CHAPTER TWELVE
Minerva
August to November 25, 1960
House Arrest
August and September
All my life, I had been trying to get out of the house. Papá always complained that, of his four girls, I should have been the boy, born to cut loose. First, I wanted to go to boarding school, then university. When Manolo and I started the underground, I traveled back and forth from Monte Cristi to Salcedo, connecting cell with cell. I couldn’t stand the idea of being locked up in any one life.
So when we were released in August and put under house arrest, you’d have thought I was getting just the punishment for me. But to tell the truth, it was as if I’d been served my sentence on a silver platter. By then, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to stay home with my sisters at Mamá‘s, raising our children.
Those first few weeks at home took some getting used to.
After seven months in prison, a lot of that time in solitary, the overload was too much. The phone ringing; a visitor dropping by (with permission from Peña, of course); Peña himself dropping by to see about the visitor;
Don Bemardo with guavas from his tree; rooms to go in and out of; children wanting their shoelaces tied; the phone ringing again; what to do with the curdled milk.
In the middle of the day when I should have been out soaking up sun and getting good country air in my infected lungs, I would seek the quiet of the bedroom, slip out of my dress and lie under the sheets watching the sun speckling the leaves through the barely opened jalousies.
But as I lay there, the same overload would start happening in my head.
Bits and pieces of the past would bob up in the watery soup of my thoughts those days—Lío explaining how to hit the volleyball so there was a curve in its fall; the rain falling on our way to Papá’s funeral; my hand coming down on Trujillo’s face; the doctor slapping her first breath into my newborn baby girl.
I’d sit up, shocked at what I was letting happen to me. I had been so much stronger and braver in prison. Now at home I was falling apart.
Or, I thought, lying back down, I’m ready for a new life, and this is how it starts.
I grew stronger gradually and began taking part in the life of the household.
None of us had any money, and the dwindling income from the farm was being stretched mighty thin across five families. So we started up a specialty business of children’s christening gowns. I did the simple stitching and seam binding.
The pneumonia in my lungs cleared up. I got my appetite back and began to regain the weight I’d lost in prison. I could wear again my old clothes Dona Fefita had brought down from Monte Cristi.
And, of course, my children were a wonder. I’d swoop down on them, showering them with kisses. “Mami!” they’d shriek. How lovely to be called mother again; to have their little arms around my neck; their sane, sweet breath in my face.
And pinto beans—were they always so colorful? “Wait, wait, wait,” I’d cry out to Fela before she dunked them in the water. I’d scoop up handfuls just to hear the soft rattle of their downpour back in the pot. Everything I had to touch. Everything I had to taste. I wanted everything back in my life again.
But sometimes a certain slant of light would send me back. The light used to fall just so at this time of day on the floor below my top bunk.
And once, Minou got hold of a piece of pipe and was rattling it against the galería rail. It was a sound exactly recalling the guards in prison running their nightsticks against the bars. I ran out and yanked the pipe from her hand, screaming, “No!” My poor little girl burst out crying, frightened by the terror in my voice.
But those memories, too, began to fade. They became stories. Everyone wanted to hear them. Mate and I could keep the house entertained for hours, telling and retelling the horrors until the sting was out of them.
We were allowed two outings a week: Thursdays to La Victoria to visit the men, and Sundays to church. But for all that I was free to travel, I dreaded going out of the house. The minute we turned onto the road, my heart started pounding and my breathing got shallow.
The open vistas distressed me, the sense of being adrift in a crowd of people pressing in on all sides, wanting to touch me, greet me, wish me well. Even in church during the privacy of Holy Communion, Father Gabriel bent down and whispered “iviva la Mariposa!”
My months in prison had elevated me to superhuman status. It would hardly have been seemly for someone who had challenged our dictator to suddenly succumb to a nervous attack at the communion rail.
I hid my anxieties and gave everyone a bright smile. If they had only known how frail was their iron-will heroine. How much it took to put on that hardest of all performances, being my old self again.
My best performances were reserved for Peña’s visits. He came often to supervise our house arrest. The children got so used to his toad face and grabby hands, they began calling him Tío Capitán and asking to hold his gun and ride on his knee horse.
