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.

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.

I gave her my name, and she repeated it several times like she was tasting it. Then she smiled like it tasted just fine.

But I was thinking, No, he is a man. And in spite of all I’d heard, I felt sorry for him. ¡Pobrecito! At night, he probably had nightmare after nightmare like I did, just thinking about what he’d done.

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.

Jaimito tried convincing Dedé to his way of thinking. “Don’t you see, my heart, all life involves compromise. You have to compromise with your sister, your mother has to compromise with your father, the sea and land have to compromise about a shoreline, and it varies from time to time. Don’t you see, my life?” “I see,” Dedé said at last, already beginning to compromise with the man she was set to marry.

“You must not see every man as a potential serpent,” he warned me. And I don’t really think I do. I mean, I like men. I want to marry one of them.

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

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

My sisters—Minerva, Mate—I was sick sometimes with fear for them, but they lived at a distance now, so I hid the sun with a finger and chose not to see the light all around me.

It was after that I noticed a change in her, as if her soul had at last matured and begun its cycles.

It was natural to blame herself. Maybe she hadn’t loved him enough. Maybe he sensed how someone else’s eyes had haunted her most of her married life.

Beware what you ask God. He might just give you what you want.

But I knew it was more complicated than that. He was both, angel and devil, like the rest of us.

She laughed. Girl, I don’t know what you mean by that way, like it’s a wrong turn or something. My body happens to also love the people my heart loves.

Today, Gandhi would not do. What I needed was a shot of Fidel’s fiery rhetoric. He would have agreed with me. We had to do something, soon!

The lawn was overgrown, not in that neglected way that makes a place look shabby, but with nice abandon, as if to say, there’s room in this house for everything, even a lot of grass.

“They got cold feet. Afraid we’re all communists. They say they don’t want another Fidel. They’d rather have a dozen Trujillos.”

But I do not believe they violated my sisters, no. I checked as best I could. I think it is safe to say they acted like gentlemen murderers in that way.

I wanted the children to have what their mothers would have wanted for them, the possibility of happiness.

“Dictatorships,” he was saying, “are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece of himself in every one of us.”

Poor Mamá, living to see the end of so many things, including her own ideas.

Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?