1958

1958

The Day of Lovers, February 14 Cloudy morning, here’s hopingfor rain.

Blessings on my marriage bed, as Mama always says.

Doña Mercedes Reyes Viuda Mirabal

announces the wedding of her daughter

Maria Teresa Mirabal Reyes

to

Leandro Guzmán Rodriguez

son of

Don Leandro Guzmán and Doña Ana Rodriguez de Guzmán

on Saturday, February fourteenth

this nineteen hundred and fifty-eighth year of Our Lord

Twenty-eighth year of the Era of Trujillo

at four o‘clock in the afternoon

San Juan Evangelista Church

Salcedo

Mariposa and Palomino, for now!

Maria Teresa and Leandro, forever!

 CHAPTER EIGHT

Patria

1959

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.

I did as He said. At sixteen I married Pedrito González and we settled down for the rest of our lives. Or so it seemed for eighteen years.

My boy grew into a man, my girl long and slender like the blossoming mimosa at the end of the drive. Pedrito took on a certain gravity became an important man around here. And I, Patria Mercedes? Like every woman of her house, I disappeared into what I loved, coming up now and then for air.

I mean, an overnight trip by myself to a girlfriend‘s, a special set to my hair, and maybe a yellow dress.

I had built my house on solid rock, all right.

Or I should say, Pedrito’s great-grandfather had built it over a hundred years back, and then each first son had lived in it and passed it on. But you have to understand, Patria Mercedes was in those timbers, in the nimble workings of the transoms, she was in those wide boards on the floor and in that creaky door opening on its old hinges.

My sisters were so different! They built their homes on sand and called the slip and slide adventure.

Minerva lived in a little nothing house—or so Mate had described it to me—in that godforsaken town of Monte Cristi. It’s a wonder her babies didn’t both die of infections.

Mate and Leandro had already had two different addresses in a year of marriage. Renters, they called themselves, the city word for the squatters we pity here in the country.

Dede and Jaimito had lost everything so many times, it was hard to keep up with their frequent moves. Now they were in our old house in Ojo de Agua, and Mama had built her up-to-date cottage on the main road from Santiago, complete with aluminum jalousies and an indoor toilet she called “the sanitary.”

And me, Patria Mercedes, like I said, I had settled down for life in my rocksure house. And eighteen years passed by.

My eighteenth year of marriage the ground of my well-being began to give a little. Just a baby’s breath tremor, a hairline crack you could hardly see unless you were looking for trouble.

New Year’s Eve we gathered in Mamá’s new house in Conuco, the sisters and all the husbands, a first since Maria Teresa’s wedding a year ago this February. We stayed late, celebrating being together more than the new year, I think. There wasn’t much talk of politics so as not to worry Mamá.

Also Jaimito had grown adamant—he didn’t want Dedé involved in whatever trouble Minerva and the others were cooking up.

Still, all of us were praying for a change this new year. Things had gotten so bad, even people like me who didn’t want anything to do with politics were thinking about it all the time. See, now I had my grown son to nail me to the hard facts. I assigned him to God’s care and asked San José and the Virgencita to mind him as well, but still I worried all the time.

 It was after one in the morning when Pedrito and Noris and I started back to our house. Nelson had stayed at Mamá‘s, saying he was going to bring in the new year talking to his uncles. As we rode home, I saw the lamp at the window of the young widow’s house, and I knew he’d be bringing it in with more than talk. Rumor had it my “boy” was sowing wild oats along with his father’s cacao crop. I had asked Pedrito to talk to our son, but you know how the men are. He was proud of Nelson for proving himself a macho before he was even a grown man.

We hadn’t been asleep but a couple of hours when that bedroom was blazing with light. My first thought was of angels descending, their burning brands flashing, their fierce wings stirring up things. But as I came fully awake, I saw it was a car aiming its lights at our bedroom window. iAy, Dios mío! I shook Pedrito awake and flew out of that bed terrified that something had happened to my boy. I know what Pedrito says, that I’m overly protective. But ever since I lost my baby thirteen years ago, my deepest fear is that I will have to put another one in the ground. This time I don’t think I could go on.

It was Minerva and Manolo and Leandro and, yes, Nelson, all very drunk. They could hardly contain their excitement till they got inside. They had just tuned into Radio Rebelde to hear the New Year’s news, and they had been greeted by the triumphant announcement. Batista had fled! Fidel, his brother Raúl, and Ernesto they call Che had entered Havana and liberated the country. ¡Cuba libre! ¡Cuba libre!

Minerva started singing our anthem and the others joined in. I kept hushing them, and they finally sobered up when I reminded them we were not libre yet. The roosters were already crowing as they left to spread the news to all their friends in the area. Nelson wanted to go along, but I put my foot down. Next year when he was eighteen, he could stay out till the cacao needed picking. But this year—he was too dead tired to argue. I walked him to his room and, as if he were still a child, undressed him and tucked him in.

But Pedrito was still wanting to celebrate. And you know him, strong emotion takes him and he knows only one way to express it if I’m close by.

 He entered me, and it took some weeks before I realized. But I’d like to think, since my cycles stopped in January, that Raúl Ernesto began his long campaign into flesh the first day of this hopeful new year.

When I told Pedrito I’d missed two months already, he said, “Maybe you’re going through the change early, you think?” Like I said, it’d been thirteen years and I hadn’t borne fruit. “Let me go in there and see what I can find,” he said, leading me by the hand into our bedroom. Our Nelson grinned. He understood now about siestas.

I went on like this another month, and I missed again.

“Pedrito,” I said, “I’m pregnant, I’m sure of it.”

“How can that be, Mami?” He teased. “We’re ready for our grandchildren.” He indicated our grown son and daughter, playing dominoes, listening in on our secrets.

Noris leapt out of her chair. “Ay, Mami, is it true, really?” Fourteen going on fifteen, she had finally outgrown her dolls and was two, three, who knows, ten years away from her own babies. (The way young women wait these days, look at Minerva!) But Noris was like me, she wanted to give herself to things, and at her tender age, she could only imagine giving herself to children.

“Why don’t you have one of your own?” Nelson teased, poking his sister where she’d already told him a thousand times it hurt to be poked. “Maybe

Marcelino wants to be a daddy?”

“Stop that!” Noris whined.

“Stop that,” Nelson mimicked her. Sometimes, I wondered how my son could be with a woman and then come home and nag his sister so miserably.

Pedrito scowled. “That Marcelino gets near you and he won’t know what hit him.”

 “Help me think of a name,” I suggested, using the baby to distract them from a silly argument.

I looked down at my belly as if Our Lord might write out the name on my cotton housedress. And suddenly it was as if His tongue spoke in my mouth. On my own, I would never have thought of naming my son after revolutionaries. “Ernesto,” I said, “I’m going to name him Raúl Emesto.”

“Ernesto?” Noris said, making a face.

But Nelson’s face lit up in a way that made me nervous. “We’ll call him Che for short.”

“Che!” Noris said, holding her nose. “What kind of a name is that?”

Like I said, it must have been the Lord’s tongue in my mouth because back then, I was running scared. Not for myself but for those I loved. 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. Pedrito didn’t worry me. I knew he would always have one hand in the soil and the other somewhere on me. He wouldn’t wander far into trouble if I wasn’t along. But my son, my first born!

I had tried to shelter him, Lord knows. To no avail. He was always tagging along behind his Tío Manolo and his new Tio Leandro, men of the world who had gone to the university and who impressed him more than his country father. Any chance he got, he was off to the capital “to see Tía Mate and the baby Jacqueline,” or to Monte Cristi “to visit Tia Minerva and Minou and the new baby Manolito.” Yes, a whole new crop of Mirabals was coming up. That was another possible explanation for my pregnancy— suggestion. After all, whenever we were together for a while under the same roof, our cycles became as synchronized as our watches.

I knew my boy. He wanted to be a man outside the bedroom where he had already proven himself. That widow woman could have started a school in there, the way I understood it. But I didn’t resent her, no. She delivered

my son gently into manhood from his boyhood, something a mother cannot possibly do. , And so I thought of a way for Nelson to be in the capital, under supervision so he wouldn’t be running wild with women or his rebel uncles. I talked to Padre de Jesus López, our new priest, who promised to talk to Padre Fabré about letting Nelson enroll in Santo Tomás de Aquino in the capital. It was a seminary, but there was no obligation to the priesthood.

At first Nelson didn’t want to go to a school of pre-priest sissies. But a couple of weeks before the start of classes during the heavy plantings in the yucca field, he had a change of heart. Better to abstain from the gardens of delectable delights than to be stuck planting them, dawn to dusk.

Besides, his weekends would be his own to spend at his aunt Maria Teresa and his uncle Leandro’s house.

Besides, some of those pre-priests were no sissies at all. They talked about pudenda and. cunnilingus as if they were speaking of the body and blood of Christ. How do I know? Nelson came home once and asked me what the words meant, assuming they were liturgical. Young people don’t bother with their Latin these days.

Next step was to convince his father, and that was the hardest of all.

Pedrito didn’t see why we should be spending money sending Nelson to a boarding school in the capital. “His best school is right here beside me learning about his patrimonio.”

I didn’t have the heart to suggest that our son might not want to be a farmer like his father. Recently, Nelson had begun talking to me about going to the university. “It’s just for a year, Papi,” I pleaded. “It’ll be a good finish to his education.”

“Besides,” I added, “right now, the seminary is the best place for him.” It was true. Johnny Abbes and his SIM were dragging young men off the streets, and farms, and from offices, like Herod the boy babies in all of Judea. The church, refusing as it did to get involved in temporal matters, remained the only sanctuary.

Pedrito folded his arms and walked off into his cacao fields. I could see him pacing among the trees. That’s where he always went to think, the way I have to get down on my knees to know my own mind. He came back, put

his big hands on either side of the door frame his great-grandfather had built over a hundred years ago, and he nodded. “He can go.” And then with a gesture indicating the green fields over his shoulders that his great- grandfather, his grandfather, and his father had farmed before him, he added, “If the land can’t keep him, I can’t make him stay.”

So with the help of good Padre de Jesus, Nelson entered Santo Tomás de Aquino last September. Out of harm’s way, I thought.

And for a while, you might have said that he was as I was—safe in God’s love.

I’ll tell you when I panicked. Around Easter my Nelson began to talk about how he would join the liberators once the rumored invasion from Cuba hit our shores.

I sat him down and reminded him what the church fathers were teaching us. God in his wisdom would take care of things. “Promise me you’ll stay out of trouble!” I was on my knees before him. I could not bear the thought of losing my son. “Por Dios,” I pleaded.

“Ay, Mamá, don’t worry!” he said, looking down at me, embarrassed. But he gave me a lukewarm promise he’d stay out of trouble.

I did worry all the time. I went to Padre de Jesús for advice. He was straight out of seminary and brimming with new ideas. He would have a young way of explaining things I could bring home to my son.

“Padre,” I said, kissing the crucifix he offered me, “I feel lost. I don’t know what the Lord requires of us in these hard times.” I dared not get too critical. We all knew there were priests around who would report you to the SIM if you spoke against the regime.

Still, I hadn’t given up on the church as Minerva and Maria Teresa had.

Ever since I’d had my vision of the Virgencita, I knew spirit was imminent, and that the churches were just glass houses, or way stations on our road through this rocky life. But His house was a mansion as big as the sky, and

all you had to do was pelt His window with a pebble-cry, Open up! Help me, God! and He would let you inside.

Padre de Jesus did not intone vague pronouncements and send me home with a pat on the head. Not at all. He stood and I could see the travail of his spirit in how he took off his glasses and kept polishing them as if they’d never come clean. “Patria, my child,” he said, which made me smile for he couldn’t have been but five, six years older than my Nelson. “We must wait.

We must pray.” He faced me. “I, too, am lost so that I can’t show you the way.”

I was shaking like when a breeze blows through the sacristy and the votive candles flicker. This priest’s frankness had touched me more than a decree. We knelt there in that hot little rectory, and we prayed to the Virgencita. She had clung to Jesus until He told her straight out, Mamá, I have to be about My Father’s business. And she had to let him go, but it broke her heart because, though He was God, He was still her boy.

I got braver like a crab going sideways. I inched towards courage the best way I could, helping out with the little things.

I knew they were up to something big, Minerva and Manolo and Leandro. I wasn’t sure about Maria Teresa, caught up as she was with her new baby Jacqueline. But those others, I could feel it in the tension and silence that would come over them when I walked in on one of their conversations. I didn’t ask questions. I suppose I was afraid of what I would find out.

But then Minerva came to me with her six-month-old Manolito and asked me to keep him. “Keep him?” I, who treasured my children more than my own life, couldn’t believe my sister would leave her son for anything.

“Where are you going?” I asked, alarmed.

That tense silence came upon her, and then haltingly, as if wanting to be sure with each step that she was not saying more than she had to, she said,

“I’m going to be on the road a lot. And I’ll be coming down here for some meetings every week.”

“But Minerva, your own child—” I began and then I saw it did hurt her to make this sacrifice she was convinced she needed to make. So I added, “I’d love to take care of my little godson here!” Manolito smiled and came readily to my arms. How delicious to hold him like my own baby five months ahead of time. That’s when I told Minerva I was pregnant with a boy.

She was so glad for me. So glad! Then she got curious. “Since when are you a fortune teller to know it’s a son?”

I shrugged. But I gave her the best reason I could. “I’ve got a name all

picked out for a boy.”

“What are you going to name him?”

I knew then I had brought it up as a way of letting her know I was with her—if only in spirit. “Raúl Emesto,” I said, watching her face.

She looked at me a long moment, and very simply, she said, “I know you want to stay out of trouble, and I respect that.”

“If there should come a time—” I said.

“There will,” she said.

Minerva and Manolo began coming down every week to Ojo de Agua from Monte Cristi, almost from one end of the island to the other. Now, whenever they were stopped at the interrogation stations, they had a good excuse for being on the road. They were visiting their sickly son at Patria González’s house in Conuco. Monte Cristi was too hot, desert really, and their doctor had prescribed healthier air for the little boy.

Every time they came, Leandro drove up from the capital, and this curly- headed man Nino and his pretty wife Dulce came over from San Francisco.

They met up with Cuca and Fafa and one named Marien—though sometimes they called each other different, make-believe names.

They needed a place to meet, and so I offered them our land. There was a clearing between the cacao and the plátano groves. Pedrito had put some cane chairs and hammocks under a thatched roof, a place for workers to rest or take a siesta during the hot part of the day. Minerva and her group would sit out there for hours, talking. Once or twice when it was raining, I’d invite them to come into the house, but they’d refuse, knowing it was just politeness on my part. And I was thankful to them for sparing me. If the SIM came, Pedrito and I could always swear we knew nothing about these meetings.

It was a problem when Nelson was home from school. He’d go out there, eager to take part in whatever his uncles were plotting. In deference to me, I’m sure, they kept him at a distance. Not in any way that could hurt his young man’s pride, but in a comradely way. They’d send him for some more ice or cigarrillos or please Nelson, hombre, couldn’t he take the car down to Jimmy’s and see what was up with that radiator since they had to make it back to the capital this very night. Once, they sent the poor boy all the way to Santiago to pick up batteries for the short wave.

When he came back from delivering them, I asked him, “What’s going on out there, Nelson?” I knew, but I wanted to hear what he knew.

“Nothing, Mamá,” he said.

Then the secret he was keeping became more than he could contain.

When it was almost June, he finally confided in me. “They’re expecting it this coming month,” he whispered. “The invasion, yes!” he added when he saw the excited look on my face.

But you know why that look was there? I’ll tell you. My Nelson would be in school in the capital until the very end of June, out of harm’s way. He had to study hard if he expected to graduate in time to attend the university in the fall. We had our own little plot cooked up to present to his father— the day before university classes started.

I was the one who was going to be on the road. Mamá couldn’t believe it when I asked if she’d keep Manolito those four days. Why I was five months gone, Mamá exclaimed. I shouldn’t be traveling!

I explained that I’d be traveling with Padre de Jesús and the Salcedo group, and this retreat was important for renewing my faith. We were going up to Constanza. That mountain air would be good for my baby. And I’d heard the road was fairly good. I didn’t add from whom (Minerva) or why.

Troops were patrolling up and down the cordillera just in case any would-be guerrillas inspired by the Cubans were thinking of hiding there.

“Ay, Virgencita, you know what you do with my girls,” was all Mama said. She had become resigned to her daughters’ odd and willful ways. And yes, she would keep Manolito. Noris, too.

I had wanted my girl to go along on the retreat, but it was no use.

Marcelino’s sister had invited Noris to her quinceañera party and there was too much to do between now and then.

“But it’s two weeks away, mi amor.” I didn’t add that we had already designed and cut her dress, bought her little satin pumps, and tried out how she would wear her hair.

“¡Ay, Mami!” she wailed. “Por favor.” Why couldn’t I understand that getting ready for them was what made parties fun?

How different she was from me at that age! For one thing, Mamá raised us the old-fashioned way where we couldn’t go to dances until after our quinceañeras. But I was raising my girl modem where she wasn’t kept cooped up, learning blind obedience. Still, I wished she’d use her wings to soar up closer to the divine hem of our Blessed Virgin instead of to flutter towards things not worthy of her attention.

I kept praying for her, but it was like Pedrito having to let go of his son.

If the Virgencita didn’t think it was time for my girl to magnify the Lord, I certainly couldn’t talk her into a retreat with “old ladies” and a bunch of bad-breath priests. (Lord forgive her!)