I myself could not get used to him. Whenever that big white Mercedes turned into our narrow driveway, I ran to my bedroom and shut the door to give myself time to put on my old-self face.
In no time, someone was sent back there to get me. “It’s Peña. You’ve got to come!” Even Mamá, who once refused to receive him, now buttered him up whenever he was over. After all, he had let her have her babies back.
One afternoon I was out trimming the laurel in the front yard. Manolito was “helping” me. After cutting the branches, all but a sliver, I held him up to pull them off. From his perch on my shoulders, he reported all he saw out on the road. “Tío’s car!” he cried out, and sure enough, I saw the flash of white through a break in the hedge. It was too late to tune up for my performance. I went directly to the carport to receive him.
“What a rare occasion, Dona Minerva. The last few times I’ve come you haven’t been well.” In other words, I’ve noticed your rudeness. All of it is filed away. “You must be feeling better,” he observed, without a question mark.
“I saw your car, I saw your car,” sang Manolito.
“Manolito, my boy, you are all eyes. We could use men like you in the
SIM.”
Oh God, I thought.
“Ladies, it’s nice to have you all here,” Pena noted, when Mate and Patria joined us on the patio. Dedé had appeared with her shears to work on the
hedge and keep her eye on “things.” Whenever she didn’t like my tone, she would clip the crown of thorns violently, scattering a spray of leaves and red petals in the air.
For the umpteenth time, Pena reminded us how lucky we were. Our five- year sentence had been commuted to house arrest. Instead of the restrictions of prison, we had only a few rules to obey. (We called them Peña’s commandments.) He rehearsed them each time he came: No trips, no visitors, no contact with politicals. Any exceptions only by his permission.
“Clear?”
We nodded. I was tempted to bring out the broom and set it by the door, the country way to tell people it was time to go.
Peña dunked the bobbing ice cubes with a fat finger. Today he had come for more than the recital of his rules. “El Jefe has not visited our province for a while now,” he began.
Of course not, I thought. Most families in Salcedo had at least one son or daughter or husband in prison.
“We are trying to get him to come. All loyal citizens are writing letters.”
Clip-clip went Dedé’s shears, as if to drown out anything I might be thinking.
“El Jefe has been very generous to you girls. It would be nice if you composed a letter of thanks for his leniency.”
He glanced at me and Mate, resting his eyes on Patria last. We gave him nothing with our faces. Poor nervous Dedé, who had edged up the patio towards us and was rewatering all the plants, said that yes, that would be wise. “I mean nice,” she corrected herself quickly, and Patria, Mate, and I bowed our heads to hide our smiles.
After Pena left there was a fight. The others wanted to go ahead and write the damn letter. But I was against it. Thank Trujillo for punishing us!
“But what harm can a little letter do?” Mate argued. It was no longer so easy for me to talk that one into anything.
“People look to us to be an example, we’ve got a responsibility!” I spoke so fiercely, they looked a little sheepish. My old self was putting on quite a show.
“Now, Minerva,” Patria reasoned. “You know if he publishes the silly thing everyone will know why we wrote it.”
“Just go along with us this one time,” Mate pleaded with me.
It reminded me of that time in Inmaculada when I had not wanted to perform for Trujillo with my friends. But I had given in to them, and we had almost met our end, too, with Sinita’s bow-and-arrow assassination attempt.
What finally convinced me was Patria’s argument that the letter might help free the men. A grateful note from the Mirabal sisters might just soften El Jefe’s heart towards our husbands.
“Heart?” I said, making a face. Then, sitting down to our task, I made it perfectly clear: “This is against my better principles.”
“Someone needs to have less principles and more sense,” Dedé murmured, but without much fight in her voice. I think she was relieved to see a little spark of the old Minerva again.
Afterwards I felt small with what I’d done. “We’ve got to do something,”
I kept muttering.
“Calm down, Minerva. Here,” Dedé said, pulling down Gandhi from the shelf. Elsa had given me this book when I first got out of prison to show me, she said, that being passive and gentle could be revolutionary. Dedé had approved wholeheartedly.
Today, Gandhi would not do. What I needed was a shot of Fidel’s fiery rhetoric. He would have agreed with me. We had to do something, soon!
