Read Online In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Álvarez - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Julia Álvarez
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crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside me.
After I lost the baby, I felt a strange vacancy. I was an empty house with a sign in front, Se Vende, For Sale. Any vagrant thought could take me.
I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, sure that some brujo had put a spell on me and that’s why the baby had died. This from Patria Mercedes, who had always kept herself from such low superstitions.
I fell asleep and dreamed the Yanquis were back, but it wasn’t my grandmother’s house they were burning—it was Pedrito’s and mine. My babies, all three of them, were going up in flames. I leapt from the bed crying, “Fire! Fire!”
I wondered if the dead child were not a punishment for my having turned my back on my religious calling? I went over and over my life to this point, complicating the threads with my fingers, knotting everything.
We moved in with Mama until I could get my strength back. She kept trying to comfort me. “That poor child, who knows what it was spared!”
“It is the Lord’s will,” I agreed, but the words sounded hollow to my ear.
Minerva could tell. One day, we were lying side by side on the hammock strung just inside the galería. She must have caught me gazing at our picture of the Good Shepherd, talking to his lambs. Beside him hung the required portrait of El Jefe, touched up to make him look better than he was. “They’re a pair, aren’t they?” she noted.
That moment, I understood her hatred. My family had not been personally hurt by Trujillo, just as before losing my baby, Jesus had not taken anything away from me. But others had been suffering great losses. There were the Perozos, not a man left in that family. And Martinez Reyna and his wife murdered in their bed, and thousands of Haitians massacred at the border, making the river, they say, still run red—iAy, Dios santo!
I had heard, but I had not believed. Snug in my heart, fondling my pearl, I had ignored their cries of desolation. How could our loving, all-powerful Father allow us to suffer so? I looked up, challenging Him. And the two faces had merged!
I moved back home with the children in early August, resuming my duties, putting a good face over a sore heart, hiding the sun—as the people around here say—with a finger. And slowly, I began coming back from the dead. What brought me back? It wasn’t God, no señor. It was Pedrito, his grief so silent and animal-like. I put aside my own grief to rescue him from his.
Every night I gave him my milk as if he were my lost child, and afterwards I let him do things I never would have before. “Come here, mi amor,” I’d whisper to guide him through the dark bedroom when he showed up after having been out late in the fields. Then I was the one on horseback, riding him hard and fast until I’d gotten somewhere far away from my aching heart.
His grief hung on. He never spoke of it, but I could tell. One night, a few weeks after the baby was buried, I felt him leaving our bed ever so quietly. My heart sank. He was seeking other consolations in one of the thatched huts around our rancho. I wanted to know the full extent of my losses, so I said nothing and followed him outside.
It was one of those big, bright nights of August when the moon has that luminous color of something ready for harvest. Pedrito came out of the shed with a spade and a small box. He walked guardedly, looking over his shoulder. At last, he stopped at a secluded spot and began to dig a little grave.
I could see now that his grief was dark and odd. I would have to be gentle in coaxing him back. I crouched behind a big ceiba, my fist in my mouth, listening to the thud of soil hitting the box.
After he was gone to the yucca fields the next day, I searched and searched, but I could not find the spot again. Ay, Dios, how I worried that he had taken our baby
After I lost the baby, I felt a strange vacancy. I was an empty house with a sign in front, Se Vende, For Sale. Any vagrant thought could take me.
I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, sure that some brujo had put a spell on me and that’s why the baby had died. This from Patria Mercedes, who had always kept herself from such low superstitions.
I fell asleep and dreamed the Yanquis were back, but it wasn’t my grandmother’s house they were burning—it was Pedrito’s and mine. My babies, all three of them, were going up in flames. I leapt from the bed crying, “Fire! Fire!”
I wondered if the dead child were not a punishment for my having turned my back on my religious calling? I went over and over my life to this point, complicating the threads with my fingers, knotting everything.
We moved in with Mama until I could get my strength back. She kept trying to comfort me. “That poor child, who knows what it was spared!”
“It is the Lord’s will,” I agreed, but the words sounded hollow to my ear.
Minerva could tell. One day, we were lying side by side on the hammock strung just inside the galería. She must have caught me gazing at our picture of the Good Shepherd, talking to his lambs. Beside him hung the required portrait of El Jefe, touched up to make him look better than he was. “They’re a pair, aren’t they?” she noted.
That moment, I understood her hatred. My family had not been personally hurt by Trujillo, just as before losing my baby, Jesus had not taken anything away from me. But others had been suffering great losses. There were the Perozos, not a man left in that family. And Martinez Reyna and his wife murdered in their bed, and thousands of Haitians massacred at the border, making the river, they say, still run red—iAy, Dios santo!
I had heard, but I had not believed. Snug in my heart, fondling my pearl, I had ignored their cries of desolation. How could our loving, all-powerful Father allow us to suffer so? I looked up, challenging Him. And the two faces had merged!
I moved back home with the children in early August, resuming my duties, putting a good face over a sore heart, hiding the sun—as the people around here say—with a finger. And slowly, I began coming back from the dead. What brought me back? It wasn’t God, no señor. It was Pedrito, his grief so silent and animal-like. I put aside my own grief to rescue him from his.
Every night I gave him my milk as if he were my lost child, and afterwards I let him do things I never would have before. “Come here, mi amor,” I’d whisper to guide him through the dark bedroom when he showed up after having been out late in the fields. Then I was the one on horseback, riding him hard and fast until I’d gotten somewhere far away from my aching heart.
His grief hung on. He never spoke of it, but I could tell. One night, a few weeks after the baby was buried, I felt him leaving our bed ever so quietly. My heart sank. He was seeking other consolations in one of the thatched huts around our rancho. I wanted to know the full extent of my losses, so I said nothing and followed him outside.
It was one of those big, bright nights of August when the moon has that luminous color of something ready for harvest. Pedrito came out of the shed with a spade and a small box. He walked guardedly, looking over his shoulder. At last, he stopped at a secluded spot and began to dig a little grave.
I could see now that his grief was dark and odd. I would have to be gentle in coaxing him back. I crouched behind a big ceiba, my fist in my mouth, listening to the thud of soil hitting the box.
After he was gone to the yucca fields the next day, I searched and searched, but I could not find the spot again. Ay, Dios, how I worried that he had taken our baby
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