And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside me.
At first glance, Patria seems to be the most assured, religious and conventional of the four sisters—eldest child profile? As a young woman, she is certain of her faith and headed for a conventional life for a female of those times: early marriage, motherhood, devoted Catholic, talented homemaker. But in fact, Patria goes through the profound changes. Perhaps, only Dedé, whose transformation happens later, after the deaths of her sisters, goes through such radical changes. Patria suffers many births and rebirths to become the politicized, compassionate and courageous woman she becomes by the end of the novel.
This passage is just the beginning. Her miscarriage signals not only the loss of the innocent life inside her but also her own loss of innocence: up to this point, she has been turning a blind eye to the violations of the dictatorship; she has not wanted to face how the church is in colluding with the regime; she yearns for security and safety. But her eyes have been opened and she is losing her faith (the pearl of great price, a Biblical phrase); the old certainties are draining out of her. And because Patria is the most physical of the sisters, her political and spiritual epiphanies almost always come through her body.
In writing the novel I was particularly interested in the experience of oppression from a female point of view. Women’s/girl’s bodies were definitely under assault in the dictatorship. El Jefe exercised the “droit de seigneur”/ el derecho del jefe: whatever woman he wanted, whether she was a young daughter or wife or fiancée, had to cede to him or the family would be blacklisted. This impending danger of what amounted to rape was very much a part of the trauma of females in the regime.
My mother, an attractive young woman at the time, recounts how Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, spotted her at a party and began making inquiries. After that, she was not allowed to go out to public gatherings. When I was researching the regime for the novel, I remember reading that el Jefe “had” (raped) hundreds of women during his reign, preferring, as he got older, younger and younger girls. But there is no record of him ever hitting on skinny women. I felt such relief thinking that as a lightweight had I been living back then, I would have been “safe.” But what pyrrhic safety if all around me, my sisters and friends were falling prey to violation.
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