We were a group of about thirty “mature” women—that’s how Padre de Jesus described us, bless his heart. We had started meeting a few months

back to discuss issues that came up in the gospel and to do Christ’s work in the bohios and barrios. Now we even had a name, Christian Cultural Group, and we had spread all over the Cibao area. Four priests provided spiritual guidance, Padre de ]esús among them. This retreat was our first, and Brother Daniel had managed to get the Maryknolls to let us use their motherhouse up in the mountains. The theme was the exploration of the meaning of Mary in our lives. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Padre de Jesús or Brother Daniel or one of the others would have an answer for me now about what was required during these troubled times.

“Ha! Your church will keep mum till kingdom come,” Minerva was always challenging me. Religion was now my belonging she didn’t want any part of. “Not a peep to help the downtrodden.”

What could I say when I, too, was intent on keeping my own flesh safe.

I’d written a letter to Padre Fabré down at Santo Tomás.

Dear Father,

Greetings in the Lord’s name from the mother of one of your

charges, Nelson González, completing his fourth year, a smart boy

on the whole, as you yourself wrote in your last report, but not

always the best with self-control. To make sure he studies hard and

stays out of trouble, please, do not let my son off the grounds except

to come home. He is a country boy not used to the city temptations,

and I do not want him getting mixed up with the wrong people.

May this letter be in the strictest of your confidences, Father.

Most faithfully yours, his mother,

Patria Mercedes

But Nelson found out about the letter from his little blabbermouth aunt in the capital. It was unfair, I wasn’t letting him become a man. But I stood firm. I’d rather have him stay alive, a boy forever, than be a man dead in the ground.

Maria Teresa was also hurt. One Saturday morning, she had come to take Nelson out for the weekend, and the director hadn’t allowed her. “Don’t you

trust me?” she confronted me. Now I had two angry souls to appease with half-truths.

“It isn’t you, Mate,” I began. I didn’t add that I knew from Nelson’s remarks that Leandro and Manolo and Minerva were involved in a serious plot.

“Don’t worry, I can take care of your baby. I’ve got lots of experience now” Mate was holding pretty Jacqueline, nuzzling her baby’s head with little kisses. “Besides, there’s nothing happening in the capital Nelson could get into, believe me. The Jaragua’s empty. The Olympia has been showing the same movie for a month. No one goes out anymore.” And then I heard her say it: “Nothing to celebrate yet.” I looked her in the eye and said, “You too, Mate?”

She hugged her baby girl close and looked so brave. I could hardly believe this was our tenderhearted little Mate whom Noris resembled so much. “Yes, I’m with them.” But then, the hard look faded and she was my baby sister again, afraid of el cuco and noodles in her soup. “If anything should happen, promise me you’ll take care of Jacqueline.”

It seemed I was going to raise all my sisters’ babies! “You know I would.

She’s one of mine, aren’t you, amorcito?” I took that baby in my arms and hugged her close. Jacqueline looked at me with that wonder the little ones have who still think of the world as a big, safe playroom inside their mother’s womb.

Our retreat had been planned for May, the month of Mary. But with the increased rumors of an invasion, El Jefe declared a state of emergency. All through May no one went anywhere without special permission from the SIM. Even Minerva stayed put in Monte Cristi. One day when we hadn’t seen his mother for almost a month, Manolito reached up to me from his crib and said, “Mamá, Mamá.” It was going to be hard to give him up once this hell on earth was over.

 By mid-June, things had quieted down. It looked as if the invasion was not going to come after all. The state of emergency was called off, and so we went ahead with plans for our retreat.

When we got to Constanza, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had grown up in the greenest, most beautiful valley on the island. But you get used to close- by beauty, and Constanza was different, like the picture of a faraway place on a puzzle you hurry to put together. I kept trying to fit it inside me and I couldn’t. Purple mountains reaching towards angelfeather clouds; a falcon soaring in a calm blue sky; God combing His sunshine fingers through green pastures straight out of the Psalms.

The retreat house was a little ways out of the village down a path through flower-dotted hillsides. Campesinos came out of their huts to watch us pass.

A pretty people, golden-skinned, light-eyed, they seemed wary, as if somebody not so kind had come down the road ahead of us. We greeted them and Padre de Jesus explained that we were on a retreat, so if they had any special requests they wanted us to remember in our prayers, please let us know. They stared at us silently and shook their heads, no.

We were each assigned a narrow cell with a cot, a crucifix on the wall, and a fount of holy water at the door. It could have been a palace, I rejoiced so in it all. Our meetings and meals were held in a big airy room with a large picture window. I sat with my back to the dazzling view so as not to be distracted from His Word by His Creation. Dawn and dusk, noon and night we gathered in the chapel and said a rosary along with the little nuns.

My old yearning to be in the religious life stirred. I felt myself rising, light-headed with transcendence, an overflowing fountain. Thank the Lord I had that child in my womb to remind me of the life I had already chosen.

It happened on the last day of our retreat.

The fourteenth of June: how can I ever forget that day!

 We were all in that big room having our midafternoon cursillo. Brother Daniel was talking of the last moment we knew of in Mary’s human life, her Assumption. Our Blessed Mother had been taken up into heaven, body and soul. What did we think of that? We went around the room, everyone declaring it was an honor for a mere mortal. When it came my turn, I said it was only fair. If our souls could go to eternal glory, our hardworking motherbodies surely deserved more. I patted my belly and thought of the little ghost of a being folded in the soft tissues of my womb. My son, my Raulito. I ached for him even more without Manolito in my arms to stanch the yearning.

Next thing I knew, His Kingdom was coming down upon the very roof of that retreat house. Explosion after explosion ripped the air. The house shook to its very foundation. Windows shattered, smoke poured in with a horrible smell. Brother Daniel was shouting, “Fall to the ground, ladies, cover your heads with your folding chairs!” Of course, all I was thinking of was protecting my unborn child. I scrambled to a little niche where a statue of the Virgencita was standing, and begging her pardon, I knocked her and her pedestal over. The crash was drowned out by the thunderous blast outside.

Then I crawled in and held my folding chair in front of me, closing the opening, and praying all the while that the Lord not test me with the loss of my child.

The shelling happened in a flash, but it seemed the chaos went on for hours. I heard moans, but when I lowered my chair, I could make out nothing in the smoke-filled room. My eyes stung, and I realized that in my fear I had wet my pants. Lord, I prayed, Lord God, let this cup pass. When the air finally cleared, I saw a mess of glass and rubble on the floor, bodies huddled everywhere. A wall had tumbled down and the tile floor was all torn up. Beyond, through the jagged hole where the window had been, the closest mountainside was a raging inferno.

Finally, there was an eerie silence, interrupted only by the sound of far- off gunfire and the nearby trickle of plaster from the ceiling. Padre de Jesus gathered us in the most sheltered comer, where we assessed our damages.

The injuries turned out to look worse than they were, just minor cuts from flying glass, thank the Lord. We ripped up our slips and bandaged the worst.

Then for spiritual comfort, Brother Daniel led us through a rosary. When we heard gunfire coming close again, we kept right on praying.

There were shouts, and four, then five, men in camouflage were running across the grounds towards us. Behind them, the same campesinos we’d seen on our walk and a dozen or more guardias were advancing, armed with machetes and machine guns. The hunted men crouched and careened this way and that as they headed towards the cover of the motherhouse.

They made it to the outdoor deck. I could see them clearly, their faces bloodied and frantic. One of them was badly wounded and hobbling, another had a kerchief tied around his forehead. A third was shouting to two others to stay down, and one of them obeyed and threw himself on the deck.

But the other must not have heard him for he kept on running towards us.

I looked in his face. He was a boy no older than Noris. Maybe that’s why I cried out, “Get down, son! Get down!” His eyes found mine just as the shot hit him square in the back. I saw the wonder on his young face as the life drained out of him, and I thought, Oh my God, he’s one of mine!

Coming down that mountain, I was a changed woman. I may have worn the same sweet face, but now I was carrying not just my child but that dead boy as well.

My stillborn of thirteen years ago. My murdered son of a few hours ago.

I cried all the way down that mountain. I looked out the spider-webbed window of that bullet-riddled car at brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, one and all, my human family. Then I tried looking up at our Father, but I couldn’t see His Face for the dark smoke hiding the tops of those mountains.

I made myself pray so I wouldn’t cry. But my prayers sounded more like I was trying to pick a fight.

I’m not going to sit back and watch my babies die, Lord, even if that’s what You in Your great wisdom decide.

They met me on the road coming into town, Minerva, Maria Teresa, Mama, Dedé, Pedrito, Nelson. Noris was weeping in terror. It was after that I noticed a change in her, as if her soul had at last matured and begun its cycles. When I dismounted from that car, she came running towards me, her arms out like a person seeing someone brought back from the dead. All of them were sure I had been singed to nothing from what they’d heard on the radio about the bombing.

No, Patria Mercedes had come back to tell them all, tell them all.

But I couldn’t speak. I was in shock, you could say, I was mourning that dead boy.

It was all over the papers the next day. Forty-nine men and boys martyred in those mountains. We had seen the only four saved, and for what?

Tortures I don’t want to think of.

Six days later, we knew when the second wave of the invasion force hit on the beaches north of here. We saw the planes flying low, looking like hornets. And afterwards we read in the papers how one boat with ninety- three on board had been bombed before it could land; the other with sixty- seven landed, but the army with the help of local campesinos hunted those poor martyrs down.

I didn’t keep count how many had died. I kept my hand on my stomach, concentrating on what was alive.

Less than a month before I was due, I attended the August gathering of our Christian Cultural Group in Salcedo. It was the first meeting since our disastrous retreat. Padre de Jesus and Brother Daniel had been down in the capital throughout July conferring with other clergy. To the Salcedo gathering, they invited only a few of us old members whom—I saw later—

they had picked out as ready for the Church Militant, tired of the Mother Church in whose skirts they once hid.

They picked right, all right. I was ready, big as I looked, heavy as I was.

The minute I walked into that room, I knew something had changed in the way the Lord Jesus would be among us. No longer was there the liturgical chatter of how San Zenón had made the day sunny for a granddaughter’s wedding or how Santa Lucia had cured the cow’s pinkeye.

That room was silent with the fury of avenging angels sharpening their radiance before they strike.

The priests had decided they could not wait forever for the pope and the archbishop to come around. The time was now, for the Lord had said, I come with the sword as well as the plow to set at liberty them that are bruised.

I couldn’t believe this was the same Padre de Jesus talking who several months back hadn’t known his faith from his fear! But then again, here in that little room was the same Patria Mercedes, who wouldn’t have hurt a butterfly, shouting, “Amen to the revolution.”

And so we were born in the spirit of the vengeful Lord, no longer His lambs. Our new name was Acción Clero-Cultural. Please note, action as the first word! And what was our mission in ACC?

Only to organize a powerful national underground.

We would spread the word of God among our brainwashed campesinos who had hunted down their own liberators. After all, Fidel would never have won over in Cuba if the campesinos there hadn’t fed him, hidden him, lied for him, joined him.

The word was, we were all brothers and sisters in Christ. You could not chase after a boy with your machete and enter the kingdom of heaven. You could not pull that trigger and think there was even a needle hole for you to

pass through into eternity.

I could go on.

 Padre de Jesus walked me out when the meeting was over. He looked a little apologetic when he glanced at my belly, but he went on and asked me.

Did I know of any one who would like to join our organization ? No doubt he had heard about the meetings Manolo and Minerva were conducting on our property.

I nodded. I knew of at least six, I said, counting Pedrito and Nelson among my two sisters and their husbands. And in a month’s time, seven.

Yes, once my son was born, I’d be out there recruiting every campesino in Ojo de Agua, Conuco, Salcedo to the army of Our Lord.

“Patria Mercedes, how you’ve changed!”

I shook my head back at him, and I didn’t have to say it. He was laughing, putting on his glasses after wiping them on his cassock, his vision —like mine—clean at last.

Next time they gathered under the shade of the thatch, I went out there, carrying my week-old prize.

“Hola, Patria,” the men called. “That’s quite a macho you got there!”

When they picked him out of my arms to look him over, my boy howled.

He was a crier from the start, that one. “What you call that bawling little he- man?”

“Raúl Emesto,” Minerva said meaningfully, bragging on her nephew.

I nodded and smiled at their compliments. Nelson looked away when I looked at him. He was probably thinking I had come out there to get him.

“Come on inside now,” I said. “I have something to talk to you about.”

He thought I meant him, but I was looking around at the whole group.

“Come on.”

Minerva waved away my invitation. “Don’t you worry about us.”

I said, “Come on in, now. I mean it this time.”

 They looked from one to the other, and something in my voice let them know I was with them. They picked up their drinks, and I could have been leading the children out of bondage, the way they all followed me obediently into my house.

Now it was Pedrito who began to worry. And the worry came where he was most vulnerable.

The same month we met in Padre de Jesús’ rectory, a new law was passed. If you were caught harboring any enemies of the regime even if you yourself were not involved in their schemes, you would be jailed, and everything you owned would become the property of the government.

His land! Worked by his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. His house like an ark with beams where he could see his great- grandfather’s mark.

We had not fought like this in our eighteen years of marriage. In that bedroom at night, that man, who had never raised his voice to me, unleashed the fury of three ancestors at me. “You crazy, mujer, to invite them into the house! You want your sons to lose their patrimony, is that what you want?”

As if he were answering his father, Raúl Ernesto began to cry. I gave him the breast and long after he was done, I cradled him there to help coax out the tenderness in his father. To remind him there was some for him as well.

But he didn’t want me. It was the first time Pedrito González had turned me away. That hurt deep in the heart’s tender parts. I was going through that empty period after the baby is born when you ache to take it back into yourself. And the only solace then is the father coming back in, making himself at home.

“If you had seen what I saw on that mountain,” I pleaded with him, weeping all over again for that dead boy. “Ay, Pedrito, how can we be true Christians and turn our back on our brothers and sisters—”

 “Your first responsibility is to your children, your husband, and your home!” His face was so clouded with anger, I couldn’t see the man I loved.

“I’ve already let them use this place for months. Let them meet over on your own Mirabal farm from now on!”

It’s true, our family farm would have been a logical alternative, but Dedé and Jaimito were living on it now. I had already approached Dedé, and she had come back without Jaimito’s permission.

“But you believe in what they’re doing, Pedrito,” I reminded him. And then I don’t know what got into me. I wanted to hurt the man in front of me.

I wanted to break this smaller version of who he was and release the big- hearted man I’d married. And so I told him. His first born did not want this patrimony. Nelson had already put in his application for the university in the fall. And what was more, I knew for a fact he was already in the underground along with his uncles. “It’s him you’ll be throwing to the SIM!”

Pedrito wiped his face with his big hands and bowed his head, resigned.

“God help him, God help him,” he kept mumbling till my heart felt wrong hurting him as I’d done.

But later in the dark, he sought me out with his old hunger. He didn’t have to say it, that he was with us now. 1 knew it in the reckless way he took me with him down into the place where his great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had met their women before him.

So it was that our house became the motherhouse of the movement.

It was here with the doors locked and the front windows shuttered that the ACC merged with the group Manolo and Minerva had started over a year ago. There were about forty of us. A central committee was elected. At first, they tried to enlist Minerva, but she deferred to Manolo, who became our president.

 It was in this very parlor where Noris had begun receiving callers that the group gave themselves a name. How they fought over that one like schoolgirls arguing over who will hold whose hand! Some wanted a fancy name that would touch all the high spots, Revolutionary Party of Dominican Integrity. Then Minerva moved swiftly through the clutter to the heart of the matter. She suggested we name ourselves after the men who had died in the mountains.

For the second time in her quiet life, Patria Mercedes (alias Mariposa #3) shouted out, “Amen to the revolution!”

So it was between these walls hung with portraits, including El Jefe‘s, that the Fourteenth of June Movement was founded. Our mission was to effect an internal revolution rather than wait for an outside rescue.

It was on this very Formica table where you could still see the egg stains from my family’s breakfast that the bombs were made. Nipples, they were called. It was the shock of my life to see Maria Teresa, so handy with her needlepoint, using tweezers and little scissors to twist the fine wires together.

It was on this very bamboo couch where my Nelson had, as a tiny boy, played with the wooden gun his grandfather had made him that he sat now with Padre de Jesús, counting the ammunition for the .32 automatics we would receive in a few weeks at a prearranged spot. The one named Ilander we called Eagle had arranged the air drop with the exiles.

It was on that very rocker where I had nursed every one of my babies that I saw my sister Minerva looking through the viewfinder of an M-1 carbine —a month ago I would not have known it from a shotgun. When I followed her aim out the window, I cried out, startling her, “No, no, not the mimosa!”

I had sent Noris away to her grandmother’s in Conuco. I told her we were making repairs to her room. And in a way, we were, for it was in her bedroom that we assembled the boxes. It was among her crocheted pink poodles and little perfume bottles and snapshots of her quinceañera party that we stashed our arsenal of assorted pistols and revolvers, three .38 caliber Smith and Wesson pistols, six .30 caliber M-1 carbines, four M-3 machine guns, and a .45 Thompson stolen from a guardia. I know, Mate and

I drew up the list ourselves in the pretty script we’d been taught by the nuns for writing out Bible passages.

It was in those old and bountiful fields that Pedrito and his son and a few of the other men buried the boxes once we got them loaded and sealed. In among the cacao roots Pedrito lowered the terrible cargo. But he seemed at peace now with the risks he was taking. This was a kind of farming, too, he told me later, one that he could share with his Nelson. From those seeds of destruction, we would soon—very soon—harvest our freedom.

It was on that very coffee table on which Noris had once knocked a tooth out tussling with her brother that the plans for the attack were drawn. On January 21st, the day of the Virgin of Highest Grace, the different groups would gather here to arm themselves and receive their last-minute instructions.

It was down this very hall and in and out of my children’s bedrooms and past the parlor and through the back galería to the yard that I walked those last days of 1959, worrying if I had done the right thing exposing my family to the SIM. I kept seeing that motherhouse up in the mountains, its roof caving in, its walls crumbling like a foolish house built on sand. I could, by a trick of terror, turn that vision into my own house tumbling down.

