Julia Alvarez Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I - 1938 to 1946

  CHAPTER ONE - Dedé

  CHAPTER TWO - Minerva

  CHAPTER THREE - This little book belongs to María Teresa

  CHAPTER FOUR - Patria

  II - 1948 to 1959

  CHAPTER FIVE - Dedé

  CHAPTER SIX - Minerva

  CHAPTER SEVEN - María Teresa

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Patria

  III - 1960

  CHAPTER NINE - Dedé

  CHAPTER TEN - Patria

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - María Teresa

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Minerva

  Epilogue

  A Postscript

  To those who helped me write this book

  “ONE OF THE NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ... SIMPLY, CLEARLY, BEAUTIFULLY TOLD.... THE WRITING IS MAGIC.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “A wondrous work, both grand and intimate ... breathtaking ... magical ... certain to find its place in the classics of contemporary literature.”

  —Jackson Clarion Ledger

  “An extraordinary tour de force that brings the sisters Mirabal to vibrant life.... This is a story that needed to be told, and Julia Alvarez is the one to tell it. No one who reads it will be able to forget the butterflies who dared to challenge the beast.”

  —Vermont Valley News

  “Doubly blessed with a poet’s vision and a realist’s eye, Julia Alvarez gives us ... lessons about the courage and vitality of the female spirit, the webs and tangles that bind families, piety and activism, loyalty and fear, faith and love.”

  —Miami Herald

  a cognizant original v5 release october 14 2010

  JULIA ALVAREZ was raised in the Dominican Republic and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1960. Her novels include How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; In the Time of the Butterflies, which was nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award; ¡Yo!; and In the Name of Salomé. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Homecoming and The Other Side/El Otro Lado, and a book of essays, Something to Declare. Ms. Alvarez lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

  Visit the author’s Web site at www.alvarezjulia.com.

  “BUILDS TO A GRIPPING INTENSITY.... ALVAREZ CONVEYS THEIR COURAGE AND THEIR DESPERATION, AND THE FULL IMPORT OF THEIR TRAGEDY.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A smashing follow-up to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents ... speaking across the years as convincingly as Anne Frank did in her diary.”

  —Glamour

  “I was moved to tears, not of sadness but of joy. The sisters Mirabal continue to live as long as women like Julia Alvarez are brave enough to tell their story.... A novel of great cariño.”

  —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

  “Haunting ... full of pathos and passion with beautifully crafted anecdotes interstitched to create a patchwork quilt of memory and ideology.... Her novel is a wonderful examination of how it feels to be a survivor, how it feels to come from a society where justice and freedom are unwelcome.”

  —The Nation

  “A POIGNANT TALE OF COURAGE AND HOPE—AS MUCH AN INSPIRATION AS IT IS A TRAGEDY.”

  —Ms.

  “Compelling, vivid.... Its evocation of everyday life in a military dictatorship, with its informers and paranoia, ranges from the comical to the chilling.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Vivid, beautifully done ... a compelling testimony to the Dominican Republic’s tragic history.”

  —Anniston Star

  “I put my life on hold to finish this work by the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Every page was worth it. Read it if you can.”

  —San Antonio Current

  “It is destined to take its place on the shelf of great Latin-American novels.”

  —Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima

  Also by Julia Alvarez

  Fiction

  In the Name of Salome

  iYo!

  How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

  Poetry

  The Other Side/El Otro Lado

  Homecoming

  Nonfiction

  Something to Declare

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First Plume Printing, August, 1995

  30

  Copyright © 1994 by Julia Alvarez

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Alvarez, Julia.

  In the time of the butterflies / Julia Alvarez.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-07699-6

  1. Mirabal, Maria Teresa, 1935-1960—Fiction. 2. Mirabal,

  Minerva, 1926-1960—Fiction. 3. Mirabal, Patria, 1924-1960—

  Fiction. 4. Dominican Republic—History—1930-1961—Fiction.

  5. Women revolutionaries—Dominican Republic—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.L84515 1995

  813’.54—dc20 95-8091

  CIP

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

  publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission

  of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS

  OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION,

  PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This work of fiction is based on historical facts

  referred to in the author’s Postscript on pages 323-324.