“We have to accept this cross is what we have to do,” Patria said.
“Like hell we do!” I said. I was on a rampage.
It lasted only until the end of that day.
We were already in bed when I heard them talking loudly on the porch.
They were everywhere—the dark glasses, the ironed pants, the pomaded hair. They stayed on the road until night, when they drew close to the house like moths drawn towards the light.
Usually I covered my head with my pillow and after a while fell asleep.
But tonight I couldn’t ignore them. I got up from bed, not even bothering to throw a shawl over my nightgown.
Dedé caught me going out the door. She tried to hold me back, but weak though I still was, I pushed her aside easily. Dedé was still Dedé, without much conviction in her fighting.
Two SIM agents were sitting on our rockers as comfortable as you please. “Compañeros,” I said, startling them in mid-rock with the revolutionary greeting. “I’m going to have to ask you to please keep your voices down. You’re right under our bedroom windows. Remember, you are
guards, not guests here.”
Neither of them said a word.
“Well, if there’s nothing else, good night then, compañeros.”
I had turned back towards the door when one of them called out, “iViva Trujillo!” the “patriotic” way of beginning and closing the day. But I wasn’t going to invoke the devil’s name in my own yard.
After a short pause in which she was probably waiting to see if I’d answer, Dedé called from inside the house, “¡Viva Trujillo!”
“¡Viva Trujillo!” Mate took it up.
And then a couple of more voices added their good wishes to our dictator, until what had been a scared compliance became, by the exaggeration of repetition, a joke. But I could feel the men listening specifically for my loyalty call.
“Viva—” I began and felt ashamed as I took a deep breath and pronounced the hated name.
Just in case I should go on a rampage again, Mama confiscated the old radio. “What we need to know, we’ll know soon enough!” And she was right, too. Little bits of news leaked in, sometimes from the least likely people.
My old friend Elsa. She had married the journalist Roberto Suárez, who was assigned to the National Palace and, though critical of the regime, wrote the flowery feature articles required of him. One night long ago, he had kept Manolo and me, as well as Elsa, in stitches with tales of his journalistic escapades. He had been held in prison once for three days for printing a picture in which Trujillo’s bare leg showed between the cuff of his pants and the top of his sock. Another time, in a misprint he hadn’t caught, Roberto’s article had stated that Senator Smathers had delivered an elegy, instead of a eulogy, of Trujillo before the joint members of the United States Congress. That time Roberto was put in jail for a month.
I had thought for sure the Suarezes would join our movement. So when Leandro moved to the capital to coordinate the cells there, I mentioned the Suarezes to him as a likely couple. Elsa and Roberto were contacted and declared themselves “friendly,” but did not want to join.
Now, in my hard times, my old friend sprang to my side. Every week since our release in August, Elsa had driven up from the capital to visit her elderly grandfather in La Vega. She would then swing up to Santiago, butter up Pena (she was good at this), and get a pass to come see me. Knowing we were in straitened circumstances, she brought bags of “old” clothes that looked fairly new to me. She claimed she couldn’t fit into anything after her babies had been born and she’d gotten big as a cow.
Elsa… always exaggerating. She had the same good figure as always—as far as I could tell. “But look at these hips, please, just look at these legs!” she’d remind me.
Once she asked me, “How do you stay so trim?” Her eyes ran over my figure in an appraising way.
“Prison,” I said flatly. She didn’t mention my figure again.
Elsa and Roberto owned a boat, and every weekend they took it out. “To fish.” Elsa winked. At sea they picked up Swan broadcasts from a little island south of Cuba as well as Radio Rebelde in Cuba and Radio Rumbos from Venezuela. “It’s a regular newsroom out there,” said Elsa, every visit catching me up on the latest news.
One day Elsa appeared, her face flushed with excitement. She couldn’t sit down for a minute, not even for her favorite pastelito snack. She had news to tell me that required an immediate walk in the garden. “What is it?” I said, clutching her arm when we were halfway down the anthuriums.
“The OAS has imposed sanctions! Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela,” Elsa counted them off with her fingers, “even the gringos.
They’ve all broken relations!” She and Roberto had been out on the boat Sunday and seen an American warship on the horizon.