As I walked, I built it back up with prayer, hung the door on its creaky hinges, nailed the floorboards down, fitted the transoms. “God help us,” I kept saying. “God help us.” Raulito was almost always in my arms, crying something terrible, as I paced, trying to settle him, and myself, down.

III

1960

 CHAPTER NINE

Dedé

1994

and

1960

When Dedé next notices, the garden’s stillness is deepening, blooming dark flowers, their scent stronger for the lack of color and light. The interview woman is a shadowy face slowly losing its features.

“And the shades of night begin to fall, and the traveler hurries home, and the campesino bids his fields farewell,” Dedé recites.

The woman gets up hurriedly from her chair as if she has just been shown the way out. “I didn’t realize it was this late.”

“No, no, I wasn’t throwing you an indirecta.” Dedé laughs, motioning the woman to sit back down. “We have a few more minutes.” The interviewer perches at the edge of her chair as if she knows the true interview is over.

“That poem always goes through my head this time of day,” Dedé explains. “Minerva used to recite it a lot those last few months when she and Mate and Patria were living over at Mamá’s. The husbands were in prison,” she adds, for the woman’s face registers surprise at this change of

address. “All except Jaimito.”

“How lucky,” her guest notes.

 “It wasn’t luck,” Dedé says right out. “It was because he didn’t get

directly involved.”

“And you?”

Dedé shakes her head. “Back in those days, we women followed our husbands.” Such a silly excuse. After all, look at Minerva. “Let’s put it this way,” Dedé adds. “I followed my husband. I didn’t get involved.”

“I can understand that,” the interview woman says quickly as if protecting Dedé from her own doubts. “It’s still true in the States. I mean, most women I know, their husband gets a job in Texas, say well, Texas it’s going to be.”

“I’ve never been to Tejas,» Dedé says absently. Then, as if to redeem herself, she adds, ”I didn’t get involved until later.“

“When was that?” the woman asks.

Dedé admits it out loud: “When it was already too late.”

The woman puts away her pad and pen. She digs around in her purse for her keys, and then she remembers—she stuck them in the ashtray of the car so she could find them easily! She is always losing things. She says it like a boast. She gives several recent examples in her confused Spanish.

Dedé worries this woman will never find her way back to the main road in the dark. Such a thin woman with fly-about hair in her face. What ever happened to hairspray? Her niece Minou’s hair is the same way. All this fussing about the something layer in outer space, and meanwhile, they walk around looking like something from outer space.

“Why don’t I lead you out to the anacahuita turn,” she offers the

interview woman.

“You drive?”

 They are always so surprised. And not just the American women who think of this as an “underdeveloped” country where Dedé should still be riding around in a carriage with a mantilla over her hair, but her own nieces and nephews and even her sons tease her about her little Subaru. Their Mama Dedé, a modem woman, ¡Epa! But in so many other things I have not changed, Dedé thinks. Last year during her prize trip to Spain, the smart-looking Canadian man approached her, and though it’d been ten years already since the divorce, Dedé just couldn’t give herself that little fling.

“I’ll make it fine,” the woman claims, looking up at the sky “Wow, the light is almost gone.”

Night has fallen. Out on the road, they hear the sound of a car hurrying home. The interview woman bids Dedé farewell, and together they walk through the darkened garden to the side of the house where the rented Datsun is parked.

A car nears and turns into the drive, its headlights beaming into their eyes. Dedé and the woman stand paralyzed like animals caught in the beams of an oncoming car.

“Who could this be?” Dedé wonders aloud.

“Your next compromiso, no?” the interview woman says.

Dedé is reminded of her lie. “Yes, of course,” she says as she peers into the dark. “¡Buenas!” she calls out.

“It’s me, Mamá Dedé,” Minou calls back. The car door slams—Dedé jumps. Footsteps hurry towards them.

“What on earth are you doing here? I’ve told you a thousand times!”

Dede scolds her niece. She doesn’t care anymore if she is betraying her lie.

Minou knows, all of her nieces know, that Dedé can’t bear for them to be on the road after dark. If their mothers had only waited until the next morning to drive back over that deserted mountain road, they might still be alive to scold their own daughters about the dangers of driving at night.

 “Ya, ya, Mama Dedé.” Minou bends down to kiss her aunt. Having taken after both her mother and father, she is a head taller than Dedé. “It just so happens I was off the road an hour ago.” There is a pause, and Dedé already guesses what Minou is hesitating to say, for therein awaits another scold. “I was over at Fela’s.”

“Any messages from the girls?” Dedé says smartly. Beside her, she can feel the eager presence of the interview woman.

“Can’t we sit down first,” Minou says. There is some emotion in her voice Dedé can’t quite make out. She has soured her niece’s welcome, scolding her the minute she gets out of her car. “Come, come, you’re right.

Forgive your old aunt’s bad manners. Let’s go have a limonada.”

“I was just on my way out,” the interview woman reminds Dedé. To Minou, she adds, “I hope to see you again—”

“We haven’t even met.” Minou smiles.

Dedé apologizes for her oversight and introduces the woman to her niece.

Oh dear, what a mishmash of gratitude follows. The interview woman is delirious at the good fortune of meeting both sister and daughter of the heroine of the Fourteenth of June underground. Dedé cringes. She had better cut this off. Unlike their aunt, the children won’t put up with this kind of overdone gush.

But Minou is chuckling away. “Come see us again,” she offers, and Dedé, forced to rise to this politeness, adds, “Yes, now you know the way.”

“I went to see Fela,” Minou begins after she is settled with a fresh lemonade.

Dedé hears her niece swallow some emotion. What could be wrong?

Dedé wonders. Gently now, she prods Minou, “Tell me what the girls had to say today?”

 “That’s just it,” Minou says, her voice still uneven. “They wouldn’t come. Fela says they must finally be at rest. It was strange, hearing that. I felt sad instead of glad.”

Her last tie, however tenuous, to her mother. So that’s what the emotion is all about, Dedé thinks. Then it strikes her. She knows exactly why Fela was getting a blackout this afternoon. “Don’t you worry.” Dedé pats her niece’s hand. “They’re still around.”

Minou scowls at her aunt. “Are you making fun again?”

Dedé shakes her head. “I swear they’ve been here. All afternoon.”

Minou is watching her aunt for any sign of irony. Finally, she says, “All right, can I ask you anything just like I do Fela?”

Dedé laughs uneasily. “Go on.”

Minou hesitates, and then she says it right out, what Dedé suspects everyone has always wanted to ask her but which some politeness kept them from. Trust Minerva’s incarnation to confront Dedé with the question she herself has avoided. “I’ve always wondered, I mean, you all were so close, why you didn’t go along with them?”

Certainly she remembers everything about that sunny afternoon, a few days into the new year, when Patria, Mate, and Minerva came over to see her.

She had been preparing a new bed in the garden, enjoying the rare quiet of an empty house. The girl had the day off, and as usual on a Sunday afternoon, Jaimito had gone to the big gallera in San Francisco, this time taking all three boys. Dedé wasn’t expecting them back till late. From Mamá’s house on the main road, her sisters must have seen Jaimito’s pickup drive away without her and hurried to come over and pay Dedé this surprise visit.

When she heard a car stop in front of the house, Dede considered taking off into the cacao grove. She was getting so solitary. A few nights ago

Jaimito had complained that his mother had noticed that Dedé wasn’t her old lively self. She rarely dropped by Dona Leila’s anymore with a new strain of hibiscus she’d sprouted or a batch of pastelitos she’d made from scratch. Miss Sonrisa was losing her smiles, all right. Dedé had looked at her husband, a long look as if she could draw the young man of her dreams out from the bossy, old-fashioned macho he’d become. “Is that what your mother says?”

He’d brought this up as he sat in slippers in the galería enjoying the cool evening. He took a final swallow from his rum glass before he answered, “That’s what my mother says. Get me another one, would you, Mami?” He held out the glass, and Dedé had gone obediently to the icebox in the back of the house where she burst into tears. What she wanted to hear from him was that he had noticed. Just his saying so would have made it better, whatever it was. She herself wasn’t sure what.

So when she saw her three sisters coming down the path that afternoon, she felt pure dread. It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised to snip the knot that was keeping Dedé’s life from falling apart.

She knew why they had come.

Patria had approached her in the fall with a strange request. Could she bury some boxes in one of the cacao fields in back of their old house?

Dedé had been so surprised. “Why, Patria! Who put you up to this?”

Patria looked puzzled. “We’re all in it, if that’s what you mean. But I’m speaking for myself.”

“I see,” Dedé had said, but really what she saw was Minerva in back of it all. Minerva agitating. No doubt she had sent Patria over rather than come herself since she and Dede were not getting along. It had been years since they’d fought openly—since Lío, wasn’t it?—but recently their hot little exchanges had started up again.

 What could Dedé say? She had to talk to Jaimito first. Patria had given her a disappointed look, and Dedé had gotten defensive. “What? I should go over Jaimito’s head? It’s only fair. He’s the one farming the land, he’s responsible for this place.”

“But can’t you decide on your own, then tell him?”

Dedé stared at her sister, disbelieving.

“That’s what I did,” Patria went on. “I joined, and then I talked Pedrito into joining me.”

“Well, I don’t have that kind of marriage,” Dedé said. She smiled to take the huffiness out of her statement.

“What kind of marriage do you have?” Patria looked at her with that sweetness on her face that could always penetrate Dedé’s smiles. Dedé looked away.

“It’s just that you don’t seem yourself,” Patria continued, reaching for Dedé’s hand. “You seem so—I don’t know—withdrawn. Is something wrong?”

It was Patria’s worried tone more than her question that pulled Dedé back into that abandoned part of herself where she had hoped to give love, and to receive it, in full measure, both directions.

Being there, she couldn’t help herself. Though she tried giving Patria another of her brave smiles, Miss Sonrisa burst into tears.

After Patria’s visit, Dedé had talked to Jaimito. As she expected, his answer was an adamant no. But beyond what she expected, he was furious with her for even considering such a request. The Mirabal sisters liked to run their men, that was the problem. In his house, he was the one to wear the pants.

“Swear you’ll keep your distance from them!”

When he got upset, he would just raise his voice. But that night, he grabbed her by the wrists and shoved her on the bed, only—he said later—

to make her come to her senses. “Swear!”

Now, when she thinks back, Dedé asks herself as Minou has asked her, Why? Why didn’t she go along with her sisters. She was only thirty-four.

She could have started a new life. But no, she reminds herself. She wouldn’t have started over. She would have died with them on that lonely mountain road.

Even so, that night, her ears still ringing from Jaimito’s shout, Dedé had been ready to risk her life. It was her marriage that she couldn’t put on the line. She had always been the docile middle child, used to following the lead. Next to an alto she sang alto, by a soprano, soprano. Miss Sonrisa, cheerful, compliant. Her life had gotten bound up with a domineering man, and so she shrank from the challenge her sisters were giving her.

Dedé sent Patria a note: Sorry. jaimito says no.

And for weeks afterwards, she avoided her sisters.

And now, here they were, all three like a posse come to rescue her.

Dede’s heart was beating away as she stood to welcome them. “How wonderful to see you!” She smiled, Miss Sonrisa, armed with smiles. She led them through the garden, delaying, showing off this and that new planting. As if they were here on a social call. As if they had come to see how her jasmine shrubs were doing.

They sat on the patio, exchanging the little news. The children were all coming down with colds. Little Jacqueline would be one in a month. Patria was up all hours again with Raulito. That boy was still not sleeping through the night. This gringo doctor she was reading said it was the parents of colicky babies who were to blame. No doubt Raulito was picking up all the tension in the house. Speaking of picking up things: Minou had called Trujillo a bad word. Don’t ask. She must have overheard her parents. They would have to be more careful. Imagine what could happen if there were another spying yardboy like Prieto on the premises.

 Imagine. An awkward silence fell upon them. Dedé braced herself. She expected Minerva to make an impassioned pitch for using the family farm for a munitions storage. But it was Mate who spoke up, the little sister who still wore her hair in braids and dressed herself and her baby girl in matching dresses.

They had come, she said, because something big, I mean really big, was about to happen. Mate’s eyes were a child‘s, wide with wonder.

Minerva drew her index finger across her throat and let her tongue hang out of her mouth. Patria and Mate burst into nervous giggles.

Dedé couldn’t believe it. They’d gone absolutely mad! “This is serious business,” she reminded them. Some fury that had nothing to do with this serious business was making her heart beat fast.

“You bet it is,” Minerva said, laughing. “The goat is going to die.”

“Less than three weeks!” Mate’s voice was becoming breathy with excitement.

“On the feast day of the Virgencita!” Patria exclaimed, making the sign of the cross and rolling her eyes heavenward. “Ay, Virgencita, watch over us.”

Dedé pointed to her sisters. “You’re going to do it yourselves?”

“Heavens, no,” Mate said, horrified at the thought. “The Action Group does the actual justice, but then all the different cells will liberate their locations. We’ll be taking the Salcedo Fortaleza.”

Dedé was about to remind her little sister of her fear of spiders, worms, noodles in her soup, but she let Mate go on. “We’re a cell, see, and there are usually only three in a cell, but we could make ours four.” Mate looked hopefully at Dedé.

As if they were inviting her to join a goddamn volleyball team!

“This is a little sudden, I know,” Patria was saying. “But it’s not like with the boxes, Dedé. This looks like a sure thing.”

“This is a sure thing,” Minerva confirmed.

 “Don’t decide now,” Patria went on as if afraid what Dedé’s snap decision might be. “Think about it, sleep on it. We’re having a meeting next Sunday at my place.”

“Ay, like old times, all four of us!” Mate clapped her hands.

Dedé could feel herself being swayed by the passion of her sisters. Then she hit the usual snag. “And Jaimito?”

There was another awkward silence. Her sisters looked at each other.

“Our cousin is also invited,” Minerva said with that stiff tone she always used with Jaimito. “But you know best whether it’s worth asking him.”

“What do you mean by that?” Dedé snapped.

“I mean by that that I don’t know what Jaimito’s politics are.”

Dedé’s pride was wounded. Whatever their problems, Jaimito was her husband, the father of her children. “Jaimito’s no trujillista, if that’s what you’re implying. No more than … than Papa was.”

“In his own way, Papá was a trujillista,” Minerva announced.

All her sisters looked at her, shocked. “Papá was a hero!” Dedé fumed.

“He died because of what he went through in prison. You should know. He was trying to keep you out of trouble!”

Minerva nodded. “That’s right. His advice was always, don’t annoy the bees, don’t annoy the bees. It’s men like him and Jaimito and other scared fulanitos who have kept the devil in power all these years.”

“How can you say that about Papá?” Dede could hear her voice rising.

“How can you let her say that about Papá?” She tried to enlist her sisters.

Mate had begun to cry.

“This isn’t what we came for,” Patria reminded Minerva, who stood and walked to the porch rail and stared out into the garden.

Dedé raked her eyes over the yard, half-afraid her sister was finding fault there, too. But the crotons were lusher than ever and the variegated bougainvilleas she hadn’t thought would take were heavy with pink blossoms. All the beds were neat and weedless. Everything in its place.

Only in the new bed where she’d just been working did the soil look torn up. And it was disturbing to see—among the established plantings—the raw brown earth like a wound in the ground.

“We want you with us. That’s why we’re here.” Minerva’s eyes as she fixed them on her sister were full of longing.

“What if I can’t?” Dedé’s voice shook. “Jaimito thinks it’s suicide. He’s told me he’ll have to leave me if I get mixed up in this thing.” There, she’d said it. Dedé felt the hot flush of shame on her face. She was hiding behind her husband’s fears, bringing down scorn on him instead of herself.

“Our dear cousin,” Minerva said sarcastically. But she stopped herself on a look from Patria.

“Everyone has their own reasons for the choices they make,” Patria said, defusing the charged atmosphere, “and we have to respect that.”

Blessed are the peacemakers, Dedé thought, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what the prize was that had been promised them.

“Whatever you decide, we’ll understand,” Patria concluded, looking around at her sisters.

Mate nodded, but Minerva could never leave well enough alone. As she climbed in the car, she reminded Dedé, “Next Sunday at Patria’s around three. In case you change your mind,” she added.

As she watched them drive away, Dedé felt strangely mingled surges of dread and joy. Kneeling at the new bed helped calm the shaking in her knees. Before she had finished smoothing the soil and laying out a border of little stones, she had worked out her plan. Only much later did she realize she had forgotten to put any seeds in the ground.

She would leave him.

Next to that decision, attending the underground meeting over at Patria’s was nothing but a small step after the big turn had been taken. All week she

refined the plan for it. As she beat the mattresses and fumigated the baseboards for red ants, as she chopped onions for the boys’ breakfast mangú and made them drink limonsillo tea to keep away the cold going around, she plotted. She savored her secret, which tasted deliciously of freedom, as she allowed his weight on her in the dark bedroom and waited for him to be done.

Next Sunday, while Jaimito was at his gallera, Dedé would ride over to the meeting. When he came back, he would find the note propped on his pillow.

I feel like I’m buried alive. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.

Their life together had collapsed. From puppydog devotion, he had moved on to a moody bossiness complicated with intermittent periods of dogged remorse that would have been passion had there been less of his hunger and more of her desire in it. True to her nature, Dedé had made the best of things, eager for order, eager for peace. She herself was preoccupied —by the births of their sons, by the family setbacks after Papa was jailed, by Papá’s sad demise and death, by their own numerous business failures.

Perhaps Jaimito felt broken by these failures and her reminders of how she had tried to prevent them. His drinking, always social, became more solitary.

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.

