Epilogue
Dedé
1994
Later they would come by the old house in Ojo de
Agua and insist on seeing me. Sometimes, for a rest, I’d go spend a
couple of weeks with Mamá in Conuco. I would use the excuse that
the monument was being built, and the noise and dust and activity
bothered me. But it was really that I could bear neither to receive
them nor turn them away.
They would come with their stories of that
afternoon—the little soldier with the bad teeth, cracking his
knuckles, who had ridden in the car with them over the mountain;
the bowing attendant from El Gallo who had sold them some purses
and tried to warn them not to go; the big-shouldered truck driver
with the husky voice who had witnessed the ambush on the road. They
all wanted to give me something of the girls’ last moments. Each
visitor would break my heart all over again, but I would sit on
this very rocker and listen for as long as they had something to
say.
It was the least I could do, being the one
saved.
And as they spoke, I was composing in my head how
that last afternoon went.
It seems they left town after four-thirty, since
the truck that preceded them up the mountain clocked out of the
local Public Works building at four thirty-five. They had stopped
at a little establishment by the side of the road. They were
worrying about something, the proprietor said, he didn’t know what.
The tall one kept pacing back and forth to the phone and talking a
lot.
The proprietor had had too much to drink when he
told me this. He sat in that chair, his wife dabbing at her eyes
each time her husband said something. He told me what each of them
had ordered. He said I might want to know this. He said at the last
minute the cute one with the braids decided on ten cents’ worth of
Chiclets, cinnamon, yellow, green. He dug around in the jar but he
couldn’t find any cinnamon ones. He will never forgive himself that
he couldn’t find any cinnamon ones. His wife wept for the little
things that could have made the girls’ last minutes happier. Their
sentimentality was excessive, but I listened, and thanked them for
coming.
It seems that at first the Jeep was following
the truck up the mountain. Then as the truck slowed for the grade,
the Jeep passed and sped away, around some curves, out of sight.
Then it seems that the truck came upon the ambush. A blue-and-white
Austin had blocked part of the road; the Jeep had been forced to a
stop; the women were being led away peaceably, so the truck driver
said, peaceably to the car. He had to brake so as not to run
into them, and that’s when one of the women—I think it must have
been Patria, “the short, plump one”—broke from the captors and ran
towards the truck. She clung to the door, yelling, “Tell the
Mirabal family in Salcedo that the calies are going to kill
us!” Right behind her came one of the men, who tore her hand off
the door and dragged her away to the car.
It seems that the minute the truck driver heard
the word calie, he shut the door he had started opening.
Following the commanding wave of one of the men, he inched his way
past. I felt like asking him, “Why didn’t you stop and help them?”
But of course, I didn’t. Still, he saw the question in my eyes and
he bowed his head.
Over a year after Trujillo was gone, it all came
out at the trial of the murderers. But even then, there were
several versions. Each one of the five murderers saying the others
had done most of the murdering. One of them saying they hadn’t done
any murdering at all. Just taken the girls to the mansion in La
Cumbre where El Jefe had finished them off.
The trial was on TV all day long for almost a
month.
Three of the murderers did finally admit to
killing one each of the Mirabal sisters. Another one killed Rufino,
the driver. The fifth stood on the side of the road to warn the
others if someone was coming. At first, they all tried to say they
were that one, the one with the cleanest hands.
I didn’t want to hear how they did it. I saw the
marks on Minerva’s throat; fingerprints sure as day on Mate’s pale
neck. They also clubbed them, I could see that when I went to cut
her hair. They killed them good and dead. But I do not believe they
violated my sisters, no. I checked as best I could. I think it is
safe to say they acted like gentlemen murderers in that way.
After they were done, they put the dead girls in
the back of the Jeep, Rufino in front. Past a hairpin curve near
where there were three crosses, they pushed the car over the edge.
It was seven-thirty The way I know is one of my visitors, Mateo
Núnez, had just begun listening to the Sacred Rosary on his little
radio when he heard the terrible crash.
He learned about the trial of the murderers on
that same radio. He walked from his remote mountain shack with his
shoes in a paper sack so as not to wear them out. It must have
taken him days. He got a lift or two, here and there, sometimes
going the wrong way. He hadn’t traveled much off that mountain. I
saw him out the window when he stopped and put on his shoes to show
up proper at my door. He gave me the exact hour and made the
thundering noise of the tumbling Jeep he graphed with his arcing
hand. Then he turned around and headed back to his mountain.
He came all that way just to tell me that.
The men got thirty years or twenty years, on
paper. I couldn’t keep straight why some of the murderers got less
than the others. Likely the one on the road got the twenty years.
