In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

The country people around the farm say that until the nail is hit, it doesn’t believe in the hammer.

We must keep quiet and not visit with each other, but think only of our immortal souls. I am so tired of mine.

So you could say I was born, but I wasn’t really here. One of those spirit babies, alelá, as the country people say. My mind, my heart, my soul in the clouds. It took some doing and undoing to bring me down to earth.

To be the grande dame of the beautiful, terrible past. But it is an impossible task, impossible! After all, she is the only one left to manage the terrible, beautiful present.

I got braver like a crab going sideways. I inched towards courage the best way I could,

I knew she was right, but I wished she hadn’t said so. I don’t know, I wanted to start believing in my fellow Dominicans again. Once the goat was a bad memory in our past, that would be the real revolution we would have to fight: forgiving each other for what we had all let come to pass.

May I never experience all that it is possible to get used to.

You think you’re going to crack any day, but the strange thing is that every day you surprise yourself by pulling it off, and suddenly you start feeling stronger, like maybe you are going to make it through this hell with some dignity, some courage, and most important—never forget this, Mate—with some love still in your heart for the men who have done this to you.

After you lose your fear, the hardest thing here is the lack of beauty. There’s no music to listen to, no good smells, ever, nothing pretty to look at.

“Dictatorships,” he was saying, “are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece of himself in every one of us.” Ah, I thought, touching the place above my heart where I did not yet know the cells were multiplying like crazy. So this is what is happening to us.