CHAPTER TWO
Minerva
1938, 1941, 1944
Complications
1938
1938
I don’t know who talked Papá into sending us away
to school. Seems like it would have taken the same angel who
announced to Mary that she was pregnant with God and got her to be
glad about it.
The four of us had to ask permission for
everything: to walk to the fields to see the tobacco filling out;
to go to the lagoon and dip our feet on a hot day; to stand in
front of the store and pet the horses as the men loaded up their
wagons with supplies.
Sometimes, watching the rabbits in their pens, I’d
think, I’m no different from you, poor things. One time, I opened a
cage to set a half-grown doe free. I even gave her a slap to get
her going.
But she wouldn’t budge! She was used to her little
pen. I kept slapping her, harder each time, until she started
whimpering like a scared child. I was the one hurting her,
insisting she be free.
Silly bunny, I thought. You’re nothing at all like
me.
It started with Patria wanting to be a nun. Mamá
was all for having a religious in the family, but Papá did not
approve in the least. More than once, he said that Patria as a nun
would be a waste of a pretty girl. He only said that once in front
of Mamá, but he repeated it often enough to me.
Finally, Papá gave in to Mamá. He said Patria could
go away to a convent school if it wasn’t one just for becoming a
nun. Mamá agreed.
So, when it came time for Patria to go down to
Inmaculada Concepción, I asked Papa if I could go along. That way I
could chaperone my older sister, who was already a grown-up
señorita. (And she had told me all about how girls become
senoritas, too.)
Papa laughed, his eyes flashing proudly at me. The
others said I was his favorite. I don’t know why since I was the
one always standing up to him. He pulled me to his lap and said,
“And who is going to chaperone you?”
“Dedé,” I said, so all three of us could go
together. He pulled a long face. “If all my little chickens go,
what will become of me?”
I thought he was joking, but his eyes had their
serious look. “Papá,” I informed him, “you might as well get used
to it. In a few years, we’re all going to marry and leave
you.”
For days he quoted me, shaking his head sadly and
concluding, “A daughter is a needle in the heart.”
Mama didn’t like him saying so. She thought he was
being critical because their only son had died a week after he was
born. And just three years ago, Maria Teresa was bom a girl instead
of a boy. Anyhow, Mama didn’t think it was a bad idea to send all
three of us away. “Enrique, those girls need some learning. Look at
us.” Mamá had never admitted it, but I suspected she couldn’t even
read.
“What’s wrong with us?” Papá countered, gesturing
out the window where wagons waited to be loaded before his
warehouses. In the last few years, Papá had made a lot of money
from his farm. Now we had class. And, Mama argued, we needed the
education to go along with our cash.
Papa caved in again, but said one of us had to stay
to help mind the store. He always had to add a little something to
whatever Mamá came up with. Mama said he was just putting his mark
on everything so no one could say Enrique Mirabal didn’t wear the
pants in his family.
I knew what he was up to all right. When Papa asked
which one of us would stay as his little helper, he looked directly
at me.
I didn’t say a word. I kept studying the floor like
maybe my school lessons were chalked on those boards. I didn’t need
to worry. Dedé always was the smiling little miss. “I’ll stay and
help, Papá.”
Papá looked surprised because really Dedé was a
year older than me. She and Patria should have been the two to go
away. But then, Papá thought it over and said Dedé could go along,
too. So it was settled, all three of us would go to Inmaculada
Concepción. Me and Patria would start in the fall, and Dedé would
follow in January since Papá wanted the math whiz to help with the
books during the busy harvest season.
And that’s how I got free. I don’t mean just going
to sleepaway school on a train with a trunkful of new things. I
mean in my head after I got to Inmaculada and met Sinita and saw
what happened to Lina and realized that I’d just left a small cage
to go into a bigger one, the size of our whole country.
First time I met Sinita she was sitting in the
parlor where Sor Asunción was greeting all the new pupils and their
mothers. She was all by herself, a skinny girl with a sour look on
her face and pokey elbows to match. She was dressed in black, which
was odd as most children weren’t put in mourning clothes until they
were at least fifteen. And this little girl didn’t look any older
than me, and I was only twelve. Though I would have argued with
anyone who told me I was just a kid!
I watched her. She seemed as bored as I was with
all the polite talk in that parlor. It was like a heavy shaking of
talcum powder in the brain hearing all those mothers complimenting
each other’s daughters and lisping back in good Castilian to the
Sisters of the Merciful Mother. Where was this girl’s mother? I
wondered. She sat alone, glaring at everybody, as if she would pick
a fight if you asked her where her mother was. I could see, though,
that she was sitting on her hands and biting her bottom lip so as
not to cry. The straps on her shoes had been cut off to look like
flats, but they looked worn out, was what they looked like.