Lío! What had become of him? Dedé had asked Minerva several times, quite casually, about their old friend. But Minerva didn’t know a thing. Last she’d heard Lio had made it to Venezuela where a group of exiles was training for an invasion.

Then, recently, without her even asking, Minerva had confided to Dedé that their old friend was alive and kicking. “Tune into Radio Rumbos, 99 on your dial.” Minerva knew Jaimito would be furious if he found Dedé listening to that outlawed station, yet her sister taunted her.

 One naughty night, Dedé left Jaimito sleeping heavily after sex and stole out to the far end of the garden to the little shack where she kept the garden tools. There, in the dark, sitting on a sack of bark chips for her orchids, Dedé had slowly turned the dial on Jaimito Enrique’s transistor radio. The static crackled, then a voice, very taken with itself, proclaimed, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!”

Fidel’s speech was played endlessly at these off hours, as Dedé soon found out. But night after night, she kept returning to the shack, and twice she was rewarded with the unfamiliar, blurry voice of someone introduced as Comrade Virgilio. He spoke his high-flown talk which had never been what had appealed to Dedé. Even so, night after night, she returned to the shed, for these excursions were what mattered now. They were her secret rebellion, her heart hungering, her little underground of one.

Now, planning her exodus, Dedé tried to imagine Lio’s surprise at hearing Dedé had joined her sisters. He would know that she, too, was one of the brave ones. His sad, sober eyes that had hung before her mind’s eye for so many years melted into the ones that looked back at her now from the mirror. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.

As the day drew closer, Dedé was beset by doubts, particularly when she thought about her boys.

Enrique, Rafael, David, how could she possibly leave them?

Jaimito would never let her keep them. He was more than possessive with his sons, claiming them as if they were parts of himself. Look at how he had named them all with his first name as well as his last! Jaime Enrique Fernández. Jaime Rafael Fernández. Jaime David Fernández. Only their middle names, which perforce became their given names, were their own.

It wasn’t just that she couldn’t bear losing her boys, although that in itself was a dread large enough to stop her in her tracks. She also couldn’t desert them. Who would stand between them and the raised hand when their father lost his temper? Who would make them mangú the way they liked it, cut

their hair so it looked right, and sit in the dark with them when they were scared and the next morning not remind them she had been there?

She needed to talk to someone, outside her sisters. The priest! She’d gotten lax in her church attendance. The new militancy from the pulpit had become like so much noise in a place you had come to hear soothing music.

But now that noise seemed in harmony with what she was feeling inside.

Maybe this new young priest Padre de Jesus would have an answer for her.

She arranged for a ride that Friday with Mamá’s new neighbors, Don Bernardo and his wife Doña Belén, old Spaniards who had been living down in San Cristóbal for years. They had decided to move to the countryside, Don Bernardo explained, hoping the air would help Dona Belen. Something was wrong with the frail, old woman—she was forgetting the simplest things, what a fork was for, how to button her dress, was it the seed or the meat of the mango you could eat. Don Bernardo was taking her to Salcedo for yet another round of tests at the clinic. “We won’t be coming back until late afternoon. I hope that won’t inconvenience you very much?” he apologized. The man was astonish ingly courtly

“Not at all,” Ded6 assured him. She could just be dropped off at the church.

“What have you got to do all day in church?” Doña Belen had a disconcerting ability to suddenly tune in quite clearly, especially to what

was none of her business.

“Community work,” Dede lied.

“You Mirabal girls are so civic-minded,” Don Bernardo observed. No doubt he was thinking of Minerva, or his favorite, Patria.

It was harder to satisfy Jaimito’s suspicions. “If you need to go to Salcedo, I’ll take you tomorrow.” He had come into the bedroom as she was getting dressed that Friday morning.

“Jaimito, por Dios!” she pleaded. He had already forbidden her to go about with her sisters, was he now going to keep her from accompanying a poor old woman to the doctor?

 “Since when has Dona Belén been a preoccupation of yours?” Then he said the thing he knew would make her feel the guiltiest. “And what about leaving the boys when they’re sick?”

“All they have is colds, for God’s sake. And Tinita’s here with them.”

Jaimito blinked in surprise at her sharp tone. Was it really this easy Dede wondered, taking command?

“Do as you please then!” He was giving her little knowing nods, his hands curling into fists. “But remember, you’re going over my head!”

Jaimito did not return her wave as they drove away from Ojo de Agua.

Something threatening in his look scared her. But Dedé kept reminding herself she need not be afraid. She was going to be leaving him. She told herself to keep that in mind.

No one answered her knock at the rectory, although she kept coming back every half hour, all morning long. In between times, she idled in shops, remembering Jaimito’s look that morning, feeling her resolve draining away. At noon, when everything closed up, she sat under a shade tree in the square and fed the pieces of the pastry she’d bought to the pigeons. Once she thought she saw Jaimito’s pickup, and she began making up stories for why she had strayed from Dona Belén at the clinic.

Midafternoon, she spotted a green panel truck pulling up to the rectory gates. Padre de Jesus was in the passenger seat, another man was driving, a third jumped out from the back, unlocked the courtyard gates, and closed them after the truck pulled in.

Dedé hurried across the street. There was only a little time left before she had to meet up with Don Bernardo and Doña Belén at the clinic, and she had to talk to the priest. All day, the yeses and noes had been swirling inside her, faster, faster, until she felt dizzy with indecision. Waiting on that bench, she had promised herself that the priest’s answer would decide it, once and for all.

 She knocked several times before Padre de Jesus finally came to the door.

Many apologies, he was unloading the truck, hadn’t heard the knocker until just now. Please, please come in. He would be right with her.

He left her sitting in the small vestibule while he finished up with the delivery Dedé could hear going on in the adjoining choir room. Over his shoulder as he departed, Dedé caught a glimpse of some pine boxes, half- covered by a tarpaulin. Something about their color and their long shape recalled an incident in Patria’s house last fall. Dedé had come over to help paint the baby’s room. She had gone into Noris’s room in search of some old sheets to lay on the floor, and there, in the closet, hidden behind a row of dresses, she’d seen several boxes just like these, standing on end. Patria had come in, acting very nervous, stammering about those boxes being full of new tools. Not too long after, when Patria had come with her request to hide some boxes, Dedé had understood what tools were inside them.

My God, Padre de Jesus was one of them! He would encourage her to join the struggle. Of course, he would. And she knew, right then and there, her knees shaking, her breath coming short, that she could not go through with this business. Jaimito was just an excuse. She was afraid, plain and simple, just as she had been afraid to face her powerful feelings for Lío.

Instead, she had married Jaimito, although she knew she did not love him enough. And here she’d always berated him for his failures in business when the greater bankruptcy had been on her part.

She told herself that she was going to be late for her rendezvous. She ran out of that rectory before the priest could return, and arrived at the clinic while Doña Belén was still struggling with the buttons of her dress.

She heard the terrible silence the minute she walked in the house.

His pickup hadn’t been in the drive, but then he often took off after a workday for a drink with his buddies. However, this silence was too deep and wide to be made by just one absence. “Enrique!” she screamed, running from room to room. “Rafael! David!”

 The boys’ rooms were deserted, drawers opened, rifled through. Oh my God, oh my God. Dedé could feel a mounting desperation. Tinita, who had come to work in the household four years ago when Jaime David was born, came running, alarmed by her mistress’s screams. “Why, Doña Dedé,” she said, wide-eyed. “It’s only Don Jaimito who took the boys.”

“Where?” Dedé could barely get it out.

“To Doña Leila‘s, I expect. He packed bags—” Her mouth dropped open, surprised by something private she wished she hadn’t seen.

“How could you let him, Tinita. How could you! The boys have colds,” she cried as if that were the reason for her distress. “Have Salvador saddle the mare,” Dedé ordered. “Quick, Tinita, quick!” For the maid was standing there, rubbing her hands down the sides of her dress.

Off Dede rode at a crazy canter all the way to Mama’s. It was already dark when she turned in the drive. The house was all lit up, cars in the driveway, Minerva and Manolo just arriving from Monte Cristi, Mate and Leandro from the capital. Of course, it would be a big weekend. But every thought of the meeting had faded from Dedé’s mind.

She had told herself on the gallop over that she must stay calm so as not to alarm Mama. But the moment she dismounted, she was crying, “I need a ride! Quick!”

“M‘ija, m’ija,” Mama kept asking. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Mama, really. It’s just Jaimito’s taken the boys to San Francisco.”

“But what’s wrong with that?” Mama was asking, suspicion deepening the lines on her face. “Is something wrong with that?”

By now, Manolo had brought the car around to the door, and Minerva was honking the horn. Off they went, Dedé telling them her story of coming home and finding the house abandoned, the boys gone.

“Why would he do this?” Minerva asked. She was digging through her purse for the cigarettes she could not smoke in front of Mama. Recently, she had picked up a bad cough along with the smoking.

 “He threatened to leave me if I got involved with your group.”

“But you’re not involved,” Manolo defended her.

“Maybe Dedé wants to be involved.” Minerva turned around to face the back seat. Dedé could not make out her expression in the dim light. The end of her cigarette glowed like a bright, probing eye. “Do you want to join us?”

Dedé began to cry. “I just have to admit to myself. I’m not you—no really, I mean it. I could be brave if someone were by me every day of my life to remind me to be brave. I don’t come by it naturally.”

“None of us do,” Minerva noted quietly.

“Dedé, you’re plenty brave,” Manolo asserted in his courtly way. Then, for they were already in the outskirts of San Francisco, he added, “You’re going to have to tell me where to turn.”

They pulled up behind the pickup parked in front of Dona Leila’s handsome stucco house, and Dedé’s heart lifted. She had seen the boys through the opened door of the front patio, watching television. As they were getting out of the car, Minerva hooked arms with Dedé. “Manolo’s right, you know. You’re plenty brave.” Then nodding towards Jaimito, who had come to the doorway and was aggressively blocking their way in, she added, “One struggle at a time, sister.”

“The liberators are here!” Jaimito’s voice was sloppy with emotion. Dedé’s arrival with Minerva and Manolo probably confirmed his suspicions. “What do you want?” he asked, hands gripping either side of the door frame.

“My sons,” Dedé said, coming up on the porch. She felt brave with Minerva at her side.

“My sons,” he proclaimed, “are where they should be, safe and sound.”

“Why, cousin, don’t you say hello?” Minerva chided him.

 He was curt in his greetings, even to Manolo, whom he had always liked.

They had together invested their wives’ inheritance in that ridiculous project—what was it?—growing onions in some godforsaken desert area where you couldn’t even get Haitians to live? Dedé had warned them.

But Manolo’s warmth could thaw any coldness. He gave his old business partner un abrazo, addressing him as compadre even though neither one was godparent to the other’s children. He invited himself in, ruffled the boys’ hair, and called out, “Doña Leila! Where’s my girl?”

Obviously, the boys suspected nothing. They yielded reluctant kisses to their mother and aunt, their eyes all the while trained on the screen where el gato Tom and el ratoncito Jerry were engaged in yet another of their battles.

Dona Leila came out from her bedroom, ready to entertain. She looked coquettish in a fresh dress, her white hair pinned up with combs. “¡Manolo, Minerva! iQué placer!” But it was Dedé whom she kept hugging.

So he hadn’t said anything to his mother. He wouldn’t dare, Dedé thought. Doña Leila had always doted on her daughter-in-law, so much so that Dedé sometimes worried that Leila’s five daughters would resent her.

But really it was obvious they adored the sister-in-law-cousin who encouraged them in their small rebellions against their possessive only brother. Seven years ago, when Don Jaime had died, Jaimito had taken on the man-of-the-family role with a vengeance. Even his mother said he was worse than Don Jaime had ever been.

“Sit down, please, sit down.” Doña Leila pointed to the most comfortable chairs, but she would not let go of Dedé’s hand.

“Mamá,” Jaimito explained, “we all have something private to discuss.

We’ll talk outside,” he addressed Manolo, avoiding his mother’s eyes.

Doña Leila hurried out to assess the porch. She turned on the garden lights, brought out her good rockers, served her guests a drink, and insisted Dedé eat a pastelito snack—she was looking too thin. “Don’t let me hold you up,” she kept saying.

Finally, they were alone. Jaimito turned the porch lights off, calling out to his mother, that there were too many bugs. But Dedé suspected that he

found it easier to address their problems in the dark.

“You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to.” The agitation in his tone carried.

Doña Leila called from inside. “You need another cervecita, m‘ijo?”

“No, no, Mamá,” Jamito said, impatience creeping into his voice. “I told Dedé,” he addressed his in-laws, “I didn’t want her getting mixed up in this thing.”

“I can assure you she’s never been to any of our gatherings,” Manolo put in. “On my word.”

Jaimito was silent. Manolo’s statement had stopped him short. But he had already gone too far to readily admit that he’d been wrong. “Well, what about her meetings with Padre de Jesus? Everyone knows he’s a flaming

communist.”

“He is not,” Minerva contradicted.

“For heaven’s sake, Jaimito, I only went to see him once,” Dedé added.

“And it was in reference to us, if you have to know the truth.”

“Us?” Jaimito stopped rocking himself, his bravado deflated. “What about us, Mami?”

Can you really be so blind, she wanted to say. We don’t talk anymore, you boss me around, you keep to yourself, you’re not interested in my garden. But Dedé felt shy addressing their intimate problems in front of her sister and brother-in-law. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“What is it, Mami?”

“Stop calling me Mami, I’m not your mother.”

Dona Leila’s voice drifted from the kitchen where she was supervising her maid in frying a whole platter of snacks. “Another pastelito, Dedé?”

“She’s been like that since the minute I got here,” Jaimito confided. His voice had grown tender. He was loosening up. “She must have asked me a hundred times, ‘Where’s Dedé? Where’s Dedé?”’ It was as close as he could get to admitting how he felt.

 “I have a suggestion, compadre,” Manolo said. “Why don’t you two take a honeymoon somewhere nice.”

“The boys have colds,” Dedé said lamely.

“Their grandmother will take very good care of them, I’m sure.” Manolo laughed. “Why not go up to—wasn’t it Jarabacoa where you honeymooned?”

“No, Rio San Juan, that area,” Jaimito said, entering into the plan.

“We went to Jarabacoa,” Minerva reminded Manolo in a tight voice that suggested she disapproved of the reconciliation he was engineering. Her sister was better off alone.

“They have a beautiful new hotel in Rio San Juan,” Manolo went on.

“There’s a balcony with each room, every one with a sea view.”

“I hear the prices are reasonable,” Jaimito put in. It was as if the two men

were working on another deal together.

“So what do you say?” Manolo concluded.

Neither Jaimito nor Dedé said a word.

“Then it’s settled.” Manolo said, but he must have felt the unsettled-ness in their silence, for he went on. “Look, everyone has troubles. Minerva and I went through our own rough times. The important thing is to use a crisis like this to grow closer. Isn’t that so, mi amor?”

Minerva’s guard was still up. “Some people can’t ever really see eye to eye.”

Her statement broke the deadlock, though it was probably the last thing Minerva had intended. Jaimito’s competitive streak was reawakened. “Dedé and I see perfectly eye to eye! The problem is other people confusing things.”

The problem is when I open my eyes and see for myself, Dedé was thinking. But she was too shaken by the night’s events and the long week of indecision to contradict him.

 And so it was that the weekend that was to have been a watershed in Dedé’s life turned into a trip down memory lane in a rented boat. In and out of the famous lagoons they had visited as a young bride and groom Jaimito rowed, stopping to point with his oar to the swamp of mangroves where the Tainos had fished and later hidden from the Spanish. Hadn’t she heard him say so eleven years ago?

And at night, sitting on their private balcony, with Jaimito’s arm around her and his promises in her ear, Dedé gazed up at the stars. Recently, in Vanidades, she had read how starlight took years to travel down to earth.

The star whose light she was now seeing could have gone out years ago.

What comfort if she counted them? If in that dark heaven she traced a ram when already half its brilliant horn might be gone?

False hopes, she thought. Let the nights be totally dark! But even that dark wish she made on one of those stars.

The roundup started by the end of the following week.

Early that Saturday Jaimito dropped off Dedé at Mamá’s with the two youngest boys. Mama had asked for Dedé’s help planting a crown-of-thorns border, so she said, but Dedé knew what her mother really wanted. She was worried about her daughter after her panicked visit a week ago. She wouldn’t ask Dede any questions—Mama always said that what went on in her daughters’ marriages was their business. Just by watching Dedé lay the small plants in the ground, Mama would know the doings in her heart.

As Dedé walked up the driveway, assessing what still needed to be done in the yard, the boys raced each other to the door. They were swallowed up by the early morning silence of the house. It seemed odd that Mama had not come out to greet her. Then Dedé noticed the servants gathered in the backyard, and Tono breaking away, walking briskly towards her. Her face had the burdened look of someone about to deliver bad news.

“What, Tono, tell me!” Dedé found she was clutching the woman’s arm.

 “Don Leandro has been arrested.”

“Only him?”

Tono nodded. And shamefully, in her heart Dedé was thankful that her sisters had been spared before she was frightened for Leandro.

Inside, Maria Teresa was sitting on the couch, unplaiting and plaiting her hair, her face puffy from crying. Mama stood by, reminding her that everything was going to be all right. By habit, Dedé swept her eyes across the room looking for the boys. She heard them in one of the bedrooms, playing with their baby cousin Jacqueline.

“She just got here,” Mamá was saying. “I was about to send the boy for you.” There were no phone lines out where the old house was—another reason Mamá had moved up to the main road.

Dedé sat down. Her knees always gave out on her when she was scared.

“What happened?”

Mate sobbed out her story, her breath wheezy with the asthma she always got whenever she was upset. She and Leandro had been asleep just a couple of hours when they heard a knock that didn’t wait for an answer. The SIM had broken down the door of their apartment, stormed inside, roughed up Leandro and carried him away. Then they ransacked the house, ripped open the upholstery on the couch and chairs, and drove off in the new Chevrolet.