Maybe another one was sorry in court. I don’t know But their
sentences didn’t amount to much, anyway. All of them were set free
during our spell of revolutions. When we had them regularly, as if
to prove we could kill each other even without a dictator to tell
us to.
After the men were sentenced, they gave
interviews that were on the news all the time. What did the
murderers of the Mirabal sisters think of this and that? Or so I
heard. We didn’t own a TV, and the one at Mamá’s we turned on only
for the children’s cartoons. I‘didn’t want them to grow up with
hate, their eyes fixed on the past. Never once have the names of
the murderers crossed my lips. I wanted the children to have what
their mothers would have wanted for them, the possibility of
happiness.
Once in a while, Jaimito brought me a newspaper
so I could see all the great doings in the country. But I’d roll it
up tight as I could get it and whack at the house flies. I missed
some big things that way. The day Trujillo was assassinated by a
group of seven men, some of them his old buddies. The day Manolo
and Leandro were released, Pedrito having already been freed. The
day the rest of the Trujillo family fled the country. The day
elections were announced, our first free ones in thirty-one
years.
“Don’t you want to know all about it?” Jaimito
would ask, grinning, trying to get me excited. Or more likely,
hopeful. I’d smile, grateful for his caring. “Why? When I can hear
it all from you, my dear?”
Not that I was really listening as he went on and
on, recounting what was in the papers. I pretended to, nodding and
smiling from my chair. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. After
all, I listened to everyone else.
But the thing was, I just couldn’t take one more
story.
In her mother’s old room, I hear Minou, getting
ready for bed. She keeps a steady patter through the open window,
catching me up on her life since we last talked. The new line of
play clothes she designed for her store in the capital; the course
she is teaching at the university on poetry and politics;
Jacqueline’s beautiful little baby and the remodeling of her
penthouse; Manolito, busy with his agricultural projects—all of
them smart young men and women making good money. They aren’t like
us, I think. They knew almost from the start they had to take on
the world.
“Am I boring you, Mamá Dedé?”
“Not at all!” I say, rocking in pleasing rhythm
to the sound of her voice.
The little news, that’s what I like, I tell them.
Bring me the little news.
Sometimes they came to tell me just how crazy I
was. To say, “Ay, Dedé, you should have seen yourself that
day!”
The night before I hadn’t slept at all. Jaime
David was sick and kept waking up, feverish, needing drinks of
water. But it wasn’t him keeping me up. Every time he cried out I
was already awake. I finally came out here and waited for dawn,
rocking and rocking like I was bringing the day on. Worrying about
my boy, I thought.
And then, a soft shimmering spread across the
sky. I listened to the chair rockers clacking on the tiles, the
isolated cock crowing, and far off, the sound of hoof beats,
getting closer, closer. I ran all the way around the galería
to the front. Sure enough, here was Mamá’s yardboy galloping on the
mule, his legs hanging almost to the ground. Funny, the thing that
you remember as most shocking. Not a messenger showing up at that
eerie time of early dawn, the dew still thick on the grass. No.
What shocked me most was that anybody had gotten our impossibly
stubborn mule to gallop.
The boy didn’t even dismount. He just called out,
“Doña Dedé, your mother, she wants you to come right away.”
I didn’t even ask him why. Did I already guess? I
rushed back into the house, into our bedroom, threw open the
closet, yanked my black dress off its hanger, ripping the right
sleeve, waking Jaimito with my piteous crying.
When Jaimito and I pulled into the drive, there
was Mamá and all the kids running out of the house. I didn’t think
the girls, right off. I thought, there’s a fire, and I
started counting to make sure everybody was out.
The babies were all crying like they had gotten
shots. And here comes Minou tearing away from the others towards
the truck so Jaimito had to screech to a stop.
“Lord preserve us, what is going on?” I ran to
them with my arms open. But they hung back, stunned, probably at
the horror on my face, for I had noticed something odd.
“Where are they!?” I screamed.
And then, Mamá says to me, she says, “Ay,
Dedé, tell me it isn’t true, ay, tell me it isn’t true.”
And before I could even think what she was
talking about, I said, “It isn’t true, Mamá, it isn’t true.”
There was a telegram that had been delivered
first thing that morning. Once she’d had it read to her, Mama could
never find it again. But she knew what it said.
There has been a car accident.
Please come to Jose Maria Cabral Hospital
in Santiago.
And my heart in my rib cage was a bird that
suddenly began to sing. Hope! I imagined broken legs strung up,
arms in casts, lots of bandages. I rearranged the house where I was
going to put each one while they were convalescing. We’d clear the
living room and roll them in there for meals.