  For Dedé

  In Memoriam

  PATRIA MERCEDES MIRABAL

  February 27, 1924-November 25, 1960

  MINERVA MIRABAL

  March 12, 1926-November 25,1960

  MARIA TERESA MIRABAL

  October 15, 1935-November 25, 1960

  RUFINO DE LA CRUZ

  November 10, 1923-November 25, 1960

  I

  1938 to 1946

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dedé

  1994

  and

  circa 1943

  She is plucking her bird of paradise of its dead branches, leaning around the plant every time she hears a car. The woman will never find the old house behind the hedge of towering hibiscus at the bend of the dirt road. Not a gringa dominicana in a rented car with a road map asking for street names! Dedé had taken the call over at the little museum this morning.

  Could the woman please come over and talk to Dedé about the Mirabal sisters? She is originally from here
but has lived many years in the States, for which she is sorry since her Spanish is not so good. The Mirabal sisters are not known there, for which she is also sorry for it is a crime that they should be forgotten, these unsung heroines of the underground, et cetera.

  Oh dear, another one. Now after thirty-four years, the commemora tions and interviews and presentations of posthumous honors have almost stopped, so that for months at a time Dedé is able to take up her own life again. But she’s long since resigned herself to Novembers. Every year as the 25th rolls around, the television crews drive up. There’s the obligatory interview. Then, the big celebration over at the museum, the delegations from as far away as Peru and Paraguay, an ordeal really, making that many little party sandwiches and the nephews and nieces not always showing up in time to help. But this is March, ¡Maria santisima! Doesn’t she have seven more months of anonymity?

  “How about this afternoon? I do have a later commitment,” Dedé lies to the voice. She has to. Otherwise, they go on and on, asking the most impertinent questions.

  There is a veritable racket of gratitude on the other end, and Dedé has to smile at some of the imported nonsense of this woman’s Spanish. “I am so compromised,” she is saying, “by the openness of your warm manner.”

  “So if I’m coming from Santiago, I drive on past Salcedo?” the woman asks.

  “Exactamente. And then where you see a great big anacahuita tree, you turn left.”

  “A ... great... big ... tree ...,” the woman repeats. She is writing all this down! “I turn left. What’s the name of the street?”

  “It’s just the road by the anacahuita tree. We don’t name them,” Dedé says, driven to doodling to contain her impatience. On the back of an envelope left beside the museum phone, she has sketched an enormous tree, laden with flowers, the branches squirreling over the flap. “You see, most of the campesinos around here can’t read, so it wouldn’t do us any good to put names on the roads.”

  The voice laughs, embarrassed. “Of course. You must think I’m so outside of things.” Tan afuera de la cosa.

  Dede bites her lip. “Not at all,” she lies. “I’ll see you this afternoon then.”

  “About what time?” the voice wants to know.

  Oh yes. The gringos need a time. But there isn’t a clock time for this kind of just-right moment. “Any time after three or three-thirty, four-ish.”

  “Dominican time, eh?” The woman laughs.

  “iExactamente!” Finally, the woman is getting the hang of how things are done here. Even after she has laid the receiver in its cradle, Dedé goes on elaborating the root system of her anacahuita tree, shading the branches, and then for the fun of it, opening and closing the flap of the envelope to watch the tree come apart and then back together again.

  In the garden, Dedé is surprised to hear the radio in the outdoor kitchen announce that it is only three o‘clock. She has been waiting expectantly since after lunch, tidying up the patch of garden this American woman will be able to see from the galería. This is certainly one reason why Dedé shies from these interviews. Before she knows it, she is setting up her life as if it were an exhibit labeled neatly for those who can read: THE SISTER WHO SURVIVED.

  Usually if she works it right—a lemonade with lemons from the tree Patria planted, a quick tour of the house the girls grew up in—usually they leave, satisfied, without asking the prickly questions that have left Dedé lost in her memories for weeks at a time, searching for the answer. Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one who survived?

  She bends to her special beauty, the butterfly orchid she smuggled back from Hawaii two years ago. For three years in a row Dedé has won a trip, the prize for making the most sales of anyone in her company. Her niece Minou has noted more than once the irony of Dedé’s “new” profession, actually embarked upon a decade ago, after her divorce. She is the company’s top life insurance salesperson. Everyone wants to buy a policy from the woman who just missed being killed along with her three sisters. Can she help it?

  The slamming of a car door startles Dedé. When she calms herself she finds she has snipped her prize butterfly orchid. She picks up the fallen blossom and trims the stem, wincing. Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.