“The capital is like this!” Elsa rubbed her fingers together. “Roberto says by next year—”
“Next year!” I was alarmed. “By then, who knows what can happen.”
We walked a little while in silence. Far off, I could hear the shouts of the children playing with the big, bright beach ball their Tía Elsa had brought them from the capital. “Dedé tells me I shouldn’t talk to you about all this.
But I said to her, Dedé, it’s in Minerva’s blood. I told her about that time you almost shot Trujillo with a toy arrow, remember? I had to step in and pretend it was part of our play.”
I wondered which of us had revised the past to suit the lives we were living now. “Ay, Elsa, that’s not how it happened.”
“Well, anyhow, she told me about the time you freed your father’s rabbits because you didn’t think it was right to have them caged.”
That story was remembered my way, but I felt diminished hearing it.
“And look at me now.”
“What do you mean? You’ve gained a little weight. You’re looking great!” She ran her eyes over me, nodding in approval. “Minerva, Minerva, I am so proud of you!”
How much I wanted at that moment to unburden myself to my old friend.
To confess that I didn’t feel the same as before prison. That I wanted my own life back again.
But before I could say a thing, she grabbed my hands. “¡Viva la Mariposa!” she whispered with feeling.
I gave her the bright brave smile she also required of me.
Our spirits were so high with the good news we couldn’t wait for Thursday to tell the men. The night before, we were almost festive as we rolled our hair in the bedroom so it would curl for our men the next day. We always did this, no matter how gloomy we were feeling. And they noticed it, too. It was a fact—we had all compared notes—that our men got more romantic the longer they were in prison. Patria claimed that Pedrito, a man of few words if there ever was one, was composing love poems for her and reciting them during visiting hours. The most embarrassing part, she admitted, was that this made her start feeling that way right there in the middle of the prison hall surrounded by guards.
Dedé sat by, watching our preparations with displeasure. She had gotten into the habit of staying over the nights before our visits. She said she had to be at Mamá’s early the next day anyhow to help with all the children once we left. But really, she was there to convince us not to go.
“You’re exposing yourselves to an accident by going down all together,”
Dedé began, “that’s what you’re doing.”
We all knew what kind of accident she meant. Just a month ago Mar rero had been found at the foot of a cliff, having supposedly lost control of his car.
“Bournigal’s drivers are very reliable,” Patria reassured her.
“Think of how many orphans you’d be leaving behind, how many widowers, a mother de luto for the rest of her life.” Dedé could really pour on the tragedy.
I don’t know if it was nerves or what, but all three of us burst out laughing. Dedé stood up and announced she was going home. “Come on, Dedé,” I called as she headed out the door. “There’s a curfew. Be reasonable.”
“Reasonable!” Her voice was seething with anger. “If you think I’m going to sit by and watch you all commit suicide, you’re wrong.”
She didn’t make it past the front gate. The SIM sent her back. She slept on the couch and the next morning wouldn’t talk to us all through breakfast.
When she turned away as we went to kiss her goodbye, I decided to use her own fears on her. “Come on, Dedé. Think how sorry you’d be if something should happen to us and you didn’t say goodbye.” She stiffened with resistance. But the second the driver turned on the engine, she ran to the car, sobbing. She blurted out the one loss she hadn’t mentioned the night before, “I don’t want to have to live without you.”
The atmosphere in prison was bright with hope. The voices in the visitors’ hall had a lift to them, now and then there was laughter. The news had spread there already: sanctions had been imposed, the gringos were closing down their embassy.
Only Manolo, like Dedé, was not convinced. He seemed gloomier than ever.
“What is it?” I asked between passings of the guard. “Isn’t it good news?”
He shrugged. Then seeing my worried face, he smiled, but it was a smile for my benefit, I could tell. I noticed for the first time that some of his front teeth were broken off.
“We’ll be home soon!” I always tried to raise his spirits with the thought of our little nest in Monte Cristi. The owners, old friends of Manolo’s parents, were allowing us to keep our things there until the day they should find a new tenant. Strangely enough, it gave me hope to know our little house, the only home we’d ever shared, was still intact.
Manolo leaned towards me, his lips grazing my cheek. A kiss to mask what he had to say. “Our cells, are they ready?”