While Jaimito was drinking the cup of coffee Tono
had made him—I hadn’t wanted to wait at home while the slow-witted
Tinita got the fire going—Mamá and I were rushing around, packing a
bag to take to the hospital. They would need nightgowns,
toothbrushes, towels, but I put in crazy things in my terrified
rush, Mate’s favorite earrings, the Vicks jar, a brassiere for each
one.
And then we hear a car coming down the drive. At
our spying jalousie—as we called that front window—I recognize the
man who delivers the telegrams. I say to Mamá, wait here, let me go
see what he wants. I walk quickly up the drive to stop that man
from coming any closer to the house, now that we had finally gotten
the children calmed down.
“We’ve been calling. We couldn’t get through. The
phone, it’s off the hook or something.” He is delaying, I can see
that. Finally he hands me the little envelope with the window, and
then he gives me his back because a man can’t be seen crying.
I tear it open, I pull out the yellow sheet, I
read each word.
I walk back so slowly to the house I don’t know
how I ever get there.
Mama comes to the door, and I say, Mamá, there is
no need for the bag.
At first the guards posted outside the morgue
did not want to let me in. I was not the closest living relative,
they said. I said to the guards, “I’m going in there, even if I
have to be the latest dead relative. Kill me, too, if you want. I
don’t care.”
The guards stepped back. “Ay, Dedé,” the friends
will say, “you should have seen yourself.”
I cannot remember half the things I cried out
when I saw them. Rufino and Minerva were on gumeys, Patria and Mate
on mats on the floor. I was furious that they didn’t all have
gumeys, as if it should matter to them. I remember Jaimito trying
to hush me, one of the doctors coming in with a sedative and a
glass of water. I remember asking the men to leave while I washed
up my girls, and dressed them. A nurse helped me, crying, too. She
brought me some little scissors to cut off Mate’s braid. I cannot
imagine why in a place with so many sharp instruments for cutting
bones and thick tissues, that woman brought me such teeny nail
scissors. Maybe she was afraid what I would do with something
sharper.
Then some friends who had heard the news appeared
with four boxes, plain simple pine without even a latch. The tops
were just nailed down. Later, Don Gustavo at the funeral parlor
wanted us to switch them into something fancy. For the girls,
anyhow. Pine was appropriate enough for a chauffeur.
I remembered Papá’s prediction, Dedé will bury
us all in silk and pearls.
But I said no. They all died the same, let them
all be buried the same.
We stacked the four boxes in the back of the
pickup.
We drove them home through the towns slowly. I
didn’t want to come inside the cab with Jaimito. I stayed out back
with my sisters, and Rufino, standing proud beside them, holding on
to the coffins whenever we hit a bump.
People came out of their houses. They had already
heard the story we were to pretend to believe. The Jeep had gone
off the cliff on a bad turn. But their faces knew the truth. Many
of the men took off their hats, the women made the sign of the
cross. They stood at the very edge of the road, and when the truck
went by, they threw flowers into the bed. By the time we reached
Conuco, you couldn’t see the boxes for the wilting blossoms
blanketing them.
When we got to the SIM post at the first little
town, I cried out, “Assassins! Assassins!”
Jaimito gunned the motor to drown out my cries.
When I did it again at the next town, he pulled over and came to
the back of the pickup. He made me sit down on one of the boxes.
“Dedé, mujer, what is it you want—to get yourself killed,
too?”
I nodded. I said, “I want to be with them.”
He said—I remember it so clearly—he said, “This
is your martyrdom, Dede, to be alive without them.”
“What are you thinking, Mama Dedé?” Minou has
come to the window. With her arms folded on the sill, she looks
like a picture.
I smile at her and say, “Look at that moon.” It
is not a remarkable moon, waning, hazy in the cloudy night. But as
far as I’m concerned, a moon is a moon, and they all bear
remarking. Like babies, even homely ones, each a blessing, each one
born with—as Mama used to say—its loaf of bread under its
arm.
“Tell me about Camila,” I ask her. “Has she
finished growing that new tooth?”
With first-time-mother exactitude Minou tells me
everything, down to how her little girl feeds, sleeps, plays,
poops.
Later the husbands told me their stories of that
last afternoon. How they tried to convince the girls not to go. How
Minerva refused to stay over with friends until the next morning.
“It was the one argument she should have lost,” Manolo said. He
would stand by the porch rail there for a long time, in those dark
glasses he was always wearing afterwards. And I would leave him to
his grief.
This was after he got out. After he was famous
and riding around with bodyguards in that white Thunderbird some
admirer had given him. Most likely a woman. Our Fidel, our Fidel,
everyone said. He refused to run for president for those first
elections. He was no politician, he said. But everywhere he went,
Manolo drew adoring crowds.
