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.

All I knew was I was not falling in love, no matter how deserving I thought Lío was. So what? I’d argue with myself. What’s more important, romance or revolution? But a little voice kept saying, Both, both, I want both. Back and forth my mind went, weaving a yes by night and unraveling it by day to a no.

It was then she realized that after all her indecisiveness, she had never really had a choice. Whether she joined their underground or not, her fate was bound up with the fates of her sisters. She would suffer whatever they suffered. If they died, she would not want to go on living without them.

From Dede's point of view

Minerva says it’s better letting yourself go—not that she ever does. The alternative is freezing yourself up, never showing what you’re feeling, never letting on what you’re thinking. (Like Dinorah. Jailface, the girls call her.) Then one day, you’re out of here, free, only to discover you’ve locked yourself up and thrown away the key somewhere too deep inside your heart to fish it out.

Where does that sister of mine get her crazy courage? As she was being marched down the hall, a voice from one of the cells they passed called out, Mariposa does not belong to herself alone. She belongs to Quisqueya! Then everyone was beating on the bars, calling out, ¡Viva la Mariposa! Tears came to my eyes. Something big and powerful spread its wings inside me. Courage, I told myself. And this time, I felt it.

I spoke real slow for her to understand that we were talking about love, love among us women. 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.

Five years and a fine of five thousand pesos for each of us. Minerva just threw her head back and laughed. And of course, I bowed mine and cried.

The contrast of the sisters is so strong. This chapter from María’s point of view is so sad

The moonlight is streaming in through our little window. I can’t sleep. I am sitting up in my bunk, writing my last entry in the space left, and sobbing in the quiet way you learn in prison so you don’t add to anyone else’s grief. I feel sad to be leaving. Yes, strange as it sounds, this has become my home, these girls are like my sisters. I can’t imagine the lonely privacy of living without them. I tell myself the connection will continue. It does not go away because you leave. And I begin to understand the revolution in a new way.

I hid my anxieties and gave everyone a bright smile. If they had only known how frail was their iron-will heroine. How much it took to put on that hardest of all performances, being my old self again.

Seeing Minerva break inside goes to show how even the strongest can break under the pressure of revolution

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.

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.

I see where this is going, and how sad

We moved quickly now towards the Jeep, hurrying as if we had to catch up with that truck. I don’t know quite how to say this, but it was as if we were girls again, walking through the dark part of the yard, a little afraid, a little excited by our fears, anticipating the lighted house just around the bend— That’s the way I felt as we started up the first mountain.

Such a sad, but well written part of the book, especially because we already know what happens so leaving it at this is all that is needed

The complete list of losses. There they are. And it helps, I’ve found, if I can count them off, so to speak. And sometimes when I’m doing that, I think, Maybe these aren’t losses. Maybe that’s a wrong way to think of them. 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?

The nightmare is over; we are free at last. But the thing that is making me tremble, that I do not want to say out loud—and I’ll say it once only and it’s done. Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?

Their soft spirit footsteps, so vague I could mistake them for my own breathing. Their different treads, as if even as spirits they retained their personalities, Patria’s sure and measured step, Minerva’s quicksilver impatience, Mate’s playful little skip. They linger and loiter over things. Tonight, no doubt, Minerva will sit a long while by her Minou and absorb the music of her breathing.

But all I hear is my own breathing and the blessed silence of those cool, clear nights under the anacahuita tree before anyone breathes a word of the future. And I see them all there in my memory, as still as statues, Mamá and Papá, and Minerva and Mate and Patria, and I’m thinking something is missing now. And I count them all twice before I realize—it’s me, Dedé, it’s me, the one who survived to tell the story.