In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

Dedé looks up at those young faces, and she knows it is herself at that age she misses the most.

:'(

It took some doing and undoing to bring me down to earth.

From the beginning, I was so good, Mamá said she’d forget I was there.

I looked up, challenging Him. And the two faces had merged!

She feels bad when she can’t carry off what she considers her responsibility. To be the grande dame of the beautiful, terrible past.

Every large household was said to have a servant on double payroll.

Like an informant?

What she meant was she didn’t understand until that moment that they were really living—as Minerva liked to say—in a police state.

Don’t plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.”

I hate men. I really hate them.

Every time I look at Papá’s place at the table my eyes fill with tears. It makes it very hard to eat meals. What a bitter end of the year!

Fuck i remember that feeling. I just wanted my dad there, I missed him so much.

I guess we’re all still grieving over Papá, and any little sadness brings up that bigger one.

That part

We sat back, marveling. And then our hands reached out, palm to palm, joining our lifelines.

:'(

So it was between these walls hung with portraits, including El Jefe’s, that the Fourteenth of June Movement was founded.

She had always been the docile middle child, used to following the lead.

There is something deeper. Sometimes I really feel it in here, especially late at night, a current going among us, like an invisible needle stitching us together into the glorious, free nation we are becoming.

I try to be lighthearted, but it takes such effort. It’s as if I am so deep inside myself, I can’t come to the surface to be with anyone.

I wanted everything back in my life again.

I hid my anxieties and gave everyone a bright smile. If they had only known how frail was their iron-will heroine.

As I began to work to get our men out of prison, it was the old Minerva I set free.

Healing

I had this eerie feeling that we were already dead and looking longingly at the house where our children were growing up without us.

That's scary

Then it was like a manageable grief inside me. Something I could bear because I could make sense of it.

The men, the children, me. We went our own ways, we became ourselves. Just that. And maybe that is what it means to be a free people, and I should be glad?

Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?