He and Leandro were transferred back to the
capital the Monday following the murder. No explanation. At La
Victoria, they rejoined Pedrito, the three of them alone in one
cell. They were extremely nervous, waiting for Thursday visiting
hours to find out what was going on. “You had no idea?” I asked
Manolo once. He turned around right there, with that oleander
framing him. Minerva had planted it years back when she was cooped
up here, wanting to get out and live the bigger version of her
life. He took off those glasses, and it seemed to me that for the
first time I saw the depth of his grief.
“I probably knew, but in prison, you can’t let
yourself know what you know.” His hands clenched the porch rail
there. I could see he was wearing his class ring again, the one
that had been on Minerva’s hand.
Manolo tells how that Thursday they were taken
out of their cell and marched down the hall. For a brief moment
they were hopeful that the girls were all right after all. But
instead of the visitors’ room, they were led downstairs to the
officers’ lounge. Johnny Abbes and Cándido Torres and other top SIM
cronies were waiting, already quite drunk. This was going to be a
special treat, by invitation only, a torture session of an unusual
nature, giving the men the news.
I didn’t want to listen anymore. But I made
myself listen—it was as if Manolo had to say it and I had to hear
it—so that it could be human, so that we could begin to forgive
it.
There are pictures of me at that time where even
I can’t pick myself out. Thin like my little finger. A twin of my
skinny Noris. My hair cropped short like Minerva’s was that last
year, held back by bobby pins. Some baby or other in my arms,
another one tugging at my dress. And you never see me looking at
the camera. Always I am looking away.
But slowly—how does it happen?—I came back from
the dead. In a photo I have of the day our new president came to
visit the monument, I’m standing in front of the house, all made
up, my hair in a bouffant style. Jacqueline is in my arms, already
four years old. Both of us are waving little flags.
Afterwards, the president dropped in for a visit.
He sat right there in Papa’s old rocker, drinking a frozen
limonada, telling me his story. He was going to do all sorts
of things, he told me. He was going to get rid of the old generals
with their hands still dirty with Mirabal blood. All those
properties they had stolen he was going to distribute among the
poor. He was going to make us a nation proud of ourselves, not run
by the Yanqui imperialists.
Every time he made one of these promises, he’d
look at me as if he needed me to approve what he was doing. Or
really, not me, but my sisters whose pictures hung on the wall
behind me. Those photos had become icons, emblazoned on
posters—already collectors’ pieces. Bring back the
butterflies!
At the end, as he was leaving, the president
recited a poem he’d composed on the ride up from the capital. It
was something patriotic about how when you die for your country,
you do not die in vain. He was a poet president, and from time to
time Manolo would say, “Ay, if Minerva had lived to see
this.” And I started to think, maybe it was for something that the
girls had died.
Then it was like a manageable grief inside me.
Something I could bear because I could make sense of it. Like when
the doctor explained how if one breast came off, the rest of me had
a better chance. Immediately, I began to live without it, even
before it was gone.
I set aside my grief and began hoping and
planning.
When it all came down a second time, I shut the
door. I did not receive any more visitors. Anyone had a story, go
sell it to Vanidades, go on the Talk to Felix Show.
Tell them how you felt about the coup, the president thrown out
before the year was over, the rebels up in the mountains, the civil
war, the landing of the marines.
I overheard one of the talk shows on the radio
Tinita kept turned on in the outdoor kitchen all the time. Somebody
analyzing the situation. He said something that made me stop and
listen.
“Dictatorships,” he was saying, “are pantheistic.
The dictator manages to plant a little piece of himself in every
one of us.”
Ah, I thought, touching the place above my heart
where I did not yet know the cells were multiplying like crazy. So
this is what is happening to us.
Manolo’s voice sounds blurry on the memorial
tape the radio station sent me, In memory of our great hero.
When you die for your country, you do not die in vain.
It is his last broadcast from a hidden spot in
the mountains. “Fellow Dominicans!” he declaims in a grainy voice.
“We must not let another dictatorship rule us!” Then something else
lost in static. Finally, “Rise up, take to the streets! Join my
comrades and me in the mountains! When you die for your country,
you do not die in vain!”
But no one joined them. After forty days of
bombing, they accepted the broadcast amnesty. They came down from
the mountains with their hands up, and the generals gunned them
down, every one.
I was the one who received the seashell Manolo
sent Minou on his last day. In its smooth bowl he had etched with a
penknife, For my little Minou, at the end of a great
adventure, then the date he was murdered, December 21, 1963. I
was furious at his last message. What did he mean, a great
adventure. A disgrace was more like it.
