such teeny nail scissors. Maybe she was afraid what I would do with something sharper.

Then some friends who had heard the news appeared with four boxes, plain simple pine without even a latch. The tops were just nailed down. Later, Don Gustavo at the funeral parlor wanted us to switch them into something fancy. For the girls, anyhow. Pine was appropriate enough for a chauffeur.

I remembered Papá’s prediction,
Dedé will bury us all in silk and pearls.

But I said no. They all died the same, let them all be buried the same.

We stacked the four boxes in the back of the pickup.

We drove them home through the towns slowly. I didn’t want to come inside the cab with Jaimito. I stayed out back with my sisters, and Rufino, standing proud beside them, holding on to the coffins whenever we hit a bump.

People came out of their houses. They had already heard the story we were to pretend to believe. The Jeep had gone off the cliff on a bad turn. But their faces knew the truth. Many of the men took off their hats, the women made the sign of the cross. They stood at the very edge of the road, and when the truck went by, they threw flowers into the bed. By the time we reached Conuco, you couldn’t see the boxes for the wilting blossoms blanketing them.