Mate stopped, too short of breath to continue.

“But why? Why?” Mamá kept asking. “Leandro’s a serious boy, an engineer!” Neither Mate nor Dedé knew how to answer her.

Dedé tried calling Minerva in Monte Cristi, but the operator reported the line was dead. Now Mamá, who had stood by accepting their shrugs for answers, levelled her gaze at each of them. “What is going on here? And don’t try to tell me nothing. I know something is going on.”

Mate flinched as if she knew she had misbehaved.

“Mamá,” Dedé said, knowing the time had come to offer their mother the truth. She patted a space between them on the couch. “You’re going to have to sit down for this.”

Dedé was the first to rush out when they heard the commotion in the front yard. What she saw made no sense at first. The servants were all on the front lawn now, Fela with a screaming Raulito in her arms. Noris stood by, holding Manolito’s hand, both of them crying. And there was Patria, on her knees, rocking herself back and forth, pulling the grass out of the ground in handfuls.

Slowly, Dede pieced together the story Patria was telling.

The SIM had come for Pedrito and Nelson who, alerted by some neighbors, had fled into the hills. Patria had answered the door and told the officers that her husband and son were away in the capital, but the SIM overran the place anyway. They scoured the property, dug up the fields, and found the buried boxes full of their incriminating cargo as well as an old box of papers. Inflammatory materials, they called it. But all Patria saw were pretty notebooks written in a girlish hand. Probably something Noris had wanted to keep private from her nosey older brother, and so hidden away in the grove.

They tore the house apart, hauling away the doors, windows, the priceless mahogany beams of Pedrito’s old family rancho. It was like watching her life dismantled before her very eyes, Patria said, weeping— the glories she had trained on a vine; the Virgencita in the silver frame blessed by the Bishop of Higüey; the wardrobe with little ducks she had stenciled on when Raulito was born.

All of it violated, broken, desecrated, destroyed.

Then they set fire to what was left.

And Nelson and Pedrito, seeing the conflagration and fearing for Patria and the children, came running down from the hills, their hands over their heads, giving themselves up.

“I’ve been good! I’ve been good!” Patria was screaming at the sky. The ground around her was bare, the grass lay in sad clumps at her side.

 Why she did what she did next, Dedé didn’t know. Grief driving her to salvage something, she supposed. Down she got on her knees and began tamping the grass back. In a soothing voice, she reminded her sister of the faith that had always sustained her. “You believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and eanh ..

Sobbing, Patria fell in, reciting the Credo: “Light of light, who for us men and for our salvation…”

“—came down from heaven,” Dedé confirmed in a steady voice.

They could not get hold of Jaimito, for he had gone off to a tobacco auction for the day. The new doctor could not come out from San Francisco after they had explained why they needed him. He had an emergency, he told Dedé, but being a connoisseur of fear, she guessed he was afraid. Don Bernardo kindly brought over some of Doña Belén’s sedatives, and indiscriminately, Dedé gave everyone a small dose, even the babies, even Tono and Fela, and of course, her boys. A numbed dreariness descended on the house, everyone moving in slow motion in the gloom of Miltown and recent events. Dedé kept trying to call Minerva, but the line was truly, conclusively down, and the operator became annoyed.

Finally Dedé reached Minerva at Manolo’s mother’s house. How relieved Dedé felt to hear her voice. It was then she realized that after all her indecisiveness, she had never really had a choice. Whether she joined their underground or not, her fate was bound up with the fates of her sisters. She would suffer whatever they suffered. If they died, she would not want to go on living without them.

Yes, Manolo had been arrested last night, too. Minerva’s voice was tight.

No doubt Doña Fefita, Manolo’s mother, was at her side. Every once in a while Minerva broke into a fit of coughing.

“Are you all right?” Dedé asked her.

 There was a long pause. “Yes, yes,” Minerva rallied. “The phone’s been disconnected but the house is standing. Nothing but books for them to steal.” Minerva’s laughter exploded into a coughing fit. “Just allergies,” she explained when Dedé worried she was ill.

“Put on Patria, please,” Minerva asked after giving the grim rundown. “I want to ask her something.” When Dedé explained how Patria had finally settled down with a sedative, that maybe it was better if she didn’t come to the phone, Minerva point blank asked, “Do you know if she saved any of the kids’ tennis shoes?”

“Aγ, Minerva,” Dedé sighed. The coded talk was so transparent even she could guess what her sister was asking about. “Here’s Mamá,” Dedé cut her off. “She wants to talk to you.”

Mamá kept pleading with Minerva to come home. “It’s better if we’re all together.” Finally, she handed the phone back to Dedé. “You convince her.”

As if Minerva had ever listened to Dedé!

“I am not going to run scared,” Minerva stated before Dedé could even begin convincing. “I’m fine. Now can’t Patria come to the line?”

A few days later, Dedé received Minerva’s panicky note. She was desperate. She needed money. Creditors were at the door. She had to buy medicines because (“Don’t tell Mama”) she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. “I hate to involve you, but since you’re in charge of the family finances .. Could Dedé advance her some cash to be taken out of Minerva’s share of the house and lands in the future?

Too proud to just plain ask for help! Dedé took off in Jaimito’s pickup, avoiding a stop at Mamá’s to use the phone since Mamá would start asking questions. From the bank, Dedé called Minerva to tell her that she was on her way with the money, but instead she reached a distraught Doña Fefita.

Minerva had been taken that very morning, the little house ransacked and boarded up. In the background Dedé could hear Minou crying piteously.

“I’m coming to get you,” she promised the little girl.

The child calmed down some. “Is Mama with you?”

 Dedé took a deep breath. “Yes, Mama is here.” The beginning of many stories. Later, she would hedge and say she meant her own Mama. But for now, she wanted to spare the child even a moment of further anguish.

She rode out to the tobacco fields where Jaimito had said he’d be supervising the planting of the new crop. She had wondered as she was dialing Minerva what Jaimito would do when he came home and found his wife and his pickup missing. Something told her he would not respond with his usual fury. Despite herself, Dede had to admit she liked what she sensed, that the power was shifting in their marriage. Coming home from Río San Juan, she had finally told him, crying as she did, that she could not continue with their marriage. He had wept, too, and begged for a second chance. For a hundredth chance, she thought. Now events were running away with them, trampling over her personal griefs, her budding hopes, her sprouting wings.

“Jaimito!” she called when she saw him from far off.

He came running across the muddy, just-turned field. How ironic, she thought, watching him. Their lives, which had almost gone their separate ways a week ago, were now drawing together again. After all, they were embarking on their most passionate project to date, one they must not fail at like the others. Saving the sisters.

They drove the short distance to Mamá‘s, debating how to break the news to her. Mamá’s blood pressure had risen dangerously after Patria’s breakdown on the front lawn. Was it really less than a week ago? It seemed months since they’d been living in this hell of terror and dreadful anticipation. Every day there were more and more arrests. The lists in the newspapers grew longer.

But there was no shielding Mamá any longer, Dedé saw when they arrived at her house. Several black Volkswagens and a police wagon were pulled into the drive. Captain Peña, head of the northern division of the SIM, had orders to bring Mate in. Mamá was hysterical. Mate clung to her,

weeping with terror as Mama declared that her youngest daughter could not leave without her. Dedé could hear the shrieks of Jacqueline calling for her mother from the bedroom.

“Take me instead, please.” Patria knelt by the door, pleading with Captain Peña. “I beg you for the love of God.”

The captain, a very fat man, looked down with interest at Patria’s heaving chest, considering the offer. Don Bemardo, drawn by the commotion from next door, arrived with the bottle of sedatives. He tried to coax Patria back on her feet, but she would not or could not stand up. Jaimito took the captain aside. Dedé saw Jaimito reaching for his bill-fold, the captain holding up his hand. Oh God, it was bad news if the devil was refusing to take a bribe.

At last, the captain said he would make an exception. Mamá could come along. But out on the drive, after loading the terrified Mate in the wagon, he gave a signal and the driver roared away, leaving Mama standing on the road. The screams from the wagon were unbearable to hear.

Dedé and Jaimito raced after María Teresa, the small pickup careening this way and that, swerving dangerously around slower traffic. Usually, Dedé was full of admonitions about Jaimito’s reckless driving, but now she found herself pressing her own foot on an invisible gas pedal. Still, they never managed to catch up with the wagon. By the time they reached the Salcedo Fortaleza and were seen by someone in authority, they were told the young llorona with the long braid had been transferred to the capital.

They couldn’t say where.

“Those bastards!” Jaimito exclaimed once they were back in the pickup.

He kept striking the vinyl seat with his fist. “They’re not going to get away with this!” This was the same old violence Dedé had cowered under for years. But now instead of fear, she felt a surge of pity. There was nothing Jaimito or anyone could do. But it touched her that he had found his way to serve the underground after all—taking care of its womenfolk.

Watching him, Dedé was reminded of his fighting cocks which, in the barnyard, appeared to be just plain roosters. But put them in a ring with another rooster, and they sprang to life, explosions of feathers and dagger

claws. She had seen them dazed, stumbling, eyes pecked out, still clawing the air at an attacker they could no longer see. She remembered, too, with wonder and some disgust and even an embarrassing sexual rush, how Jaimito would put their heads in his mouth, as if they were some wounded part of him or, she realized, of her that he was reviving.

On the way back to Mamá‘s, Dedé and Jaimito made plans. Tomorrow early, they would drive down to the capital and petition for the girls, not that it would do any good. But doing nothing could be worse. Unclaimed prisoners tended to disappear. Oh God, Dedé could not let herself think of that!

It was odd to be riding in the pickup, the dark road ahead, a slender moon above, holding hands, as if they were young lovers again, discussing wedding plans. Dedé half expected Minerva and Lío to pop up in back. The thought stirred her, but not for the usual reason of lost opportunity recalled.

Rather, it was because that time now seemed so innocent of this future.

Dedé fought down the sob that twisted like a rope in her gut. She felt that if she let go, the whole inside of her would fall apart.

As they turned into the driveway, they saw Mama standing at the end of it, Tono and Patria at her side, trying to hush her. “Take everything, take it all! But give me back my girls, por Dios!” she was shouting.

“What is it, Mama, what is it?” Dedé had leapt out of the pickup before it had even come to a full stop. She already guessed what was wrong.

“Minerva, they’ve taken Minerva.”

Dedé exchanged a glance with Jaimito. “How do you know this, Mamá?”

“They took the cars.” Mama pointed to the other end of the drive and, sure enough, the Ford and the Jeep were gone.

Some of the SIM guards left behind had asked her for the keys. They were confiscating the two vehicles registered under a prisoner’s name.

Minerva! No one had ever bothered to change those documents since Papa’s time. Now they were SIM cars.

“Lord.” Mama looked up, addressing those very stars Dedé had already discounted. “Lord, hear my cry!”

“Let’s go talk to Him inside,” Dedé suggested. She had seen the hedges move slightly. They were being spied upon and would be from now on.

In Mamá’s bedroom, they all knelt down before the large picture of the Virgencita. It was here that all the crises in the family were first addressed —when Patria’s baby was born dead, when the cows caught the pinkeye, when Papa had been jailed, and later when he died and his other family had come to light.

Now, in the small room, they gathered again, Patria, Noris, Mama, even Jaimito, though he hung back sheepishly, unaccustomed to being on his knees. Patria led the rosary, breaking down every now and then, Dedé filling in those breaks with a strong, full voice. But really her heart was not in it. Her mind was thinking over all she must do before she and Jaimito left in the morning. The boys had to be dropped off at Dona Leila‘s, and Minou had to be sent for in Monte Cristi, and the pickup had to be filled with gas, and some bags packed for the girls in whatever prison held them, and a bag for her and Jaimito in case they had to stay overnight.

The praying had stopped. Everyone was crying quietly now, touching the veil of the Virgin for comfort. Looking up at the Blessed Mother, Dedé saw where Minerva’s and Mate’s pictures had been newly tucked into the frame that already held Manolo, Leandro, Nelson, Pedrito. She struggled but this time she could not keep down her sobs.

That night as she lay beside Jaimito, Dede could not sleep. It was not the naughty insomnia that resulted from a trip out to the shed to listen to the contraband station. This was something else altogether. She was feeling it slowly coming on. The dark of a childhood closet, the odor of gasoline she never liked, the feel of something dangerous pawing at her softly to see

what she would do. She felt a tickling temptation to just let go. To let the craziness overtake her before the SIM could destroy all she loved.

But who would take care of her boys? And Mama? And who would coax Patria back if she wandered away again from the still waters and green pastures of her sanity?

Dedé could not run away. Courage! It was the first time she had used that word to herself and understood exactly what it meant. And so, as Jaimito snored away, Dedé began devising a little exercise to distract her mind and fortify her spirit.

Concentrate, Dedé! she was saying. Remember a clear cool night a lot like this one. You are sitting under the anacahuita tree in the front yard….

And she began playing the happy memory in her head, forcing herself to imagine the scent of jasmine, the feel of the evening on her skin, the green dress she was wearing, the tinkle of ice in Papa’s glass of rum, the murmured conversation.

But wait! Dedé didn’t make up that memory game the night of the arrests.

In fact, she didn’t invent it at all. It was Minerva who taught her how to play it after she was released from prison and was living those last few months at Mamá’s with Mate and Patria and the children.

Every day Dedé would go over to visit, and every day she would have a fight with Minerva. Dedé would start by pleading, then arguing with Minerva to be reasonable, to stay home. The rumors were everywhere.

Trujillo wanted her killed. She was becoming too dangerous, the secret heroine of the whole nation. At the pharmacy, in church, at the mercado, Dedé was being approached by well-wishers. “Take care of our girls,” they would whisper. Sometimes they would slip her notes. “Tell the butterflies to avoid the road to Puerto Plata. It’s not safe.” The butterflies, Lord God, how people romanticized other people’s terror!

 But Minerva acted unconcerned about her safety. She could not desert the cause, she’d argue with Dedé, and she would not stay holed up in Ojo de Agua and let the SIM kill her spirit. Besides, Dedé was giving in to her exaggerated fears. With the OAS clamoring about all the jailings and executions, Trujillo was not going to murder a defenseless woman and dig his own grave. Silly rumors.

“Voz del pueblo, voz del cielo,” Dedé would quote. Talk of the people, voice of God.

One time, towards the end, Dedé broke down in tears in the middle of one of their arguments. “I’m losing my mind worrying about you, don’t you see?” she had wept. But instead of caving in to Dedé’s tears, Minerva offered her an exercise.

“I made it up in La Victoria whenever they’d put me in solitary,” she explained. “You start with a line from a song or a poem. Then you just say it over until you feel yourself calming down. I kept myself sane that way.”

Minerva smiled sadly. “You try it, come on. I’ll start you off.”

Even now, Dedé hears her sister, reciting that poem she wrote in jail, her voice raspy with the cold she never got rid of that last year. And the shades of night begin to fall, and the traveler hurries home, and the campesino bids his fields farewell….

No wonder Dedé has confused Minerva’s exercise and her poem about the falling of night with that sleepless night before their first trip to the capital. A dark night was falling, one of a different order from the soft, large, kind ones of childhood under the anacahuita tree, Papa parceling out futures and Mama fussing at his drinking. This one was something else, the center of hell maybe, the premonition of which made Dedé draw closer to Jaimito until she, too, finally fell asleep.

 CHAPTER TEN

Patria

January to March 1960

I don’t know how it happened that my cross became bearable. We have a saying around here, the humpback never gets tired carrying his burden on his back. All at once, I lost my home, my husband, my son, my peace of mind. But after a couple of weeks living at Mama‘s, I got used to the sorrows heaped upon my heart.

That first day was the hardest. I was crazy with grief, all right. When Dedé and Tono walked me into the house, all I wanted to do was lie down and die. I could hear the babies crying far off and voices calming them and Noris sobbing along with her aunt Mate, and all their grief pulled me back from mine. But first, I slept for a long time, days it seemed. When I woke up, Dedé’s voice was in my ear, invoking the Lord’s name.

And on the third day He rose again…

I got up from bed ready to set up housekeeping at Mamá’s. I asked for a basin for the baby’s bath, and told Noris she had to do something about that hair in her eyes.

Mate and I moved into a front room with the crib for both our babies. I put Noris with Minou and Manolito in the spare room Minerva always used.

Mamá, I thought, would do better by herself in her own room.

But past midnight, the sleepers began to shift beds, everyone seeking the comfort of another body. Manolito invariably crawled in with me, and soon after, Raulito would start bawling. That boy was jealous even in his sleep!

I’d bring him to my bed, leaving the crib empty for Jacqueline was already cuddled at her mother’s side. In the mornings, I’d find Noris and Minou in Mamá’s bed, their arms around each other, fast asleep.

And on the third day He rose again…

On my third day at Mamá‘s, instead of a resurrection, I got another crucifixion. The SIM came for Mate.

It was three months before I laid eyes on her or Minerva or our husbands.

Three months before I got to hold my Nelson.

As I said, I recovered. But every now and then, I couldn’t get the pictures out of my head.

Over and over again, I saw the SIM approaching, I saw Nelson and Pedrito hurrying out the back way, Noris’s stricken face. I saw the throng of men at the door, I heard the stomping, the running, the yelling. I saw the house burning.

I saw tiny cells with very little air and no light. I heard doors open, I saw hands intrusive and ugly in their threats. I heard the crack of bones breaking, the thud of a body collapsing. I heard moans, screams, desperate cries.

Oh my sisters, my Pedrito, oh my little lamb!

My crown of thorns was woven of thoughts of my boy. His body I had talcumed, fed, bathed. His body now broken as if it were no more than a bag of bones.