I didn’t give it to her. In fact, for a while, I
kept his death a secret from her. When she’d ask, I’d tell her,
“Sí, si, Papi is up in the mountains fighting for a
better world.” And then, you see, after about a year or so of that
story it was an easy next step for him to be up in heaven with her
Mami and her Tía Patria and her Tía Mate living in a better
world.
She looked at me when I told her this—she must
have been eight by then—and her little face went very serious.
“Mamá Dedé,” she asked, ”is Papi dead?“
I gave her the shell so she could read his
goodbye for herself.
“That was a funny woman,” Minou is saying. “At
first I thought you were friends or something. Where did you pick
her up, Mama Dedé?”
“Me? Pick her up! You seem to forget, mi
amor, that the museum is just five minutes away and everyone
shows up there wanting to hear the story, firsthand.” I am rocking
harder as I explain, getting angrier. Everyone feels they can
impose. The Belgian movie maker who had me pose with the girls’
photos in my hands; the Chilean woman writing a book about women
and politics; the schoolchildren who want me to hold up the braid
and tell them why I cut it off in the first place.
“But, Mama Dedé,” Minou says. She is sitting on
the sill now, peering out from her lighted room into the
galería whose lights I’ve turned off against the mosquitoes.
“Why don’t you just refuse. We’ll put the story on cassette, a
hundred and fifty pesos, with a signed glossy photograph thrown in
for free.”
“Why, Minou, the idea!” To make our
tragedy—because it is our tragedy, really, the whole country‘s—to
make it into a money-making enterprise. But I see she is laughing,
enjoying the deliciously sacrilegious thought. I laugh, too. “The
day I get tired of doing it, I suppose I’ll stop.”
My rocking eases, calmed. Of course, I think, I
can always stop.
“When will that be, Mamá Dedé, when will you have
given enough?”
When did it turn, I wonder, from my being the
one who listened to the stories people brought to being the one
whom people came to for the story of the Mirabal sisters?
When, in other words, did I become the
oracle?
My girlfriend Olga and I will sometimes get
together for supper at a restaurant. We can do this for ourselves,
we tell each other, like we don’t half believe it. Two divorced
mujeronas trying to catch up with what our children call
the modern times. With her I can talk over these things.
I’ve asked her, what does she think.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Olga says. We are
at El Almirante, where—we have decided—the waiters must be retired
functionaries from the old Trujillo days. They are so
self-important and ceremonious. But they do let two women dine
alone in peace.
“I think you deserve your very own life,” she is
saying, waving my protest away. “Let me finish. You’re still living
in the past, Dedé. You’re in the same old house, surrounded by the
same old things, in the same little village, with all the people
who have known you since you were this big.”
She goes over all these things that supposedly
keep me from living my own life. And I am thinking, Why, I wouldn’t
give them up for the world. I’d rather be dead.
“It’s still 1960 for you,” she concludes. “But
this is 1994, Dedé, 1994!”
“You’re wrong,” I tell her. “I’m not stuck in the
past, I’ve just brought it with me into the present. And the
problem is not enough of us have done that. What is that thing the
gringos say, if you don’t study your history, you are going to
repeat it?”
Olga waves the theory away. “The gringos say too
many things.”
“And many of them true,” I tell her. “Many of
them.” Minou has accused me of being pro-Yanqui. And I tell her, “I
am pro whoever is right at any moment in time.”
Olga sighs. I already know. Politics do not
interest her.
I change the subject back to what the subject
was. “Besides, that’s not what I asked you. We were talking about
when I became the oracle instead of the listener.”
“Hmm,” she says. “I’m thinking, I’m
thinking.”
So I tell her what I think.
“After the fighting was over and we were a broken
people”—she shakes her head sadly at this portrait of our recent
times—“that’s when I opened my doors, and instead of listening, I
started talking. We had lost hope, and we needed a story to
understand what had happened to us.”
Olga sits back, her face attentive, as if she
were listening to someone preach something she believes. “That’s
really good, Dedé,” she says when I finish. ”You should save that
for November when you have to give that speech.“
I hear Minou dialing, putting in a call to
Doroteo, their goodnight tête-à-tête, catching up on all the little
news of their separated hours. If I go in now, she’ll feel she has
to cut it short and talk to her Mamá Dedé instead.
And so I come stand by the porch rail, and the
minute I do, of course, I can’t help thinking of Manolo and of
Minerva before him. We had this game called Dark Passages when we
were children. We would dare each other to walk down into the dark
garden at night. I only got past this rail once or twice. But
Minerva, she’d take off, so that we’d have to call and call,
pleading for her to come back. I remember, though, how she would
stand right here for a moment, squaring her shoulders, steeling
herself. I could see it wasn’t so easy for her either.
