Julia Alvarez - In the Time of the Butterflies
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It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillos dictatorship. It doesnt have to. Everybody knows of Las MariposasThe Butterflies.In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sistersMinerva, Patria, Mar?a Teresa, and the survivor, Ded?speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillos rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarezs imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.
Julia Alvarez: author's other books
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JULIA ALVAREZ was raised in the Dominican Republic and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1960. Her novels include How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; In the Time of the Butterflies, which was nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award; Yo!; and In the Name of Salom. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Homecoming and The Other Side/El Otro Lado, and a book of essays, Something to Declare. Ms. Alvarez lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
Visit the authors Web site at www.alvarezjulia.com.
Epilogue
Ded
1994
Later they would come by the old house in Ojo de Agua and insist on seeing me. Sometimes, for a rest, Id go spend a couple of weeks with Mam in Conuco. I would use the excuse that the monument was being built, and the noise and dust and activity bothered me. But it was really that I could bear neither to receive them nor turn them away.
They would come with their stories of that afternoonthe little soldier with the bad teeth, cracking his knuckles, who had ridden in the car with them over the mountain; the bowing attendant from El Gallo who had sold them some purses and tried to warn them not to go; the big-shouldered truck driver with the husky voice who had witnessed the ambush on the road. They all wanted to give me something of the girls last moments. Each visitor would break my heart all over again, but I would sit on this very rocker and listen for as long as they had something to say.
It was the least I could do, being the one saved.
And as they spoke, I was composing in my head how that last afternoon went.
It seems they left town after four-thirty, since the truck that preceded them up the mountain clocked out of the local Public Works building at four thirty-five. They had stopped at a little establishment by the side of the road. They were worrying about something, the proprietor said, he didnt know what. The tall one kept pacing back and forth to the phone and talking a lot.
The proprietor had had too much to drink when he told me this. He sat in that chair, his wife dabbing at her eyes each time her husband said something. He told me what each of them had ordered. He said I might want to know this. He said at the last minute the cute one with the braids decided on ten cents worth of Chiclets, cinnamon, yellow, green. He dug around in the jar but he couldnt find any cinnamon ones. He will never forgive himself that he couldnt find any cinnamon ones. His wife wept for the little things that could have made the girls last minutes happier. Their sentimentality was excessive, but I listened, and thanked them for coming.
It seems that at first the Jeep was following the truck up the mountain. Then as the truck slowed for the grade, the Jeep passed and sped away, around some curves, out of sight. Then it seems that the truck came upon the ambush. A blue-and-white Austin had blocked part of the road; the Jeep had been forced to a stop; the women were being led away peaceably, so the truck driver said, peaceably to the car. He had to brake so as not to run into them, and thats when one of the womenI think it must have been Patria, the short, plump onebroke from the captors and ran towards the truck. She clung to the door, yelling, Tell the Mirabal family in Salcedo that the calies are going to kill us! Right behind her came one of the men, who tore her hand off the door and dragged her away to the car.
It seems that the minute the truck driver heard the word calie, he shut the door he had started opening. Following the commanding wave of one of the men, he inched his way past. I felt like asking him, Why didnt you stop and help them? But of course, I didnt. Still, he saw the question in my eyes and he bowed his head.
Over a year after Trujillo was gone, it all came out at the trial of the murderers. But even then, there were several versions. Each one of the five murderers saying the others had done most of the murdering. One of them saying they hadnt done any murdering at all. Just taken the girls to the mansion in La Cumbre where El Jefe had finished them off.
The trial was on TV all day long for almost a month.
Three of the murderers did finally admit to killing one each of the Mirabal sisters. Another one killed Rufino, the driver. The fifth stood on the side of the road to warn the others if someone was coming. At first, they all tried to say they were that one, the one with the cleanest hands.
I didnt want to hear how they did it. I saw the marks on Minervas throat; fingerprints sure as day on Mates pale neck. They also clubbed them, I could see that when I went to cut her hair. They killed them good and dead. 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.
After they were done, they put the dead girls in the back of the Jeep, Rufino in front. Past a hairpin curve near where there were three crosses, they pushed the car over the edge. It was seven-thirty The way I know is one of my visitors, Mateo Nnez, had just begun listening to the Sacred Rosary on his little radio when he heard the terrible crash.
He learned about the trial of the murderers on that same radio. He walked from his remote mountain shack with his shoes in a paper sack so as not to wear them out. It must have taken him days. He got a lift or two, here and there, sometimes going the wrong way. He hadnt traveled much off that mountain. I saw him out the window when he stopped and put on his shoes to show up proper at my door. He gave me the exact hour and made the thundering noise of the tumbling Jeep he graphed with his arcing hand. Then he turned around and headed back to his mountain.
He came all that way just to tell me that.
The men got thirty years or twenty years, on paper. I couldnt keep straight why some of the murderers got less than the others. Likely the one on the road got the twenty years. Maybe another one was sorry in court. I dont know But their sentences didnt amount to much, anyway. All of them were set free during our spell of revolutions. When we had them regularly, as if to prove we could kill each other even without a dictator to tell us to.
After the men were sentenced, they gave interviews that were on the news all the time. What did the murderers of the Mirabal sisters think of this and that? Or so I heard. We didnt own a TV, and the one at Mams we turned on only for the childrens cartoons. Ididnt want them to grow up with hate, their eyes fixed on the past. Never once have the names of the murderers crossed my lips. I wanted the children to have what their mothers would have wanted for them, the possibility of happiness.
Once in a while, Jaimito brought me a newspaper so I could see all the great doings in the country. But Id roll it up tight as I could get it and whack at the house flies. I missed some big things that way. The day Trujillo was assassinated by a group of seven men, some of them his old buddies. The day Manolo and Leandro were released, Pedrito having already been freed. The day the rest of the Trujillo family fled the country. The day elections were announced, our first free ones in thirty-one years.
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