“I’ve been good,” I’d start screaming at the sky, undoing the “recovery.”

And then, Mama would have to send for Dedé. Together Dedé and I would pray a rosary. Afterwards we played our old childhood game, opening the Bible and teasing a fortune out of whatever verse our hands

landed on.

And on the third day He rose again…

It was odd living in Mamá’s new house. Everything from the old house was here, but all rearranged. Sometimes I’d find myself reaching for a door that wasn’t there. In the middle of the night, however fearful I was about waking the children, I had to turn on a light to go to the sanitary. Otherwise, I’d end up crashing into the cabinet that never used to be in the hallway in the old house.

In the entryway hung the required portrait of El Jefe, except it wasn’t our old one of Trujillo as a young captain that used to hang next to the Good Shepherd. Mama had acquired this latest portrait and hung it all by itself, out as far as she could get it from the rest of the house. He was older now— heavier, his jowls thicker, the whole face tired out, someone who had had too much of all the bad things in life.

Maybe because I was used to the Good Shepherd and Trujillo side by side in the old house, I caught myself praying a little greeting as I walked by.

Then another time, I came in from outside with my hands full of anthuriums. I looked up at him, and I thought why not. I set up a vase on the table right under his picture.

It seemed natural to add a nice little lace cloth for the table.

I don’t know if that’s how it started, but pretty soon, I was praying to him, not because he was worthy or anything like that. I wanted something from him, and prayer was the only way I knew to ask.

It was from raising children I learned that trick. You dress them in their best clothes and they behave their best to match them.

Nelson, my devil! When he was little, he was always tormenting Noris, always getting into things. I’d call him in, give him a bath. But instead of putting him in his pajamas and sending him to bed in the middle of the day

where he’d get bored and mean, I’d dress him up in his gabardine trousers and little linen guayabera I’d made him just like his father’s. And then I’d take him with me to Salcedo for an afternoon novena and a coconut ice afterwards. That dressed-up boy acted like an angel!

So, I thought, why not? Treat him like a spirit worthy of my attention, and maybe he would start behaving himself.

Every day I changed the flowers and said a few words. Mama thought I was just putting on a show for Peña and his SIM who came by often to check on the family. But Fela understood, except she thought I was trying to strike a deal with the evil one. I wasn’t at all. I wanted to turn him towards his better nature. If I could do that, the rest would follow.

Jefe, I would say, remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.

(That one never worked with him.)

Hear my cry, Jefe. Release my sisters and their husbands and mine. But most especially, I beg you, oh Jefe, give me back my son.

Take me instead, I’ll be your sacrificial lamb.

I hung my Sacred Heart, a recent gift from Don Bernardo, in the bedroom.

There I offered, not my trick prayers, but my honest-to-God ones.

I wasn’t crazy, after all. I knew who was really in charge.

I had let go of my hard feelings, for the most part, but there was some lingering bitterness. For instance, I had offered myself to El Jefe to do with as he wanted, but I hadn’t extended the same courtesy to God.

I guess I saw it as a clear-cut proposition I was making El Jefe. He would ask for what he always asked for from women. I could give that. But there would be no limit to what our Lord would want of Patria Mercedes, body and soul and all the etceteras besides.

With a baby still tugging at my breast, a girl just filling out, and my young-man son behind bars, I wasn’t ready to enter His Kingdom.

In the midst of my trials, there were moments. I can’t say they were moments of Grace. But they were moments of knowing I was on the right track.

One day soon after Mate was taken, Peña showed up. That man gave me a creepy feeling, exactly the same as the one I’d felt in the presence of the devil in the old days, fooling with my hands at night. The children were out on the patio with me. They kept their distance from Pena, refusing the candies he offered them unless I took them from him, in my hands, first.

When he reached for Minou to ride on his knee, all of them ran away.

“Lovely children,” he said, to mask the obvious rejection. Are they all yours?“

“No, the boy and the little girl are Minerva‘s, and the baby girl is María Teresa’s.” I said the names very clearly. I wanted it to sink in that he was making these children orphans. “The baby boy and the young girl are mine.”

“Don Pedrito must love those children of his.”

My blood went cold. “What makes you say so, Captain?” I tried to keep my voice even.

“The SIM made your husband an offer, but he wouldn’t take it.”

So, he was still alive! Three times, Dedé and Mama and Jaimito had been down to headquarters, only to be told that there was no record of our prisoners.

“Don’t you want to know what the offer was?” Peña seemed miffed. I had noted that he got some thrill out of having me plead for information.

“Yes, please, captain.”

“Your husband was offered his freedom and his farm back—”

My heart leapt!

“—if he proved his loyalty to El Jefe by divorcing his Mirabal wife.”

 “Oh?” I could feel my heart like a hand making a fist in my chest.

Peña’s sharp, piglike eyes were watching me. And then he had his dirty little say. “You Mirabal women must be something else”—he fondled himself—“to keep a man interested when all he can do with his manhood is pass water!”

I had to say two Glory Be’s to myself before I could speak aloud. Even so, my voice threw sparks. “Captain Pena, no matter what you do to my husband, he will always be ten times the man you are!” That evil man threw back his head and laughed, then picked up his cap from his lap and stood to leave. I saw the lump he’d gotten by working me up to this state.

I went in search of the children to calm myself down. I found Minou digging a hole in the ground and burying all the candies Pena had brought.

When I asked her why she was wasting her candies, she said she was burying them like the box her Mama and Papá had buried in their yard that

was bad to touch.

“This is bad candy,” she said to me.

“Yes, it is,” I said and got down on my knees to help her finish burying it.

Pena’s mention of Pedrito was the first news we had had of any of our prisoners. Then, a few days later, Dedé and Mamá came back from another trip to the capital with the “good news” that the girls’ names, along with those of the men and my Nelson, had appeared on the latest list of three hundred and seventy-two detained. Oh, how relieved we were! As long as the SIM admitted they were in custody, our prisoners stood less of a chance of being disappeared.

Dark as it was, I went out into the garden with Mamá’s scissors. I cut by scent more than sight so that I didn’t know exactly what I had until I was back inside. I arranged his spray of jasmine and stems of gardenias in a vase on the little table, then took the rest of the flowers into my bedroom.

And on the third day, He rose again.

 We were already working on the third week. Still, there were moments, like I said—resurrection gathering speed.

Sunday, early, we packed ourselves in Jaimito’s pickup. Except for a few farm horses over at Dedé’s and the old mule at Mama‘s, it was the only transportation left us, now that all the cars had been confiscated. Mamá laid out an old sheet in the flatbed and put the children in back with me. She and Dedé and Jaimito rode in front. It was still early morning as we drove towards Salcedo for the first mass. The mist was rising all around us from the fields. As we passed the turnoff to our old house in Conuco, I felt a stab of pain. I looked at Noris, hoping she hadn’t noticed, but her pretty face was struggling to be brave.

No one knew that the Voice of God would speak from the pulpit that day.

None of us would have expected it from Padre Gabriel, who was, we thought, a stooge substitute sent in after Padre de Jesus was arrested.

When it came, I almost didn’t hear it. Raulito was having one of his crying fits and Jacqueline, who is empathic when it comes to tears, had joined in. Then, too, Minou was busy “reading” my upside-down missal to Manolito. Dedé and I were having a time managing the lot, while Mama was doing her share, casting stem glances from the middle of our pew. As she’s all too fond of telling us, we are raising savages with all our new theories about talking, not spanking. “Fighting tyrants and meanwhile creating little ones.”

I was headed to the vestibule with the children when I heard what I thought I had misheard. “We cannot remain indifferent to the grievous blows that have afflicted so many good Dominican homes … Padre Gabriel’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker.

“Hush now!” I said, so fiercely the children stopped their fussing and looked at me with full attention.

“All human beings are born with rights derived from God that no earthly power can take away.”

 The sun was shining through the stained glass window of John the Evangelist, depicted in a loincloth some church ladies had complained was inappropriate, even in our tropical heat. I propped Raulito up on the baptismal font and gave the other children mints to keep them quiet.

“To deny these rights is a grave offense against God, against the dignity of man.”

He went on, but I wasn’t listening anymore. My heart was beating fast. I knew once I said it I couldn’t take it back. Oh Lord, release my son, I prayed. And then I added what I’d been holding back. Let me be your sacrificial lamb.

When Padre Gabriel was done, he looked up, and there was utter silence in that church. We were stunned with the good news that our Gabriel had delivered unto us. If the church had been a place to clap, we would have drowned out his “Dóminus vobíscum” with applause.

We stayed the whole day in Salcedo, sitting in the park between masses, buying treats for the kids as bribes for the next hour-long mass. Their church clothes were soiled by the time the last mass rolled around at six.

With each service, the rumor spread, and the crowds grew. People kept coming back, mass after mass. Undercover agents also started showing up.

We could spot them easily. They were the ones who knelt with their butts propped on the pew seats and looked about during the consecration. I caught sight of Peña in the back of the church, no doubt taking note of repeaters like me.

Later, we found out this was happening all over the country. The bishops had gathered together earlier in the week and drafted a pastoral letter to be read from every pulpit that Sunday. The church had at last thrown in its lot with the people!

That evening we rode home in high spirits, the babies fast asleep in the arms of the older children. It was already dark, but when I looked up at the sky, I saw a big old moon like God’s own halo hung up there as a mark of his covenant. I shivered, remembering my promise.

We were worried about attending mass the following Sunday. All week we heard of attacks on churches throughout the island. Down in the capital, somebody had tried to assassinate the archbishop in the cathedral while he was saying mass. Poor Pittini was so old and blind he didn’t even realize what was happening, but kept right on intoning the Kyrie as the assassin was being wrestled to the ground.

Nothing as serious as that happened in our parish. But we had our own excitement. Sunday after the pastoral, we were visited by a contingent of prostitutes. When it was time for communion, there was such sashaying and swaying of hips to the altar rail you’d have thought they were offering their body and blood, not receiving His. They lined up, laughing, taunting Padre Gabriel by opening their mouths for the Sacred Host and making lewd gestures with their tongues. Then one of them reached right in his chalice and helped herself.

This was like a gunshot in our congregation. Ten or twelve of us women got up and formed a cordon around our priest. We let in only those we knew had come to the table for salvation, not sacrilege. You can bet those puticas lit in to us. One of them shoved me aside; but did Patria Mercedes turn the other cheek? Not on your life. I yanked that scrawny, done-up girl to the back of the church. “Now,” I said, “You want to receive communion, you recite the Credo first.”

She looked at me as if I had asked her to speak English. Then she gave me a toss of her head and marched off to the SIM to collect whatever her charge was for desecrating.

The following Sunday, we arrived for early mass, and we couldn’t get in the door for the stench inside. It took no time at all to find out what the problem was. ¡Sin vergüenzas! They had come into the church the night before and deposited the contents of latrines inside the confessional.

I sent the children home with Mama, afraid of some further incident with the SIM. Dedé, Noris, and I stayed to clean up. Yes, Noris insisted, though I fussed that I wanted her home safe with the others. God’s house was her house, too, she argued. My prayers to the Virgencita to bring her around had

been answered. I had to laugh. It was what Sor Asunción always used to tell us. Beware what you ask God. He might just give you what you want.

One morning, close to a month after Mate and Minerva had been taken, I had another visitor. Dedé and Mamá had gone to the capital to make their rounds. Their habit was to drive down every week with Jaimito or with some other prisoner’s family. They refused to take me along. They were sure someone at the SIM headquarters would realize they had overlooked me and grab me on the spot.

Before heading home, they always drove out to La Victoria. Out of desperation, I suppose, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girls. Of course, they never saw them. But often there were sheets and towels hanging to dry through the bars of windows, and this touch of domesticity always gave them hope.

I was in the parlor, teaching Noris how to applique monograms just as I had once taught Mate. The children were busy building their block palaces on the floor. Tono came in and announced there was a visitor. Instantly, my heart sank, for I assumed it was Peña again. But no, it was Margarita, no last name given, wanting to see the dona of the house, though she couldn’t say in relation to what.

The young woman sitting on the stoop out back looked vaguely familiar.

She had a sweet, simple face and dark, thick hair held back with bobby pins. The eyes, the brows, the whole look had Mirabal written all over it.

Ay, no, I thought, not now. She stood up the minute she saw me, and bowed her head shyly. “Could we speak privately?”

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew Minerva had stayed in touch with them over the years, but I had always kept my distance. I did not want to be associated with the issue of a campesina who had had no respect for the holy banns of matrimony or for the good name of Mirabal.

I nodded towards the garden where no one could overhear our talk.

 When we were a little ways down the path, she reached in her pocket and offered me a folded note.

My hands began to shake. “God be praised,” I said, looking up. “Where did you get this?”

“My mother’s cousin works in La Victoria. He doesn’t want his name mentioned.”

I unfolded the note. It was the label off a can of tomato paste. The back had been written on.

We’re in Cell # 61, Pavilion A, La Victoria—Duke, Miriam,

Violeta, Asela, Delia, Sina, Minerva, and me. Please notify their

families. We are well but dying for news of home and the children.

Please send Trinalin as we are all down with a bad grippe &

Lomotil for the obvious. Any food that keeps. Many kisses to all but

especially to my little darling.

And then, as if I wouldn’t recognize that pretty hand in a million years, the note was signed, Mate.

My head was spinning with what needed to be done. Tonight with Mama and Dedé, I would write a reply and fix up a package. “Can we send something back with your relative?”

She nodded, lingering as if she had something else to say. I realized I had forgotten there was always a charge for such services. “Wait here, please,” I said, and ran to the house to get my purse.

She looked pained when I offered her the bills. “No, no, we wouldn’t take anything from you.” Instead, she handed me a card with the name of the pharmacy I always went to in Salcedo; her own name was written on the back. “Margarita Mirabal, to serve you.”

That Mirabal was something of a shock. “Thank you, Margarita,” I said, offering her my hand. Then I added the words I found hard to wrench from my prideful heart. “Patria Mercedes, to serve you.”

When she had left, I read Mate’s note over and over as if with each reading, new information would surface. Then I sat down on the bench by

the birds of paradise, and I had to laugh. Papa’s other family would be the agents of our salvation! It was ingenious and finally, I saw, all wise. He was going to work several revolutions at one time. One of them would have to do with my pride.

That night, Dedé, Mama, and I stayed up late preparing the package. We made sweet potato biscuits with molasses, which would have a lot of nutrition, and filled a bag full of little things that wouldn’t spoil. We packed a change of underwear for each of them, and socks, and inside the socks I stuck a comb and brush for them to share. I couldn’t imagine how Mate was taking care of that long hair.

Our little pile of things grew, and we began arguing over what was necessary. Mama thought it would be a mistake to send Mate her good black towel she had made the week she was home—to save her nerves. She had finished appliqueing the M in gold satin, but had not gotten to the G yet. “The more you send the more chances someone along the way will

steal the whole thing.”

“Ay, Mama, have a little faith.”

She put her hands on her hips and shook her head at me. “Patria Mercedes, you should be the first one to know .. We kept our sentences incomplete whenever we were criticizing the government inside the house.

There were ears everywhere, or at least we imagined them there. ”That is no towel for a jail cell,“ Mamá finished, as if that was what she had been about to say from the start.

Dedé convinced her. She used the same argument about the manicure set, the case with lipstick and face powder, the little bottle of Matador’s Delight.

These little touches of luxury would raise the the girls’ spirits. How could Mama argue with that!

Tucked inside Mate’s prayerbook, I put some money and our note.

 Dearest Minerva and Mate, we are petitioning at headquarters,

and God willing, some door will open soon. The children are all

well, but missing you terribly. Please advise us of your health and

any other needs. Also, what of the men, and dear Nelson? Send any

news, and remember you are in the hearts and prayers of Patria and

Dedé, and your loving mother.

Mama wrote her own name. I couldn’t keep back my tears when I saw her struggling with the pen and then ruining her signature by running the ink with her tears.

After Mamá went to bed, I explained to Dedé who had brought the note over. I had been vague with Mama, so as not to open old wounds. “She looks like Mate,” I reported. “She’s quite pretty.”

“I know,” Dedé admitted. It turned out she knew a lot more.

“Back when Papa died, Minerva asked me to take out of her inheritance for those girls’ education.” Dedé shook her head, remembering. “I got to thinking about it, and I decided to put in half. It wasn’t all that much,” she added when she saw my face. I was a little hurt not to be included in this charitable act. “Now the oldest has her pharmacy degree and is helping out

the others.”

“A fine girl,” I agreed.

“There isn’t any other kind of Mirabal girl,” Dedé said, smiling. It was a remark Papá used to make about his girls. Back then, we had assumed he was talking just about us.

Something wistful and sisterly hung in the air. Maybe that’s why I went ahead and asked her. “And you, Dedé, how are you doing?”

She knew what I meant. I could read a sister’s heart even if it was hidden behind a practiced smile. Padre de Jesus had told me about an aborted visit Dedé had made to his rectory. But since the girls’ arrest, we were all too numb to feel or talk of any other grief.

“Jaimito is behaving himself very well. I can’t complain,” she said.

Behave? What a curious word for a wife to use about her husband. Often

now, Dedé slept over at Mamá’s with the two younger boys. To keep an eye

on us, so she said.

“Things are all right then?”

“Jaimito’s been great,” Dedé went on, ignoring my question. “I’m very grateful, since I know he didn’t want any part of this mess.”

“None of us did,” I observed. And then, because I could see her drawing in, I turned away from any implied criticism of Jaimito. Actually— unlike Minerva—I liked our blustery cousin. Under all his swagger, that man had a good heart.

I took her hand. “When all this is over, please get some counsel from Padre de Jesús. Faith can strengthen a marriage. And I want you both to be happy together.”