And when she was older, every time she got upset,
she would stand at this same rail. She’d look out into the garden
as if that dark tangle of vegetation were the new life or question
before her.
Absently, my hand travels to my foam breast and
presses gently, worrying an absence there.
“Mi amor,” I hear Minou say in the background,
and I feel goose bumps all up and down my arms. She sounds so much
like her mother. “How’s our darling? Did you take her to Helados
Bon?”
I walk off the porch onto the grass, so as not to
overhear her conversation, or so I tell myself. For a moment I want
to disappear. My legs brushing fragrances off the vague bushes, the
dark growing deeper as I walk away from the lights of the
house.
The losses. I can count them up like the list
the coroner gave us, taped to the box of things that had been found
on their persons or retrieved from the wreck. The silliest things,
but they gave me some comfort. I would say them like a catechism,
like the girls used to tease and recite “the commandments” of their
house arrest.
One pink powder puff.
One pair of red high-heeled shoes.
The two-inch heel from a cream-colored
shoe.
Jaimito went away for a time to New York. Our
harvests had failed again, and it looked as if we were going to
lose our lands if we didn’t get some cash quick. So he got work in
a factoria, and every month, he sent home money. I am
ashamed after what came to pass to say so. But it was gringo
dollars that saved our farm from going under.
And when he came back, he was a different man.
Rather, he was more who he was. I had become more who I was, too,
locked up, as I said, with Mamá and the children my only company.
And so, though we lived under the same roof until after Mama died,
to spare her another sadness, we had already started on our
separate lives.
One screwdriver.
One brown leather purse.
One red patent leather purse with straps
missing.
One pair of yellow nylon underwear.
One pocket mirror.
Four lottery tickets.
We scattered as a family, the men, and later the
children, going their separate ways.
First, Manolo, dead within three years of
Minerva.
Then Pedrito. He had gotten his lands back, but
prison and his losses had changed him. He was restless, couldn’t
settle down to the old life. He remarried a young girl, and the new
woman turned him around, or so Mamá thought. He came by a lot less
and then hardly at all. How all of that, beginning with the young
girl, would have hurt poor Patria.
And Leandro. While Manolo was alive, Leandro was
by his side, day and night. But when Manolo took off to the
mountains, Leandro stayed home. Maybe he sensed a trap, maybe
Manolo had become too radical for Leandro, I don’t know. After
Manolo died, Leandro got out of politics. Became a big builder in
the capital. Sometimes when we’re driving through the capital,
Jacqueline points out one impressive building or another and says,
“Papá built that.” She is less ready to talk about the second wife,
the new, engrossing family, stepbrothers and sisters the age of her
own little one.
One receipt from El Gallo.
One missal held together with a rubber
band.
One man’s wallet, 56 centavos in the
pocket.
Seven rings, three plain gold bands, one gold
with a small diamond stone, one gold with an opal and four pearls,
one man’s ring with garnet and eagle insignia, one silver initial
ring.
One scapular of our Lady of Sorrows.
One Saint Christopher’s medal.
Mama hung on twenty years. Every day I wasn’t
staying over, I visited her first thing in the morning and always
with an orchid from my garden for the girls. We raised the children
between us. Minou and Manolito and Raulito, she kept. Jacqueline
and Nelson and Noris were with me. Don’t ask me why we divided them
that way. We didn’t really. They would wander from house to house,
they had their seasons, but I’m talking about where they most often
slept.
What a time Mama had with those teenage
granddaughters. She wanted them locked up like nuns in a convent,
she was always so afraid. And Minou certainly kept her—and me—in
worries. She took off, a young sixteen-year-old, by herself to
study in Canada. Then it was Cuba for several years. ¡Ay,
Dios! We pinned enough Virgencitas and azabaches and
hung enough scapulars around that girl’s neck to charm away the men
who were always wanting to get their hands on that young
beauty.
I remember Minou telling me about the first time
she and Doroteo “got involved”—what she called it. I imagined, of
course, the bedside scene behind the curtain of that euphemism. He
stood with his hands under his arms as if he were not going to give
in to her charms. Finally, she said, “Doroteo, what’s wrong?” And
Doroteo said, “I feel like I’d be desecrating the flag.”
He had a point there. Imagine, the daughter of
two national heroes. All I said to Minou was “I like that young
man.”
But not Mama. “Be smart like your mother,” she
kept saying. “Study and marry when you’re older.” And all I could
think of was the hard time Mama had given Minerva when she had done
just that!
Poor Mamá, living to see the end of so many
things, including her own ideas. Twenty years, like I said, she
hung on. She was waiting until her granddaughters were past the
dangerous stretch of their teen years before she left them to fend
for themselves.