So that’s what was worrying him. He didn’t know that the revolution was out of our hands. Others were now in charge.
“Who?” he persisted.
I hated to tell him I didn’t know. That we were totally disconnected at Mamá’s. The guard was passing by, so I remarked instead about the plantain fritters we’d eaten the night before. “Nobody knows who they are,”
I mouthed when the guard was safely down the row.
Manolo eyes grew big in his pale face. “This could be a plant. Find out who’s left.” His grip tightened until my hands felt numb, but I would never tell him to let go.
We were watched around the clock, our visits supervised, even food vendors had their baskets checked at the gate. When and how and whom was I to contact? And if I tried, I’d only be risking more lives.
But it was more than that. I had put on too good a show for Manolo as well. He didn’t know the double life I was leading. Outwardly, I was still his calm, courageous compañera. Inside, the woman had got the upper hand.
And so the struggle with her began. The struggle to get my old self back from her. Late in the night, I’d lie in bed, thinking, You must gather up the broken threads and tie them together.
Secretly, I hoped that events would settle the matter for me and, along with everyone else, I honestly believed we were seeing the last days of the regime. Shortages were everywhere. Trujillo was doing all the crazy things of a trapped animal. In church in a drunken stupor, he had seized the chalice and dispensed communion to his frightened attendants. The pope was talking about excommunication.
But with everyone against him and no one left to impress, Trujillo didn’t have to hold himself back anymore. One morning, soon after sanctions went into effect, we woke up to the sound of sirens on the road. Trucks were roaring by, full of soldiers. Dedé did not appear that morning, and since that one was like clockwork, we knew something was wrong.
The next day Elsa brought the very news we’d been waiting for, with the conclusion we had dreaded. Two nights ago after dark, a group of young men had run through Santiago, distributing leaflets under doors, urging an uprising. Every last one of them had been caught.
“‘They will find out what it is to run a comb through tangled hair,’ ” Elsa quoted Trujillo’s reaction to the young rebels’ capture.
Peña came by late that afternoon. All further visits to La Victoria were cancelled.
“But why?” I blurted out. And then bitterly I added, “We wrote the letter!”
Pena narrowed his eyes at me. He hated to be asked questions that implied he wasn’t in charge of things. “Why don’t you write another letter to El Jefe and ask him to explain himself to you!”
“She’s just upset. We all are,” Patria explained. She made a pleading face for me to be nice. “Aren’t you just upset, Minerva?”
“I’m very upset,” I said, folding my arms.
It was the end of September before visiting days were reinstated at La Victoria, and we got to see the men. That morning when we picked up our passes, Peña gave us a warning look, but we were all so relieved, we answered him with smiles and too many thank-yous. All the way down in the car we rented with a driver, we were giddy with anticipation. Mate told some of her favorite riddles we all pretended not to know so she could have the pleasure of answering them herself. The thing Adam had in front that Eva had in back was the letter A. The thing that’s put in hard and comes out soft were the beans in the boiling water. That one had gotten a taste for spicy humor in prison.
Our mood changed considerably when we were finally ushered into that dim, familiar hall. The men looked thinner, their eyes desperate in their pale faces. Between passings of the increased guardia patrol, I tried to find out from Manolo what was going on.
“It’s over for us.” Manolo clutched my hands.
“You can’t think like that. We’ll be back in our little house before the year is up.”
But he insisted on goodbyes. He wanted me to know how deep was his love for me. What to say to the children. What kind of burial he wanted if I got a body, what kind of memorial service if I didn’t.
“Stop this!” I said in an annoyed voice. My heart was in my mouth.
On the drive home, we all wept, unable to console each other, for my sisters had heard the same grim news from Pedrito and Leandro. The men in their cells were being taken out at night in small groups and killed.
The driver, a man about our age who had already driven us down twice, looked in his rearview mirror. “The butterflies are sad today,” he noted.
That made me sit up and dry my tears. The butterflies were not about to give up! We had suffered a setback but we had not been beaten.
In the long days that followed, we expected Pena to appear every morning with the horrible news. Now I was the one waiting out on the galeria to intercept him if he came. I did not want anyone else to have to bear the first blow.