In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.

Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.

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.

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

Minerva says a soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. That is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.

I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country.

Mamá sighs when I tell her that we have to come back tomorrow “Ay, m’ijita” she says. “You’re going to fight everyone’s fight, aren’t you?” “It’s all the same fight, Mamá,” I tell her.

May the limitations of love not cast a spell On the serious ambitions of my mind.

Maybe she’s right, what does love come to, anyway?

She says she has not been kissed for years! I guess there are some bad parts to being somebody everybody respects.

There’s going to be a scene when we get back to San Fran.

That room was silent with the fury of avenging angels sharpening their radiance before they strike.

“Tell the butterflies to avoid the road to Puerto Plata. It’s not safe.” The butterflies, Lord God, how people romanticized other people’s terror!

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.

“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.”

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A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.