And then fourteen years ago this last January, I
came into her bedroom one morning, and she was lying with her hands
at her waist, holding her rosary, quiet, as if she were praying. I
checked to make sure she was gone. It was strange how this did not
seem a real death, so unlike the others, quiet, without rage or
violence.
I put the orchid I had brought the girls in her
hands. I knew that, unless my destiny was truly accursed and I
survived my children, this was the last big loss I would have to
suffer. There was no one between me and the dark passage ahead—I
was next.
The complete list of losses. There they
are.
And it helps, I’ve found, if I can count them
off, so to speak. And sometimes when I’m doing that, I think, Maybe
these aren’t losses. Maybe that’s a wrong way to think of them. The
men, the children, me. We went our own ways, we became ourselves.
Just that. And maybe that is what it means to be a free people, and
I should be glad?
Not long ago, I met Lio at a reception in honor
of the girls. Despite what Minou thinks, I don’t like these things.
But I always make myself go.
Only if I know he will be there, I won’t go. I
mean our current president who was the puppet president the day the
girls were killed. “Ay, Dedé,” acquaintances will sometimes try to
convince me. “Put that behind you. He’s an old, blind man
now.”
“He was blind when he could see,” I’ll snap. Oh,
but my blood bums just thinking of shaking that spotted hand.
But most things I go to. “For the girls,” I
always tell myself.
Sometimes I allow myself a shot of rum before
climbing into the car, not enough to scent the slightest scandal,
just a little thunder in the heart. People will be asking things,
well meaning but nevertheless poking their fingers where it still
hurts. People who kept their mouths shut when a little peep from
everyone would have been a chorus the world couldn’t have ignored.
People who once were friends of the devil. Everyone got amnesty by
telling on everyone else until we were all one big rotten family of
cowards.
So I allow myself my shot of rum.
At these things, I always try to position myself
near the door so I can leave early. And there I was about to slip
away when an older man approached me. On his arm was a handsome
woman with an open, friendly face. This old fool is no fool, I’m
thinking. He has got himself his young nurse wife for his old
age.
I put out my hand, just a reception line habit, I
guess. And this man reaches out both hands and clasps mine. “Dedé,
caramba, don’t you know who I am?” He holds on tight, and the young
woman is beaming beside him. I look again.
“iDios santo, Lío!” And suddenly, I
have to sit down.
The wife gets us both drinks and leaves us alone.
We catch up, back and forth, my children, his children; the
insurance business, his practice in the capital; the old house I
still live in, his new house near the old presidential palace.
Slowly, we are working our way towards that treacherous past, the
horrible crime, the waste of young lives, the throbbing heart of
the wound.
“Ay, Lío,” I say, when we get to that part.
And bless his heart, he takes my hands and says,
“The nightmare is over, Dedé. Look at what the girls have done.” He
gestures expansively.
He means the free elections, bad presidents now
put in power properly, not by army tanks. He means our country
beginning to prosper, Free Zones going up everywhere, the coast a
clutter of clubs and resorts. We are now the playground of the
Caribbean, who were once its killing fields. The cemetery is
beginning to flower.
“Ay, Lío,” I say it again.
I follow his gaze around the room. Most of the
guests here are young. The boy-businessmen with computerized
watches and walkie-talkies in their wives’ purses to summon the
chauffeur from the car; their glamorous young wives with degrees
they do not need; the scent of perfume; the tinkle of keys to the
things they own.
“Oh yes,” I hear one of the women say “we spent a
revolution there.”
I can see them glancing at us, the two old ones,
how sweet they look under that painting of Bido. To them we are
characters in a sad story about a past that is over.
All the way home, I am trembling, I am not sure
why.
It comes to me slowly as I head north through the
dark countryside-the only lights are up in the mountains where the
prosperous young are building their getaway houses, and of course,
in the sky, all the splurged wattage of the stars. Lío is right.
The nightmare is over; we are free at last. But the thing that is
making me tremble, that I do not want to say out loud-and I’ll say
it once only and it’s done.
Was it for this, the sacrifice of the
butterflies?
“Mamá Dedé! Where are you?” Minou must be off
the phone. Her voice has that exasperated edge our children get
when we dare wander from their lives. Why aren’t you where I
left you? “Mamá Dedé!”
I stop in the dark depths of the garden as if
I’ve been caught about to do something wrong. I turn around. I see
the house as I saw it once or twice as a child: the roof with its
fairytale peak, the verandah running along three sides, the windows
lighted up, glowing with lived life, a place of abundance, a magic
place of memory and desire. And quickly I head back, a moth
attracted to that marvelous light.
I tuck her in bed and turn off her light and
stay a while and talk in the dark.