Suddenly she was in tears. But then, she always got weepy when I spoke to her that way. I touched her face, and motioned for us to go outside.

“What’s wrong, you can tell me,” I asked as we walked up the moon-lit drive.

She was looking up at the sky. The big old moon of a few days back had shrunk to something with a big slice of itself gone. “Jaimito’s a good man, whatever anyone thinks. But he would have been happier with someone

else, that’s all.” There was a pause.

“And you?” I prodded.

“I suppose,” she admitted. But if she had a ghost in her heart, she didn’t give out his name. Instead, she reached up as if that moon were a ball falling into her empty hands. “It’s late,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

As we made our way back down the drive, I heard a distinct cough.

“We’ve got visitors again,” I whispered.

“I know,” she said, “ghosts all over the place.”

The minute Jaimito’s pickup turned onto the road in the mornings for daily mass, the little toy-engine sound of a VW would start up. All night, we smelled their cigarettes in the yard and heard muffled coughs and sneezes.

Sometimes, we would call out, “God bless you!” As the days wore on, we began taking our little revenges on them.

There was a nook where one side of the house met another, and that was their favorite after-dark hiding place. Mama put some cane chairs out there along with a crate with an ashtray so they’d stop littering her yard. One night, she set out a thermos full of ice water and a snack, as if the three Kings were coming. They stole that thermos and glasses and the ashtray, and instead of using the path Mamá had cleared for them, they trampled through her flowers. The next day, Mama moved her thorn bushes to that side of the yard. That night when she heard them out there, she opened up the bathroom window and dumped Jacqueline‘s dirty bathwater out into the yard. There was a surprised cry, but they didn’t dare come after us. After all, they were top secret spies, and we weren’t supposed to know they were out there.

Inside, Dedé and I could barely contain our hilarity. Minou and Jacqueline laughed in that forced way of children imitating adult laughter they don’t really understand. Next morning, we found bits of fabric and threads and even a handkerchief caught on the thorns. From then on when they spied on us, they kept a respectful distance from the house.

Getting our packet to Margarita took some plotting.

The morning after her visit, we stopped at the pharmacy on the way back from daily mass. While the others waited in the pickup, I went in. I was holding Raulito in such a way that his blanket covered up the package. For once, that little boy was quiet, as if he could tell I needed his good behavior.

It was strange going into that pharmacy now that I knew she worked there. How many times in the past hadn’t I dropped in to buy aspirin or formula for the baby. How many times hadn’t the sweet, shy girl in the

white jacket taken care of my prescriptions. I wondered if she’d known all along who I was.

“If it’s any problem—” I began, handing her the package. Quickly, she slipped it under the counter. She looked at me pointedly. I should not elaborate in this public place.

Margarita scowled at the large bill I pressed into her hand. In a whisper, I explained it was for the Lomotil and Trinalin and vitamins I wanted her to include in the package. She nodded. The owner of the pharmacy was approaching.

“I hope this helps,” Margarita said, handing me a bottle of aspirin to disguise our transaction. It was the brand I always bought.

That week, Mamá and Dedé came back elated from their weekly trip. They had seen a black towel hanging out of a window of La Victoria! Dedé couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a zigzag of something in the front, probably the monogram. And who else would have a black towel in prison?

“I know, I know,” Mama said. “I already heard it several times coming home.” She mimicked Dedé: “See, Mamá, what a good idea it was to send that towel. ”

“The truth is,” Mamá continued—it was her favorite phrase these days —“I didn’t think it’d get to her. I’ve gotten so I suspect everyone.”

“Look at this!” Jaimito called us over to where he was sitting at the dining room table, reading the papers he’d bought in the capital. He pointed to a photograph of a ghostly bunch of young prisoners, heads bowed, as El Jefe wagged his finger at them. “Eight prisoners pardoned yesterday at the National Palace.” He read off the names. Among them, Dulce Tejeda and Miriam Morales, who, according to Mate’s note, shared a cell with her and Minerva.

I felt my heart lifting, my cross light as a feather. All eight pardoned prisoners were either women or minors! My Nelson had only turned

eighteen a few weeks ago in prison. Surely, he still counted as a boy?

“My God, here’s something else,” Jaimito went on. Capitan Victor Alicinio Peña was listed in the real estate transactions as having bought the old González farm from the government for a pittance. “He stole it is what he did,” I blurted out.

“Yes, the boy stole the mangoes,” Dedé said in a loud voice to conceal my indiscretion. Last week, Tono had found a little rod behind Mama’s wedding picture—a telltale sign of bugging. Only in the garden or riding around in a car could we speak freely with each other.

“The truth is …” Mamá began, but stopped herself. Why give out the valuable truth to a hidden microphone?

Peña owed me was the way I saw it. The next day, I put on the yellow dress I’d just finished and the black heels Dedé had passed on to me. I talcumed myself into a cloudy fragrance and crossed the hedge to Don Bernardo’s house.

“Where are you going, Mamá?” Noris called after me. I’d left her tending the children. “Out,” I said, waving my hand over my shoulder, “to see Don Bernardo.” I didn’t want Mamá or Dedé to know about my outing.

Don Bernardo really was our next door angel disguised as an old Spaniard with an ailing wife. He had come to the island under a refugee program Trujillo had instituted in the forties “to whiten the race.” He had not been much help to the dictator in that regard, since he and Dona Belén had never had any children. Now he spent most of his days reminiscing on his porch and tending to an absence belted into a wheelchair. From some need of his own, Don Bernardo pretended his wife was just under the weather rather than suffering from dementia. He conveyed made-up greetings and apologies from Dona Belén. Once a week, the old man struggled to get behind the wheel of his old Plymouth to drive Dona Belén over to Salcedo for a little checkup.

 He was a true angel all right. He had come through for us as a god-father for all the little ones—Raulito, Minou, and Manolito—at a time when most people were avoiding the Mirabals.

Then, after the girls were taken, I realized that Jacqueline hadn’t been christened. All my children had been baptized the country way, within the first cycle of the moon after their birth. But Maria Teresa, who always loved drama and ceremony, had kept postponing the christening until it could be done “properly” in the cathedral in San Francisco with the bishop officiating and the girls’ choir from Inmaculada singing “Regina Coeli.”

Maybe pride ran in more than one set of veins in the family.

One afternoon when I was still a little crazy with grief, I ran out of Mamá’s house, barefoot, with Jacqueline in my arms. Don Bemardo was already at his door with his hat on and his keys in his hand. “So you’re ready to be a fish in the waters of salvation, eh, my little snapper?” He chucked Jacqueline under her little chin, and her tears dried up like it was July in Monte Cristi.

Now I was at Don Bemardo’s door again, but this time without a baby in my arms. “What a pleasure, Patria Mercedes,” he greeted me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have me drop in at any hour of the day or night, barefoot or dressed up, with a favor to ask.

“Don Bernardo, here I am bothering you again,” I said. “But I need a ride

to Santiago to Captain Peña’s office.”

“A visit to the lion’s den, I see.”

I caught a glimpse of a smile in the curve of his thick, white mustache.

Briefly, he entered the bedroom where Dona Belén lay harnessed in her second childhood. Then out he came, crooking his elbow as my escort.

“Doña Belén sends her greetings,” he said.

Captain Victor Alicinio Pena received me right away. Maybe it was my nerves, but his office had the closed-in feeling of a jail cell, metal jalousies

at the windows and fluorescence the only light. An air conditioner gave out a violent mechanical sound, as if it were about to give out. I wished I were outside, waiting under the almond trees in the square with Don Bernardo.

“It’s a pleasure to see you, Dona Patria.” Captain Peña eyeballed me as if he had to be true to his verb and see every part of me. “How can I be of help?” he asked, motioning for me to sit down.

I had planned to make an impassioned plea, but no words came out of my mouth. It wouldn’t have been exaggerating to say that Patria Mercedes had been struck dumb in the devil’s den.

“I must say I was a little surprised to be told you were here to see me,”

Pena went on. I could see he was growing annoyed at my silence. “I am a busy man. What is it I can do for you?”

Suddenly, it all came out, along with the tears. How I had read in the papers about El Jefe excusing minors, how my boy had just turned eighteen in prison, how I wondered if there was anything at all Pena could do to get my boy pardoned.

“This matter is outside my department,” he lied.

That’s when it struck me. This devil might seem powerful, but finally I had a power stronger than his. So I used it. Loading up my heart with prayer, I aimed it at the lost soul before me.

“This came down from above,” he continued. But now, he was the one growing nervous. Absently, his hands fiddled with a plastic card on his key ring. It was a prism picture of a well-stacked brunette. When you tilted it a certain way, her clothes dropped away. I tried not to be distracted, but to keep right on praying.

Soften his devils heart, oh Lord. And then, I said the difficult thing, For he, too, is one of your children.

Pena lay down his pathetic key ring, picked up the phone, and dialed headquarters in the capital. His voice shifted from its usual bullying bark to an accommodating softness. “Yes, yes, General, absolutely.” I wondered if he would ever get to my petition. And then it came, so smoothly buttered, it almost slipped right by me. “There’s a little matter I’ve got sitting here in

my office.” He laughed uproariously at something said on the other end.

“No, not exactly that little matter.”

And then he told what I was after.

I sat, my hands clutched on my lap. I don’t know if I was praying as much as listening intently—trying to judge the success of my petition from every pause and inflection in Pena’s voice. Maybe because I was watching him so closely a funny thing started to happen. The devil I was so used to seeing disappeared, and for a moment, like his tilting prism, I saw an overgrown fat boy, ashamed of himself for kicking the cat and pulling the wings off butterflies.

I must have looked surprised because as soon as he hung up, Pena leaned towards me. “Something wrong?”

“No, no,” I said quickly, bowing my head. I did not want to be pushy and ask him directly what he had found out. “Captain,” I pleaded, “can you offer me any hope?”

“It’s in the works,” he said, standing up to dismiss me. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

“¡Gracias, ay, muchas gracias!” I kept saying, and I wasn’t just thanking Peña.

The captain held on to my hand too long, but this time I didn’t pull away.

I was no longer his victim, I could see that. I might have lost everything, but my spirit burned bright. Now that I had shined it on him, this poor blind moth couldn’t resist my light.

It was time to tell him what I’d be doing for him. “I’ll pray for you,

Captain.”

He laughed uneasily. “What for?”

“Because it’s the only thing I have left to repay you with,” I said, holding his gaze. I wanted him to understand that I knew he had taken our land.

We waited, and weeks went by. A second, and then a third, pastoral was read from the pulpits. The regime responded with a full-force war against the church. A campaign began in the papers to cancel the concordat with the Vatican. The Catholic church should no longer have a special status in our country. The priests were only stirring up trouble. Their allegations against the government were lies. After all, our dictator was running a free country. Maybe to prove himself right, Trujillo was granting more and more pardons and visiting passes.

Every day or so, I stopped at the portrait with a fresh flower and a little talk. I tried to pretend he was my boy, too, a troubled one in need of guidance. “You know as well as I do that casting out the church won’t do you a bit of good,” I advised him. “Besides, think of your future. You’re no spring chicken at sixty-nine, and very soon, you’re going to be where you don’t make the rules.”

And then more personally, I reminded him of the pardon I’d asked for.

But nothing came through for us. Either Peña had forgotten or—God forbid!—something terrible had happened to Nelson. I started having bad days again and long nights. Only the thought of Easter just around the comer kept Patria Mercedes inching along. The blossoms on the flame trees

were about to burst open.

And on the third day He rose again …

The little notes kept streaming in. From the few hints Mate could drop into them, I pieced together what the girls were going through in prison.

They asked for food that would keep—they were hungry. Bouillon cubes and some salt—the food they got had no flavor. Aspirin—they had fevers.

Ephedrine—the asthma was acting up. Ceregen—they were weak. Soap— they were able to wash themselves. A dozen small crucifixes? That I couldn’t make out. One or two, yes, but a dozen?! I believed they were feeling more peace of mind when they asked for books. Martí for Minerva (the poems, not the essay book) and for Mate, a blank book and a pen.

Sewing materials for both, plus the children’s recent measurements. Ay, pobrecitas, they were missing their babies.

 I spent hours with Don Bernardo and Dona Belén next door, wishing my mind could fade like hers into the past. I would have gone all the way back, all the way back to the beginning of—I wasn’t sure of what.

Finally, when I’d almost given up hope, Peña arrived at the house in his big showy white Mercedes, wearing an embroidered guayabera instead of his uniform. Oh dear, a personal visit.

“Capitán Peña,” I welcomed him. “Please come inside where it’s cool.” I made a point of stopping at the entryway so he could see the fresh flowers under the portrait. “Shall I make you a rum coke?” I was gushing shamelessly all over him.

“Don’t bother yourself, Doña Patria, don’t bother yourself.” He indicated the chairs on the porch. “It’s nice and cool out there.” He looked at the road as a car slowed, the driver taking in who had dropped in on the Mirabal family.

Right then and there, I realized this visit was as much for him as for me.

I’d heard that he was having trouble at our place—I will never call that farm anything else. All the campesinos had run off, and there wasn’t a neighbor willing to lend a hand. (What could he expect? That whole area was full of González!) But being seen conversing with Doña Patria sent out the message—I didn’t hold him responsible for my loss. All he had done was buy a cheap farm from the government.

Mamá did, however, hold him responsible. She locked herself in her bedroom with her grandbabies and refused to come out. She would never visit with the monster who had torn her girls from her side. She didn’t care that he was trying to help us now. The truth was the devil was the devil even in a halo. But I knew it was more complicated than that. He was both, angel and devil, like the rest of us.

“I have good news for you,” Peña began. He folded his hands on his lap, waiting for me to gush a little more over him.

 “What is it, Captain?” I leaned forward, playing my pleading part.

“I have the visiting passes,” he said. My heart sunk a little, I had wanted the pardon most of all. But I thanked him warmly as he counted out each one. “Three passes,” he concluded when he was done.

Three? “But we have six prisoners, Captain,” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Shouldn’t it be six passes?”

“It should be six, shouldn’t it?” He gave me little righteous nods. “But Manolo’s in solitary, and Leandro’s still deciding on a job for El Jefe. So!

They’re both—shall we say—unavailable.”

A job for El Jefe? “And my Nelson?” I said right out.

“I talked with headquarters,” Pena spoke slowly, delaying the news to increase my anticipation. But I stayed unruffled, praying my Glory Be‘s, one right after the other. “Seeing as your boy is so young, and El Jefe has been pardoning most minors…” He swilled his drink around so the ice tinkled against the glass. “We think we can get him in with the next round.”

My first born, my little ram. The tears began to flow.

“Now, now, Doña Patria, don’t get like that.” But I could tell from Peña’s tone that he loved seeing women cry.

When I had controlled myself, I asked, “And the girls, Captain?”

“The women were all offered pardons as well.”

I was at the edge of my chair. “So the girls are coming home, too?”

“No, no, no,” he said, wagging his finger at me. “They seem to like it in prison. They have refused.” He raised his eyebrows as if to say, what can I do about such foolishness? Then he returned us to the subject of his little coup, expecting more of my gratitude. “So, how shall we celebrate when the boy comes home?”

“We’ll have you over for a sancocho,” I said before he could suggest something rude.

As soon as he was gone, I rushed to Mamá’s bedroom and delivered my good news.

Mama went down on her knees and threw her hands up in the air. “The truth is the Lord has not forgotten us!”

“Nelson is coming home?” Noris rushed forward. Since his imprisonment, Noris had moped horribly, as if Nelson were a lost love instead of “the monster” who had tortured her all her childhood.

The younger children began to chant, “Nelson home! Nelson home!”

Mama looked up at me, ignoring the racket. “And the girls?”

“We have passes to see them,” I said, my voice dropping.

Mamá stood up, stopping the clamor short. “And what does the devil

want in return?”

“A sancocho when Nelson comes home.”

“Over my dead body that man is going to eat a sancocho in my house.”

I put my hand on my lips, reminding Mamá that she had to watch what she said.

“I mean it, over my dead body!” Mamá hissed. “And that’s the truth!”

By the time she said it the third time, she and I both knew she was resigned to feeding Judas at her table. But there would be more than one stray hair in that sancocho, as the campesinos liked to say. No doubt Fela would sprinkle in her powders and Tono would say an Our Father backwards over the pot, and even I would add some holy water I’d bottled from Jacqueline’s baptism to give to her mother.

That night as we walked in the garden, I admitted to Mamá that I had made an indiscreet promise. She looked at me, shocked. “Is that why you snuck out of the house a few weeks ago?”

 “No, no, no. Nothing like that. I offered Our Lord to take me instead of my Nelson.”

Mama sighed. “Ay, m‘ija, don’t even say so. I have enough crosses.”

Then she admitted, “I offered Him to take me instead of any of you. And since I’m the mother, He’s got to listen to me first.”

We laughed. “The truth is,” Mama continued, “I have everything in hock to Him. It’ll take me another lifetime to fulfill all the promesas I’ve made once everybody comes home.

“As for the Pena promesa,” she added, “I have a plan.” There was that little edge of revenge in her voice. “We’ll invite all the neighbors.”

I didn’t have to remind her that we weren’t living among our kin anymore. Most of these new neighbors wouldn’t come, afraid of being seen socializing with the blackmarked Mirabals. That was part of Mama’s plan.

“Peña will show up, thinking the sancocho is meant just for him.”

I started laughing before she was through. I could see which way her revenge was going.

“All those neighbors will look out their windows and kick themselves when they realize they slighted the head of the northern SIM!”

“Ay, Mamá,” I laughed. “You are becoming la jefa of revenge!”

“Lord forgive me,” she said, smiling sweetly. There wasn’t a bit of sorry in her voice.

“That makes two of us,” I said, hooking my arm with hers.

“Good night,” I called out to the cigarette tips glowing like fireflies in the dark.

