In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

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.

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 María 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.”

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.

If you multiply by zero, you still get zero, and a thousand heartaches.

Words repeated, distorted, words recreated by those who might bear them a grudge, words stitched to words until they are the winding sheet the family will be buried in when their bodies are found dumped in a ditch, their tongues cut off for speaking too much.

A chill goes through her, for she feels it in her bones, the future is now beginning.

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

El Jefe does not bother to look up as we enter. He is going over a stack of papers with several nervous assistants, his manicured hands following the words being read out to him. He learned his letters late, so the story goes, and refuses to look at anything over a page long. In the offices around him, official readers go through thick reports, boiling the information down to the salient paragraph.

What is that thing the gringos say, if you don’t study your history, you are going to repeat it?” Olga waves the theory away. “The gringos say too many things.” “And many of them true,” I tell her. “Many of them.” Minou has accused me of being pro-Yanqui. And I tell her, “I am pro whoever is right at any moment in time.”

So I tell her what I think. “After the fighting was over and we were a broken people”—she shakes her head sadly at this portrait of our recent times—“that’s when I opened my doors, and instead of listening, I started talking. We had lost hope, and we needed a story to understand what had happened to us.”

It comes to me slowly as I head north through the dark countryside—the only lights are up in the mountains where the prosperous young are building their getaway houses, and of course, in the sky, all the splurged wattage of the stars. Lío is right. 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?

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.