In the Time of Butterflies (15 page)

For another thing, Papa discouraged boyfriends. I was his treasure, he’d say, patting his lap, as if I were a girl in a jumper instead of a woman of twenty-three in the slacks he objected to my wearing in public.

“Papá,” I’d say. “I’m too old for that.”

One time he offered me anything if I would sit on his lap. “Just come here and whisper it in my ear.” His voice was a little thick from drinking. I sat right down and swooped to my prize. “I want to go to the university, Papa, please.”

“Now, now,” he said as if I were all worked up about something. “You wouldn’t want to leave your old Papa, would you?”

“But Papa, you’ve got Mamá;‘ I argued.

His face went blank. We both listened for Mama stirring in the front of the house near where we sat. Maria Teresa was off at school, Dede was newly married, Patria two times a mother. And here I was, a grown woman sitting on my father’s lap. “Your mother and I ...” he began, but thought better of continuing. Then he added, “We need you around.”

Three years cooped at home since I’d graduated from Inmaculada, and I was ready to scream with boredom. The worse part was getting newsy letters from Elsa and Sinita in the capital. They were taking a Theory of Errors class that would make Sor Asunción’s hair stand on end even under her wimple. They had seen Tin-Tan in
Tender Little Pumpkins,
and been to the country club to hear Alberti and his band. And there were so many nice-looking men in the capital!

I’d get restless with jealousy when Papa brought their letters back from the Salcedo post office. I’d jump in the Jeep and roar off into the countryside, my foot pressing heavily down on the gas as if speed could set me free. I’d drive further and further out, pretending to myself that I was running away to the capital. But something always made me turn the car around and head back home, something I’d seen from the corner of my eye.

One afternoon, I was on one of these getaway rampages, racing down the small side roads that spiderweb our property. Near the northeast cacao groves, I saw the Ford parked in front of a small, yellow house. I tried to figure out what
campesino
family lived there, but I couldn’t say I had ever met them.

So I made it my business to take that back road frequently, keeping an eye out. Every time I drove the Ford, these raggedy girls came running after me, holding out their hands, calling for mints.

I studied them. There were three that ran to the road whenever they heard the car, a fourth one sometimes came in the arms of the oldest. Four girls, I checked, three in panties, and the baby naked. One time, I stopped at the side of the road and stared at their Mirabal eyes. “Who is your father?” I asked point blank.

They had been bold, clamoring kids a moment before. Now, spoken to by a lady in a car, they hung their heads and looked at me from the comers of
their
eyes.

“Do you have a brother?” I asked more gently.

It was a delicious revenge to hear them murmur, “No,
señora.”
Pap.A was not going to get the son he wanted, after all!

A little later the woman came sauntering from her house, her hair just combed out from rollers and too much of something on her face. When she saw me, her face fell. She scolded the kids as if that was what she’d come for. “I told you not to bother the cars!”

“They’re not bothering anything,” I defended them, caressing the baby’s cheek.

The woman was looking me over. I suppose she was taking inventory, what I had, what she didn’t have, doing the simple arithmetic and, perhaps a few days later, exacting some new promise from Papa.

Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing those four raggedy girls with Papá’s and my own deep-set eyes staring back at me. “Give me, give me!” they cried. But when I asked them, “What do you want?” they stood, mute, their mouths hanging open, not knowing where to start.

Had they asked me the same thing, I would have stared back, mute, too.

What did I want? I didn’t know anymore. Three years stuck in Ojo de Agua, and I was like that princess put to sleep in the fairy tale. I read and complained and argued with Dedé, but all that time I was snoring away.

When I met Lío, it was as if I woke up. The givens, all I’d been taught, fell away like so many covers when you sit up in bed. Now when I asked myself,
What do you want, Minerva Mirabal?
I was shocked to find I didn’t have an answer.

All I knew was I was not falling in love, no matter how deserving I thought Lío was. So what? I’d argue with myself. What’s more important, romance or revolution? But a little voice kept saying,
Both, both, I want both.
Back and forth my mind went, weaving a yes by night and unraveling it by day to a no.

As always happens, your life decides for you anyway. Lío announced he was seeking asylum out of the country. I was relieved that circumstances would be resolving things between us.

Still, when he left, I was hurt that he hadn’t even said goodbye. Then I started worrying that his silence meant he had been caught. Out of the comers of my eyes, I kept seeing Lio himself! He was not a pretty sight. His body was bruised and broken as if he had endured all the tortures in La Fortaleza he had ever described to me. I was sure I was having premonitions that Lio had not escaped after all.

Mama, of course, noticed the tightening in my face. My bad headaches and asthma attacks worried her. “You need rest,” she prescribed one afternoon and sent me to bed in Papá’s room, the coolest in the house. He was off in the Ford for his afternoon review of the farm.

I lay in that mahogany bed, tossing this way and that, unable to sleep. Then, something I hadn’t planned. I got up and tried the door of the armoire. It was locked, which wasn’t all that strange as the hardware was always getting stuck. Using one of my bobby pins, I popped the inside spring and the door sprang open.

I ran my hand along Papá’s clothes, releasing his smell in the room. I stared at his new fancy
guayaberas
and started going through the pockets. In the inside pocket of his dress jacket, I found a packet of papers and pulled them out.

Prescriptions for his medicines, a bill for a Panama hat he’d been wearing around the farm, a new, important look for him. A bill from El Gallo for seven yards of gingham, a girl’s fabric. An invitation from the National Palace to some party. Then, four letters, addressed to me from Lio!

I read them through hungrily. He hadn’t heard from me about his proposal to leave the country. (What proposal?) He had arranged for me to come to the Colombian embassy. I should let him know through his cousin Mario. He was waiting for my answer—next letter. Still no answer, he complained in a third letter. In the final letter, he wrote that he was leaving that afternoon on the diplomatic pouch plane. He understood it was too big a step for me at the moment. Some day in the future, maybe. He could only hope.

It seemed suddenly that I’d missed a great opportunity. My life would have been nobler if I had followed Lío. But how could I have made the choice when I hadn’t even known about it? I forgot my earlier ambivalence, and I blamed Papa for everything: his young woman, his hurting Mamá, his cooping me up while he went gallivanting around.

My hands were shaking so bad that it was hard to fold the letters into their envelopes. I stuffed them in my pocket, but his bills and correspondence I put back. I left the doors of the armoire gaping open. I wanted him to know he had been found out.

Minutes later, I was roaring away in the Jeep without a word to Mamá. What would I have said? I’m going to find my good-for-nothing father and drag him back?

I knew where to find him all right. Now that Papa was doing so well, he had bought a second car, a Jeep. I knew damn well he wasn’t reviewing the fields if he had taken the Ford, not the Jeep. I headed straight for that yellow house.

When I got there, those four girls looked up, startled. After all, the man they always expected was already there, the car parked in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I turned into the dirt path and crashed into the Ford, making the bumper curl up and shattering the window in back. Then I came down on that horn until he appeared, shirtless and furious in the doorway.

He took one look at me and got as pale as an olive-skinned man can get. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. “What do you want?” he said at last.

I heard the little girls crying, and I realized my own face was wet with tears. When he came forward, I gave a warning honk and wildly backed out of the path and into the road. A pickup coming around the curve veered and ran into the ditch—plantains, oranges, mangoes, yucca spilling all over the road. That didn’t stop me, no. I stepped on the gas. From the comer of my eye I saw him, a figure growing smaller and smaller until I left him behind me.

When I got home, Mama met me at the door. She eyed me, and she must have known. “Next time, you don’t leave this house without saying where you’re going.” We both knew her scold was meaningless. She hadn’t even asked where I’d been.