Monday, Pena telephoned. The audience with El Jefe was set in the National Palace for the next day. We were to bring a sponsor. Someone willing to give the young offender work and be responsible for him.

Someone who had not been in trouble with the government.

 “Thank you, thank you,” I kept saying.

“So when is my sancocho?” Pena concluded.

“Come on, Mamá,” I said when I got off the line and had given her our good news. “The man isn’t all that bad.”

“Humpf!” Mama snorted. “The man is smart is what he is. Helping with Nelson’s release will do what twenty sancochos couldn’t do. Soon the González clan will have him baptizing their babies!”

I knew she was right, but I wished she hadn’t said so. I don’t know, I wanted to start believing in my fellow Dominicans again. Once the goat was a bad memory in our past, that would be the real revolution we would have to fight: forgiving each other for what we had all let come to pass.

We made the trip to the capital in two cars. Jaimito and I rode down in the pickup. He had agreed to sponsor his nephew, giving him his own parcel to farm. I always said our cousin had a good heart.

Mama, Tio Chiche and his son, Blanco, a young colonel in the army, followed in Don Bernardo’s car. We wanted a show of strength—our most respectable relations. Dedé was staying behind to take care of the children.

It was my first excursion out of the Salcedo province in three months. My mood was almost festive!

At the last minute, Noris stole into the pickup and wouldn’t come out. “I want to go get my brother,” she said, her voice breaking. I couldn’t bring myself to order her out.

Somehow, in our excitement, our two cars lost each other on the road.

Later we found out that Don Bemardo’s old Plymouth had a flat near the Constanza turnoff, and when Blanco went to change it, there was no jack or spare in the trunk. Instead, Mamá described a whole library that Don Bernardo confessed he had hidden there. In her forgetful rages, Dona Belen had taken it into her head to rip up her husband’s books, convinced there were love letters hidden in those pages.

 Because we had backtracked, looking for them, we got to the National Palace with only minutes to spare. Up the front steps we raced—there must have been a hundred of them. In Dedé’s tight little heels, I suffered my Calvary, which I offered up to my Nelson’s freedom. At the entrance, there was a checkpoint, then two more friskings inside. Those were my poor Noris’s Calvary. You know how girls are at that age about any attention paid their bodies, and this was out and out probing of the rudest kind.

Finally, we were escorted down the hall by a nervous little functionary, who kept checking his watch and motioning for us to hurry along.

With all the rushing around, I hadn’t stopped to think. But now I began worrying that our prize would be snatched away at the last minute. El Jefe was going to punish us Mirabals. Just like with Minerva’s degree, he would wait till I had my hands on my Nelson and then say, “Your family is too good to accept pardons, it seems. I’m so sorry. We’ll have to keep the boy.”

I could not let myself be overcome by fears. I hung on to the sound of my girl’s new heels clicking away beside me. My little rosebud, my pigs-eye, my pretty one. Suddenly, my heart just about stopped. ¡Ay, Dios mío! What could I be thinking, bringing her along! Everybody knew that with each passing year the old goat liked them younger and younger. I had offered myself as a sacrificial lamb for Nelson. Certainly not my darling.

I squeezed my Noris’s hand. “You stay by me every second, you hear!

Don’t drink anything you’re offered, and it’s no to any invitation to any party.”

“Mamá, what are you talking about?” Her bottom lip was quivering.

“Nothing, my treasure. Nothing. Just stay close.”

It was like asking the pearl to stay inside its mother oyster. All the way down that interminable hall, Noris held tight to my hand.

I needed her touch as much as she needed mine. The past was rushing down that long corridor towards me, a flood of memories, sweeping me back as I struggled to keep up with the little official. We were on our way to the fateful Discovery Day dance, Minerva and Dedé, Pedrito, Papa and Jaimito and I, and nothing bad had happened yet. I was climbing up to the shrine of the Virgencita in Higuey to hear her voice for the first time. I was

a bride, promenading down the center aisle of San Juan Evangelista twenty years back to marry the man with whom I would have our dear children, dearer than my life.

The room was a parlor with velvet chairs no one would dream of sitting on even if invited, which we weren’t. Doors led in from three sides, and posted at each one was a fine-featured guard from El Jefe’s elite all-white corps. A few other families stood by, in clumps, looking solemn, the women in black, the men in suits or formal guayaberas. My yellow dress stood out like a shout I tried to quiet by draping my black mantilla over my shoulders.

Still, I was glad I had worn it. I was going to greet my boy dressed in the sunshine he hadn’t seen in a month.

A crowd of journalists was let in one of the doors. A tall American draped with cameras approached and asked us in his accented Spanish what our feelings were today. We looked to the little man, who nodded his permission. The audience was as much for the press as for us. We were part of a stage show.

El Jefe entered in a wash of camera flashes. I don’t know what I thought I’d see—I guess after three months of addressing him, I was sure I’d feel a certain kinship with the stocky, overdressed man before me. But it was just the opposite. The more I tried to concentrate on the good side of him, the more I saw a vain, greedy, unredeemed creature. Maybe the evil one had become flesh like Jesus! Goosebumps jumped all up and down my bare arms.

El Jefe sat down in an ornate chair on a raised platform and spoke directly to the families of the prisoners to be released. We had better do a better job of controlling our young people. Next time, we shouldn’t expect such mercy. As a group, we thanked him in chorus. Then we were to name ourselves for him, one by one, and thank him again with little personalized comments. I couldn’t think of anything to add to my thank-you, but I was hoping that Jaimito would come up with something.

 When our turn came, El Jefe nodded for me to speak first. I had a momentary cowardly thought of not giving him my complete name.

“Patria Mercedes Mirabal de González, to serve you.”

His bored, half-lidded eyes showed a spark of interest. “So you are one of the Mirabal sisters, eh?”

“Yes, Jefe. I’m the oldest.” Then, to emphasize what I was here for, I added, “Mother of Nelson González. And we’re very grateful to you.”

“And who is that little flower beside you?” El Jefe smiled down at Noris.

The journalists noted the special attention we were receiving and came forward with their cameras.

Once everyone’s particular thanks had been given, El Jefe turned and spoke to an aide beside him. A hush went through the room like a crack through a china cup. Then talk resumed. El Jefe moved closer to Noris to ask what flavor ice cream she liked. I kept her hand tight in mine while I scanned every door. This might be some sort of roulette game in which I had to guess correctly which one Nelson would come through in order to win his freedom. The American journalist threw out questions to El Jefe about his policies regarding political prisoners and the recent OAS charges of human rights abuses. El Jefe waved them away. He had managed to get out of Noris that she liked chocolate and strawberry if it wasn’t too strawberryish.

A door swung open. A cortege of guards in dress whites came through, followed by a handful of sorry-looking boys, their skulls visible under their shaven heads, their eyes big and scared, their faces swollen with bruises.

When I saw Nelson, I cried out and dropped to my knees.

Lord, I remember praying, thank you for giving me my son again.

I didn’t need to remind Him what I had offered in return. Still, I didn’t expect Him to come right out and claim it. Later Jaimito said it was just Trujillo calling me to receive my prisoner. But I know a godly voice when I hear one. I heard Him all right, and He called my name.

 Next day, we were famous. On the front page of El Caribe, the two photographs were side by side: Noris giving her hand to a smiling Jefe (Young Offender Softens El Jefe’s Heart); and me, kneeling, my hands clutched in prayer (Grateful Madre Thanks Her Benefactor).

 CHAPTER ELEVEN

María Teresa

March to August 1960

Wednesday, March 16 (55 days)

I just got the notebook. Santicló has had to be very careful this time around, smuggling in just a couple of things every few days.

Security measures are stepped up after the second pastoral, he says.

You’re safer in here than out there, bombs and what not.

He tries to say helpful things.

But can he really believe we’re safer in here? Maybe he is, being a guard and all. But we politicals can be snuffed out just like that. A little visit to La 40, that’s all it takes. Look at Florentino and Papilín—I better stop. I know how I get.

Thursday, March 17 (56 days)

The fear is the worse part. Every time I hear footsteps coming down the hall, or the clink of the key turning in the lock, I’m tempted to curl up in the comer like a hurt animal, whimpering, wanting to be safe. But I know if I do that, I’ll be giving in to a low part of myself, and I’ll feel even less human. And that is what they want to do, yes, that is what they want to do.

Friday, March 18 (57 days)

It feels good to write things down. Like there will be a record.

Before this, I scraped on the wall with our contraband nail. A mark for each day, a line through a week. It was the only record I could keep, besides the one in my head where I would remember things, store them.

The day we were brought here, for instance.

They marched us down the corridor past some of the men’s cells. We looked a sight, dirty, uncombed, bruised from sleeping on the hard floor.

The men started calling out their code names so we’d know who was still alive. (We kept our eyes averted, for they were all naked.) I listened hard but I didn’t hear, “¡Palomino vive!” I’m trying not to worry about it as we didn’t hear a lot of names because the guards commenced beating on the bars with their nightsticks, drowning out the men’s cries. Then Minerva began singing the national anthem, and everyone joined in, men and women. That time Minerva got solitary for a week.

The rest of us “women politicals” were locked up in a cell no bigger than Mamá’s living and dining room combined. But the real shock was the sixteen other cellmates we found here. “Nonpoliticals,” all right. Prostitutes, thieves, murderers—and that’s just the ones who have confided in us.

Saturday, March 19 (58 days)

Three bolted steel walls, steel bars for a fourth wall, a steel ceiling, a cement floor. Twenty-four metal shelves (“bunks”), a set of twelve on each side, a bucket, a tiny washbasin under a small high window. Welcome home.

We’re on the third floor (we believe) at the end of a long corridor. Cell # 61 facing south towards the road. El Rayo and some of the boys are in Cell # 60 (next to the guardia station), and # 62 on our other side is for nonpoliticals. Those guys love to talk dirty through the walls. The other girls don’t mind, they say, so most of them have taken bunks on that side.

 Twenty-four of us eat, sleep, write, go to school, and use the bucket— everything—in a room 25 by 20 of my size 6 feet. I’ve walked it back and forth many times, believe me. The rod in the middle helps, on account of we hang our belongings and dry towels there, and it kind of divides the room in two. Still, you lose your shame quickly in this horrid place.

All us politicals have our bunks on the east side, and so we’ve asked for the southeast comer to be “ours.” Minerva says that except for closed meetings, anyone can join our classes and discussions, and many have.

Magdalena, Kiki, America, and Milady have become regulars. Dinorah sometimes comes, but it’s usually to criticize.

Oh yes, I forgot. Our four-footed Miguelito. He shows up for any occasion that involves crumbs.

Sunday, March 20 (59 days)

Today I took my turn at our little window, and everything I saw was blurry through my tears. I had such a yearning to be out there.

Cars were speeding east to the capital, north towards home; there was a donkey loaded down with saddlebags full of plantains and a boy with a switch making him move along; lots and lots of police wagons. Every little

thing I was eating up with my eyes so I lost track of time. Suddenly, there was a yank at my prison gown. It was Dinorah, who keeps grumbling about us “rich women” who think we are better than riffraff.

“That’s enough,” she snapped. “We all want to have a turn.”

Then the touchingest thing happened. Magdalena must have seen I’d been crying because she said, “Let her have my turn.”

“And mine,” Milady added.

Kiki offered her ten minutes, too, and soon I had a whole other half hour to stand on the bucket if I wanted to.

Of course, I immediately stepped down, because I didn’t want to deny anyone their ten minutes of feasting on the world. But it raised my spirits so much, the generosity of these girls I once thought were below me.

Monday, March 21 (60 days)

I keep mentioning the girls.

I have to admit the more time I spend with them, the less I care what they’ve done or where they come from. What matters is the quality of a person. What someone is inside themselves.

My favorite is Magdalena. I call her our little birdseed bell. Everybody comes peck-peck-pecking what they want off her, and she gladly gives it.

Her ration of sugar, her time at the sink, her bobby pins.

I don’t know what she’s in for, since there’s a sort of unwritten courtesy here that you’re not supposed to ask anyone—though a lot of the girls blurt out their stories. Magdalena doesn’t say much about herself, but she has a little girl, too, and so we are always talking about our daughters. We don’t have any pictures, but we have thoroughly described our darlings to each other. Her Amantina sounds like a doll girl. She’s seven years old with hazel eyes (like my Jacqui) and light brown curls that used to be blond!

Strange… since Magdalena herself is pretty dark with quite a kink in her

hair. There’s a story there, but I didn’t dare come right out and ask who the father was.

Tuesday, March 22 (61 days)

I broke down last night. I feel so ashamed.

It happened right before lights out. I was lying on my bunk when the call went round, Viva Trujillo! Maybe it was that call or maybe it was all finally getting to me, but suddenly the walls were closing in, and I got this panicked feeling that I would never ever get out of here. I started to shake and moan, and call out to Mamá to take me home.

Thank God, Minerva saw in time what was going on. She crawled in my bunk and held me, talking soft and remindful to me of all the things I had to live and be patient for. I settled down, thank God.

It happens here all the time. Every day and night there’s at least one breakdown—someone loses control and starts to scream or sob or moan.

Minerva says it’s better letting yourself go—not that she ever does. The alternative is freezing yourself up, never showing what you’re feeling, never letting on what you’re thinking. (Like Dinorah. Jailface, the girls call her.) Then one day, you’re out of here, free, only to discover you’ve locked yourself up and thrown away the key somewhere too deep inside your heart to fish it out.

Wednesday, March 23 (62 days)

I’m learning a whole new language here, just like being in our movement. We’ve got code names for all the guards, usually some feature of their body or personality that lets you know instantly what to expect from them. Bloody Juan, Little Razor, Good Hair. I never could figure out Tiny, though. The man is as big as a piece of furniture you have to move in a truck. Tiny what? I asked Magdalena. She explained that Tiny is the one

with the fresh fingers, but according to those who have reason to know, he has very little to brag about.

Every day we get the “shopping list” from the knockings on the wall.

Today bananas are 5 cents each (tiny brown ones); a piece of ice, 15 cents; one cigarette, 3 cents; and a bottle of milk that is really half water, 15 cents.

Everything is for sale here, everything but your freedom.

The code name for these “privileges” is turtle, and when you want to purchase a privilege, you tell the guardía in charge that you’d like to throw some water on the turtle.

Today, I threw a whole bucket on the creature and bought rounds of cassava for everyone in our cell with the money Santicló brought us from Mama. Ten cents a stale round, and I couldn’t even keep mine down.

Thursday, March 24 (63 days)

Periodically, we are taken downstairs to an officers’ lounge and questioned. I’ve only been twice. Both times I was scared so witless that the guards had to carry me along by the arms. Then, of course, I’d get one of my asthma attacks and could barely breathe to talk.

Both times, I was asked gruff questions about the movement and who my contacts were and where we’d gotten our supplies. I always said, I have already said all I know, and then they’d threaten me with things they would do to me, to Leandro, to my family. The second time, they didn’t even threaten that much except to say that it was too bad a pretty lady would have to grow old in prison. Miss out on … (A bunch of lewd comments I won’t bother to repeat here.)

The ones they take out a lot are Sina and Minerva. It isn’t hard to figure out why. Those two always stand up to these guys. Once, Minerva came back from one of the interrogation sessions laughing. Trujillo’s son Ramfis had come special to question her because Trujillo had said that Minerva Mirabal was the brain behind the whole movement.

 I’m very flattered, Minerva said she said. But my brain isn’t big enough

to run such a huge operation.

That worried them.

Yesterday, something that could have been awful happened to Sina. They took her into a room with some naked men prisoners. The guards stripped off her clothes in front of the prisoners. Then they taunted Manolo, setting him up on a bucket and saying, Come now, leader, deliver one of your revolutionary messages.

What did he do? Minerva wanted to know, her voice all proud and indignant.

He stood up as straight as he could and said, Comrades, we have suffered

a setback but we have not been beaten.

Liberty or Death!

That was the only time I saw Minerva cry in prison. When Sina told that story.

Friday, March 25 (64 days)

Bloody Juan beats on the bars with an iron bar at five, iViva Trujillo! and we are rudely woken up. No chance of mistaking—even for a minute— where I am. I hide my face in my hands and cry. This is how every day starts out.

Lord forbid Minerva should see me, she’d give me one of her talks about morale.

It’s my turn to empty the bucket, but Magdalena offers to do it.

Everybody’s been so kind about relieving me because of the way my stomach’s been.

Right before chao comes, Minerva leads us in singing the national anthem. We know through knocking with our neighbor cell that our “serenades” really help raise the men’s spirits. The guards don’t even try to

stop us anymore. What harm are we doing? Minerva asks. In fact, we’re being patriotic, saying good morning to our country.

Today we sing, Adiós con el corazón, since this is Miriam’s and Dulce’s last day. Most of us are crying.

I end up vomiting my breakfast chao. Anything can set me off these days.

Not that my stomach needs an excuse for rejecting that watery paste. (What are those little gelatin things I sometimes bite down on?)

Saturday, March 26 (65 days)

We just had our “little school,” which Minerva insists on every day, except Sundays. I guess Fidel did this when he was in prison in the Isle of Pines, and so we have to do it, too. Minerva started us off by reciting some Marti and then we all talked about what we thought the words meant. I was daydreaming about my Jacqui—wondering if she was walking yet, if she was still getting the rash between her little fingers—when Minerva asked what I thought. I said I had to agree with what everyone was saying. She just shook her head.

Then, we politicals gathered in our comer and rehearsed the three

cardinal rules:

Never believe them.

Never fear them.

Never ask them anything.

Even Santicló? I asked. He is so good to me, to all of us really.

Especially Santicló, Sina said. I don’t know who is tougher, Minerva or her.

Both of them have warned me about getting too fond of the enemy

Sunday, March 27 (66 days)