I got up and pretended to study the pictures on the
walls like I was a lover of religious art. When I got to the
Merciful Mother right above Sinita’s head, I reached in my pocket
and pulled out the button I’d found on the train. It was sparkly
like a diamond and had a little hole in back so you could thread a
ribbon through it and wear it like a romantic lady’s choker
necklace. It wasn’t something I’d do, but I could see the button
would make a good trade with someone inclined in that
direction.
I held it out to her. I didn’t know what to say,
and it probably wouldn’t have helped anyway. She picked it up,
turned it all around, and then set it back down in my palm. “I
don’t want your charity.”
I felt an angry tightness in my chest. “It’s just a
friendship button.”
She looked at me a moment, a deciding look like she
couldn’t be sure of anybody. “Why didn’t you just say so?” She
grinned as if we were already friends and could tease each
other.
“I did just say so,” I said. I opened up my hand
and offered her the button again. This time she took it.
After our mothers left, we stood on line while a
list was made of everything in our bags. I noticed that along with
not having a mother to bring her, Sinita didn’t own much either.
Everything she had was tied up in a bundle, and when Sor Milagros
wrote it out, all it took was a couple of lines: 3 change of
underwear, 4 pair of socks, brush and comb, towel and
nightdress. Sinita offered the sparkly button, but Sor Milagros
said it wasn’t necessary to write that down.
“Charity student,” the gossip went round. “So?” I
challenged the giggly girl with curls like hiccups, who whispered
it to me. She shut up real quick. It made me glad all over again
I’d given Sinita that button.
Afterwards, we were taken into an assembly hall and
given all sorts of welcomes. Then Sor Milagros, who was in charge
of the tens through twelves, took our smaller group upstairs into
the dormitory hall we would share. Our side-by-side beds were
already set up for the night with mosquito nets. It looked like a
room of little bridal veils.
Sor Milagros said she would now assign us our beds
according to our last names. Sinita raised her hand and asked if
her bed couldn’t be next to mine. Sor Milagros hesitated, but then
a sweet look came on her face. Sure, she said. But when some other
girls asked, she said no. I spoke right up, “I don’t think it’s
fair if you just make an exception for us.”
Sor Milagros looked mighty surprised. I suppose
being a nun and all, not many people told her what was wrong and
right. Suddenly, it struck me, too, that this plump little nun with
a bit of her gray hair showing under her headdress wasn’t Mamá or
Papá I could argue things with. I was on the point of apologizing,
but Sor Milagros just smiled her gap-toothed smile and said, “All
right, I’ll allow you all to choose your own beds. But at the first
sign of argument”—some of the girls had already sprung towards the
best beds by the window and were fighting about who got there
first—“we’ll go back to alphabetical. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Sor Milagros,” we chorused.
She came up to me and took my face in her hands.
“What’s your name?” she wanted to know.
I gave her my name, and she repeated it several
times like she was tasting it. Then she smiled like it tasted just
fine. She looked over at Sinita, whom they all seemed partial to,
and said, “Take care of our dear Sinita.”
“I will,” I said, standing up straight like I’d
been given a mission. And that’s what it turned out to be, all
right.
A few days later, Sor Milagros gathered us all
around for a little talk. Personal hygiene, she called it. I knew
right away it would be about interesting things described in the
most uninteresting way.
First, she said there had been some accidents.
Anyone needing a canvas sheet should come see her. Of course, the
best way to prevent a mishap was to be sure to visit our chamber
pots every night before we got in bed. Any questions?
Not a one.
Then, a shy, embarrassed look came on her face. She
explained that we might very well become young ladies while we were
at school this year. She went through a most tangled-up explanation
about the how and why, and finished by saying if we should start
our complications, we should come see her. This time she didn’t ask
if there were any questions.
I felt like setting her straight, explaining things
simply the way Patria had explained them to me. But I guessed it
wasn’t a good idea to try my luck twice in the first week.
When she left, Sinita asked me if I understood what
on earth Sor Milagros had been talking about. I looked at her
surprised. Here she’d been dressed in black like a grownup young
lady, and she didn’t know the first thing. Right then, I told
Sinita everything I knew about bleeding and having babies between
your legs. She was pretty shocked, and beholden. She offered to
trade me back the secret of Trujillo.
“What secret is that?” I asked her. I thought
Patria had told me all the secrets.
“Not yet,” Sinita said looking over her
shoulder.