She tells me all the news of what Camila did
today. Of Doroteo’s businesses, of their plans to build a house up
north in those beautiful mountains.
I am glad it is dark, so she cannot see my face
when she says this. Up north in those beautiful mountains where
both your mother and father were murdered!
But all this is a sign of my success, isn’t it?
She’s not haunted and full of hate. She claims it, this beautiful
country with its beautiful mountains and splendid beaches—all the
copy we read in the tourist brochures.
We make our plans for tomorrow. We’ll go on a
little outing to Santiago where I’ll help her pick up some fabrics
at El Gallo. They’re having a big sale before they close the old
doors and open under new management. A chain of El Gallos is going
up all over the island with attendants in rooster-red uniforms and
registers that announce how much you are spending. Then we’ll go to
the museum where Minou can get some cuttings from Tono for the
atrium in her apartment. Maybe Jaime David can have lunch with us.
The big important senator from Salcedo better have time for her,
Minou warns me.
Fela’s name comes up. “Mamá Dedé, what do you
think it means that the girls might finally be at rest?”
That is not a good question for going to bed, I
think. Like bringing up a divorce or a personal problem on a
postcard. So I give her the brief, easy answer. “That we can let
them go, I suppose.”
Thank God, she is so tired and does not push me
to say more.
Some nights when I cannot sleep, I lie in bed
and play that game Minerva taught me, going back in my memory to
this or that happy moment. But I’ve been doing that all afternoon.
So tonight I start thinking of what lies ahead instead.
Specifically, the prize trip I’ve as good as won
again this year.
The boss has been dropping hints. “You know,
Dedé, the tourist brochures are right. We have a beautiful paradise
right here. There’s no need to travel far to have a good
time.”
Trying to get by cheap this year!
But if I’ve won the prize trip again, I’m going
to push for what I want. I’m going to say, “I want to go to Canada
to see the leaves.”
“The leaves?” I can just see the boss making his
professional face of polite shock. It’s the one he uses on all the
tutumpotes when they come in wanting to buy the cheaper
policies. Surely your life is worth a lot more, Don
Fulano.
“Yes,” I’ll say, “leaves. I want to see the
leaves.” But I’m not going to tell him why. The Canadian man I met
in Barcelona, on last year’s prize trip, told me about how they
turn red and gold. He took my hand in his, as if it were a leaf,
spreading out the fingers. He pointed out this and that line in my
palm. “Sugar concentrates in the veins.” I felt my resolve to keep
my distance melting down like the sugar in those leaves. My face I
knew was burning.
“It is the sweetness in them that makes them
burn,” he said, looking me in the eye, then smiling. He knew an
adequate Spanish, good enough for what he had to say. But I was too
scared yet to walk into my life that bold way. When he finished the
demonstration, I took back my hand.
But already in my memory, it has happened and I
am standing under those blazing trees—flamboyants in bloom in my
imagination, not having seen those sugar maples he spoke of. He is
snapping a picture for me to bring back to the children to prove
that it happens, yes, even to their old Mama Dedé.
It is the sweetness in them that makes them
burn.
Usually, at night, I hear them just as I’m
falling asleep.
Sometimes, I lie at the very brink of
forgetfulness, waiting, as if their arrival is my signal that I can
fall asleep.
The settling of the wood floors, the wind astir
in the jasmine, the deep released fragrance of the earth, the crow
of an insomniac rooster.
Their soft spirit footsteps, so vague I could
mistake them for my own breathing.
Their different treads, as if even as spirits
they retained their personalities, Patria’s sure and measured step,
Minerva’s quicksilver impatience, Mate’s playful little skip. They
linger and loiter over things. Tonight, no doubt, Minerva will sit
a long while by her Minou and absorb the music of her
breathing.
Some nights I’ll be worrying about something, and
I’ll stay up past their approaching, and I’ll hear something else.
An eerie, hair-raising creaking of riding boots, a crop striking
leather, a peremptory footstep that makes me shake myself awake and
turn on lights all over the house. The only sure way to send the
evil thing packing.
But tonight, it is quieter than I can
remember.
Concentrate, Dedé, I say. My hand worries the
absence on my left side, a habitual gesture now. My pledge of
allegiance, I call it, to all that is missing. Under my fingers, my
heart is beating like a moth wild in a lamp shade. Dedé,
concentrate!
But all I hear is my own breathing and the
blessed silence of those cool, clear nights under the anacahuita
tree before anyone breathes a word of the future. And I see them
all there in my memory, as still as statues, Mamá and Papá, and
Minerva and Mate and Patria, and I’m thinking something is missing
now. And I count them all twice before I realize-it’s me, Dedé,
it’s me, the one who survived to tell the story.