In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

After I lost the baby, I felt a strange vacancy. I was an empty house with a sign in front, Se Vende,

Why is it that every man I can’t love seems to feel I would if Papá hadn’t died?

Build your house upon a rock, He said, do my will. And though the rain fall and the floods come and the winds blow, the good wife’s house will stand.

Now that I had shined it on him, this poor blind moth couldn’t resist my light.

May I never experience all that it is possible to get used to.

¡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.

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.

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.

“you can get rid of a dictator, but it’s much more difficult to eradicate the dictatorship mentality that lives on in the imagination and culture of a country.”