In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

Every soft foot needs a hard shoe.

“A daughter is a needle in the heart.”

“It’s just a friendship button.” She looked at me a moment, a deciding look like she couldn’t be sure of anybody. “Why didn’t you just say so?” She grinned as if we were already friends and could tease each other. “I did just say so,” I said. I opened up my hand and offered her the button again. This time she took it.

She was born a queen, not by dynastic right, but by the right of beauty whom divinity sends to the world only rarely.

“Trujillo is a devil,” Sinita said as we tiptoed back to our beds. We had managed to get them side by side again this year. But I was thinking, No, he is a man.

think saints all lived before high heels were invented.

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.

Little Book, I pulled out Regular from under my pillow for my New Year’s fortune. Mamá frowns that this isn’t allowed by the pope, but I have to think fortunes really do tell the truth. My first day of the year wasn’t Good and it wasn’t Bad, just Regular.

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

It turns out she and Elsa and Lourdes and Sinita have been going to some secret meetings over at Don Horacio’s house! Don Horacio is Elsa’s grandfather who is in trouble with the police because he won’t do things he’s supposed to, like hang a picture of our president in his house. Minerva says the police don’t kill him because he is so old, he will soon die on his own without any bother to them. 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.

It is so strange now I know something I’m not supposed to know. Everything looks just a little different.

Berto wrote so sympathizingly about my homesickness and signed himself, “your Stronghold.” I do like the sound of that.

Even being born, I was coming out, hands first, as if reaching up for something. Thank goodness, the midwife checked Mamá at the last minute and lowered my arms the way you fold in a captive bird’s wings so it doesn’t hurt itself trying to fly. 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.

those truly in love spoke poetry to their beloved.

And to the days and nights that followed. Something keeps her turning and turning these moments in her mind, something. She is no longer sure she wants to find out what.

For one thing, my nose was always in a book. Love was something I had read would come. The man I’d love would look like the poet in a frontispiece, pale and sad with a pen in his hand.

I’d argue with myself. What’s more important, romance or revolution? But a little voice kept saying, Both, both, I want both.

She smiles at him, her eyes glistening with tears. Her fingers find his hand and hold tight, as if she were pulling him up from an edge she lost him to years back.

I want to know things I don’t even know what they are. But I could be happy without answers if I had someone to love. And so it is of human life the goal to seek, forever seek, the kindred soul.

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

I know I’m taking a very good look around before I close my eyes and fall in true love.

“You must not see every man as a potential serpent,”

“I’m not stuck in the past, I’ve just brought it with me into the present. And the problem is not enough of us have done that. What is that thing the gringos say, if you don’t study your history, you are going to repeat it?”

To them we are characters in a sad story about a past that is over.

But all this is a sign of my success, isn’t it? She’s not haunted and full of hate. She claims it,

It is the sweetness in them that makes them burn.

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