It was a couple of weeks before Sinita got to her
secret. I’d forgotten about it, or maybe I’d just put it out of my
mind, a little scared what I might find out. We were busy with
classes and making new friends. Almost every night someone or other
came visiting under our mosquito nets or we visited them. We had
two regulars, Lourdes and Elsa, and soon all four of us started
doing everything together. It seemed like we were all just a little
different—Sinita was charity and you could tell; Lourdes was fat,
though as friends we called her pleasantly plump when she asked,
and she asked a lot; Elsa was pretty in an I-told-you-so way, as if
she hadn’t expected to turn out pretty and now she had to prove it.
And me, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut when I had something to
say.
The night Sinita told me the secret of Trujillo I
couldn’t sleep. All day I hadn’t felt right, but I didn’t tell Sor
Milagros. I was afraid she’d stick me in the sickroom and I’d have
to lie in bed, listening to Sor Consuelo reading novenas for the
sick and dying. Also, if Papa found out, he might change his mind
and keep me home where I couldn’t have any adventures.
I was lying on my back, looking up into the white
tent of the mosquito net, and wondering who else was awake. In her
bed next to mine, Sinita began to cry very quietly as if she didn’t
want anybody to know. I waited a little, but she didn’t stop.
Finally, I stepped over to her bed and lifted the netting. “What’s
wrong?” I whispered.
She took a second to calm down before she answered.
“It’s José Luis.”
“Your brother?” We all knew he had died just this
last summer. That’s how come Sinita had been wearing black that
first day.
Her body began to shake all over with sobs. I
crawled in and stroked her hair like Mama did mine whenever I had a
fever. “Tell me, Sinita, maybe it’ll help.”
“I can‘t,” she whispered. “We can all be killed.
It’s the secret of Trujillo.”
Well, all I had to be told was I couldn’t know
something for me to have to know it. So I reminded her, “Come on,
Sinita. I told you about babies.”
It took some coaxing, but finally she began.
She told me stuff I didn’t even know about her. I
thought she was always poor, but it turned out her family used to
be rich and important. Three of her uncles were even friends of
Trujillo. But they turned against him when they saw he was doing
bad things.
“Bad things?” I interrupted. “Trujillo was doing
bad things?” It was as if I had just heard Jesus had slapped a baby
or Our Blessed Mother had not conceived Him the immaculate
conception way. “That can’t be true,” I said, but in my heart, I
felt a china-crack of doubt.
“Wait,” Sinita whispered, her thin fingers finding
my mouth in the dark. “Let me finish.
“My uncles, they had a plan to do something to
Trujillo, but somebody told on them, and all three were shot, right
on the spot.” Sinita took a deep breath as if she were going to
blow out all her grandmother’s birthday candles.
“But what bad things was Trujillo doing that they
wanted to kill him?” I asked again. I couldn’t leave it alone. At
home, Trujillo hung on the wall by the picture of Our Lord Jesus
with a whole flock of the cutest lambs.
Sinita told me as much as she knew. I was shaking
by the time she was through.
According to Sinita, Trujillo became president in
a sneaky way. First, he was in the army, and all the people who
were above him kept disappearing until he was the one right below
the head of the whole armed forces.
This man who was the head general had fallen in
love with another man’s wife. Trujillo was his friend and so he
knew all about this secret. The woman’s husband was a very jealous
man, and Trujillo made friends with him, too.
One day, the general told Trujillo he was going to
be meeting this woman that very night under the bridge in Santiago
where people meet to do bad things. So Trujillo went and told the
husband, who waited under the bridge for his wife and this general
and shot them both dead.
Very soon after that, Trujillo became head of the
armed forces.
“Maybe Trujillo thought that general was doing a
bad thing by fooling around with somebody else’s wife,” I defended
him.
I heard Sinita sigh. “Just wait,” she said, “before
you decide.”
After Trujillo became the head of the army, he got
to talking to some people who didn’t like the old president. One
night, these people surrounded the palace and told the old
president that he had to leave. The old president just laughed and
sent for his good friend, the head of the armed forces. But General
Trujillo didn’t come and didn’t come. Soon, the old president was
the ex-president on an airplane to Puerto Rico. Then, something
that surprised even the people who had surrounded the palace,
Trujillo announced he was the president.
“Didn’t anyone tell him that wasn’t right?” I
asked, knowing I would have.
“People who opened their big mouths didn’t live
very long,” Sinita said. “Like my uncles I told you about. Then,
two more uncles, and then my father.” Sinita began crying again.
“Then this summer, they killed my brother.”
My tummy ache had started up again. Or maybe it was
always there, but I’d forgotten about it while trying to make
Sinita feel better. “Stop, please,” I begged her. “I think I’m
going to throw up.”
“I can‘t,” she said.
