In the Time of the Butterflies - By Julia Alvarez Page 0,2

staring at the orchid Dedé is still holding in her hand. Obviously, she wants more. She looks up, shyly. “I just have to say, it’s really so easy to talk to you. I mean, you’re so open and cheerful. How do you keep such a tragedy from taking you under? I’m not sure I am explaining myself?”

Dedé sighs. Yes, the woman is making perfect sense. She thinks of an article she read at the beauty salon, by a Jewish lady who survived a concentration camp. “There were many many happy years. I remember those. I try anyhow. I tell myself, Dedé, concentrate on the positive! My niece Minou tells me I am doing some transcending meditation, something like that. She took the course in the capital.

“I’ll tell myself, Dedé, in your memory it is such and such a day, and I start over, playing the happy moment in my head. This is my movies—I have no television here.”

“It works?”

“Of course,” Dedé says, almost fiercely. And when it doesn’t work, she thinks, I get stuck playing the same bad moment. But why speak of that.

“Tell me about one of those moments,” the woman asks, her face naked with curiosity. She looks down quickly as if to hide it.

Dedé hesitates, but her mind is already racing backwards, year by year by year, to the moment she has fixed in her memory as zero.

She remembers a clear moonlit night before the future began. They are sitting in the cool darkness under the anacahuita tree in the front yard, in the rockers, telling stories, drinking guanábana juice. Good for the nerves, Mama always says.

They’re all there, Mamá, Papá, Patria-Minerva-Dedé. Bang-bang-bang, their father likes to joke, aiming a finger pistol at each one, as if he were shooting them, not boasting about having sired them. Three girls, each born within a year of the other! And then, nine years later, Maria Teresa, his final desperate attempt at a boy misfiring.

Their father has his slippers on, one foot hooked behind the other. Every once in a while Dedé hears the clink of the rum bottle against the rim of his glass.

Many a night, and this night is no different, a shy voice calls out of the darkness, begging their pardon. Could they spare a calmante for a sick child out of their stock of kindness? Would they have some tobacco for a tired old man who spent the day grating yucca?

Their father gets up, swaying a little with drink and tiredness, and opens up the store. The campesino goes off with his medicine, a couple of cigars, a few mints for the godchildren. Dedé tells her father that she doesn’t know how they do as well as they do, the way he gives everything away. But her father just puts his arm around her, and says, “Ay, Dedé, that’s why I have you. Every soft foot needs a hard shoe.

“She’ll bury us all,” her father adds, laughing, “in silk and pearls.” Dedé hears again the clink of the rum bottle. “Yes, for sure, our Dedé here is going to be the millionaire in the family.”

“And me, Papá, and me?” Maria Teresa pipes up in her little girl’s voice, not wanting to be left out of the future.

“You, mi ñapita, you’ll be our little coquette. You’ll make a lot of men‘s—”

Their mother coughs her correcting-your-manners cough.

“—a lot of men’s mouths water,” their father concludes.

María Teresa groans. At eight years old, in her long braids and checkered blouse, the only future the baby wants is one that will make her own mouth water, sweets and gifts in big boxes that clatter with something fun inside when she shakes them.

“What of me, Papá?” Patria asks more quietly. It is difficult to imagine Patria unmarried without a baby on her lap, but Dedé’s memory is playing dolls with the past. She has sat them down that clear, cool night before the future begins, Mamá and Papá and their four pretty girls, no one added, no one taken away. Papá calls on Mamá to help him out with his fortune-telling. Especially—though he doesn’t say this—if she’s going to censor the clairvoyance of his several glasses of rum. “What would you say, Mamá, about our Patria?”

“You know, Enrique, that I don’t believe in fortunes,” Mamá says evenly. “Padre Ignacio says fortunes are for those without faith.” In her mother’s tone, Dedé can already hear the distance that will come between her parents. Looking back, she thinks, Ay Mamá, ease up a little