  But really, this woman should shut car doors with less violence. Spare an aging woman’s nerves. And I’m not the only one, Dedé thinks. Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.

  She walks the woman quickly through the house, Mamá’s bedroom, mine and Patria‘s, but mostly mine since Patria married so young, Minerva and María Teresa’s. The other bedroom she does not say was her father’s after he and Mamá stopped sleeping together. There are the three pictures of the girls, old favorites that are now emblazoned on the posters every November, making these once intimate snapshots seem too famous to be the sisters she knew.

  Dedé has placed a silk orchid in a vase on the little table below them. She still feels guilty about not continuing Mamá’s tribute of a fresh blossom for the girls every day. But the truth is, she doesn’t have the time anymore, with a job, the museum, a household to run. You can’t be a modem woman and insist on the old sentimentalities. And who was the fresh orchid for, anyway? Dedé looks up at those young faces, and she knows it is herself at that age she misses the most.

  The interview woman stops before the portraits, and Dede waits for her to ask which one was which or how old they were when these were taken, facts Dedé has at the ready, having delivered them so many times. But instead the thin waif of a woman asks, “And where are you?”

  Dedé laughs uneasily. It’s as if the woman has read her mind. “I have this hallway just for the girls,” she says. Over the woman’s shoulder, she sees she has left the door to her room ajar, her nightgown flung with distressing abandon on her bed. She wishes she had gone through the house and shut the doors to the bedrooms.

  “No, I mean, where are you in the sequence, the youngest, the oldest?”

  So the woman has not read any of the articles or biographies around. Dedé is relieved. This means that they can spend the time talking about the simple facts that give Dedé the illusion that hers was just an ordinary family, too—birthdays and weddings and new babies, the peaks in that graph of normalcy.

  Dedé goes through the sequence.

  “So fast in age,” the woman notes, using an awkward phrase.

  Dedé nods. “The first three of us were born close, but in other ways, you see, we were so different.”

  “Oh?” the woman asks.

  “Yes, so different. Minerva was always into her wrongs and rights.” Dedé realizes she is speaking to the picture of Minerva, as if she were assigning her a part, pinning her down with a handful of adjectives, the beautiful, intelligent, high-minded Minerva. “And Maria Teresa, ay, Dios,” Dedé sighs, emotion in her voice in spite of herself. “Still a girl when she died, pobrecita, just turned twenty-five.” Dedé moves on to the last picture and rights the frame. “Sweet Patria, always her religion was so important.”

  “Always?” the woman says, just the slightest challenge in her voice.

  “Always,” Dedé affirms, used to this fixed, monolithic language around interviewers and mythologizers of her sisters. “Well, almost always.”

  She walks the woman out of the house into the galería where the rocking chairs wait. A kitten lies recklessly under the runners, and she shoos it away. “What is it you want to know?” Dedé asks bluntly. And then because the question does seem to rudely call the woman to account for herself, she adds, “Because there is so much to tell.”

  The woman laughs as she says, “Tell me all of it.”

  Dedé looks at her watch as a polite reminder to the woman that the visit is circumscribed. “There are books and articles. I could have Tono at the museum show you the letters and diaries.”

  “That would be great,” the woman says, staring at the orchi
d Dedé is still holding in her hand. Obviously, she wants more. She looks up, shyly. “I just have to say, it’s really so easy to talk to you. I mean, you’re so open and cheerful. How do you keep such a tragedy from taking you under? I’m not sure I am explaining myself?”

  Dedé sighs. Yes, the woman is making perfect sense. She thinks of an article she read at the beauty salon, by a Jewish lady who survived a concentration camp. “There were many many happy years. I remember those. I try anyhow. I tell myself, Dedé, concentrate on the positive! My niece Minou tells me I am doing some transcending meditation, something like that. She took the course in the capital.

  “I’ll tell myself, Dedé, in your memory it is such and such a day, and I start over, playing the happy moment in my head. This is my movies—I have no television here.”

  “It works?”

  “Of course,” Dedé says, almost fiercely. And when it doesn’t work, she thinks, I get stuck playing the same bad moment. But why speak of that.

  “Tell me about one of those moments,” the woman asks, her face naked with curiosity. She looks down quickly as if to hide it.

  Dedé hesitates, but her mind is already racing backwards, year by year by year, to the moment she has fixed in her memory as zero.