Sinita’s story spilled out like blood from a
cut.
One Sunday this last summer, her whole family was
walking home from church. Her whole family meant all Sinita’s
widowed aunts and her mother and tons of girl cousins, with her
brother José Luis being the only boy left in the entire family.
Everywhere they went, the girls were assigned places around him.
Her brother had been saying that he was going to revenge his father
and uncles, and the rumor all over town was that Trujillo was after
him.
As they were rounding the square, a vendor came up
to sell them a lottery ticket. It was the dwarf they always bought
from, so they trusted him.
“Oh I’ve seen him!” I said. Sometimes when we would
go to San Francisco in the carriage, and pass by the square, there
he was, a grown man no taller than me at twelve. Mama never bought
from him. She claimed Jesus told us not to gamble, and playing the
lottery was gambling. But every time I was alone with Papá, he
bought a whole bunch of tickets and called it a good
investment.
José Luis asked for a lucky number. When the dwarf
went to hand him the ticket, something silver flashed in his hand.
That’s all Sinita saw. Then José Luis was screaming horribly and
her mother and all the aunts were shouting for a doctor. Sinita
looked over at her brother, and the front of his white shirt was
covered with blood.
I started crying, but I pinched my arms to stop. I
had to be brave for Sinita.
“We buried him next to my father. My mother hasn’t
been the same since. Sor Asunción, who knows my family, offered to
let me come to el colegio for free.”
The aching in my belly was like wash being wrung so
tightly, there wasn’t a drop of water left in the clothes. “I’ll
pray for your brother,” I promised her. “But Sinita, one thing. How
is this Trujillo’s secret?”
“You still don’t get it? Minerva, don’t you see?
Trujillo is having everyone killed!”
I lay awake most of that night, thinking about
Sinita’s brother and her uncles and her father and this secret of
Trujillo that nobody but Sinita seemed to know about. I heard the
clock, down in the parlor, striking every hour. It was already
getting light in the room by the time I fell asleep.
In the morning, I was shaken awake by Sinita.
“Hurry,” she was saying. “You’re going to be late for Matins.” All
around the room, sleepy girls were clapping away in their slippers
towards the crowded basins in the washroom. Sinita grabbed her
towel and soap dish from her night table and joined the
exodus.
As I came fully awake, I felt the damp sheet under
me. Oh no, I thought, I’ve wet my bed! After I’d told Sor Milagros
that I wouldn’t need an extra canvas sheet on my mattress.
I lifted the covers, and for a moment, I couldn’t
make sense of the dark stains on the bottom sheet. Then I brought
up my hand from checking myself. Sure enough, my complications had
started.
¡Pobrecita!
1941
1941
The country people around the farm say that until
the nail is hit, it doesn’t believe in the hammer. Everything
Sinita said I filed away as a terrible mistake that wouldn’t happen
again. Then the hammer came down hard right in our own school,
right on Lina Lovatón’s head. Except she called it love and went
off, happy as a newlywed.
Lina was a couple of years older than Elsa,
Lourdes, Sinita, and me; but her last year at Inmaculada, we were
all in the same dormitory hall of the fifteens through seventeens.
We got to know her, and love her, which amounted to the same thing
when it came to Lina Lovatón.
We all looked up to her as if she were a lot older
than even the other seventeens. She was grownup-looking for her
age, tall with red-gold hair and her skin like something just this
moment coming out of the oven, giving off a warm golden glow. Once
when Elsa pestered her in the washroom while Sor Socorro was over
at the convent, Lina slipped off her gown and showed us what we
would look like in a few years.
She sang in the choir in a clear beautiful voice
like an angel. She wrote in a curlicued hand that was like the old
prayerbooks with silver clasps Sor Asunción had brought over from
Spain. Lina taught us how to roll our hair, and how to curtsy if we
met a king. We watched her. All of us were in love with our
beautiful Lina.
The nuns loved her too, always choosing Lina to
read the lesson during silent dinners or to carry the Virgencita in
the Sodality of Mary processions. As often as my sister Patria,
Lina was awarded the weekly good-conduct ribbon, and she wore it
proudly, bandolier style, across the front of her blue serge
uniform.
I still remember the afternoon it all started. We
were outside playing volleyball, and our captain Lina was leading
us to victory. Her thick plaited hair was coming undone, and her
face was pink and flushed as she flung herself here and there after
the ball.
Sor Socorro came hurrying out. Lina Lovatón had to
come right away. An important visitor was here to meet her. This
was very unusual since we weren’t allowed weekday visitors and the
sisters were very strict about their rules.
Off Lina went, Sor Socorro straightening her hair
ribbons and pulling at the pleats of her uniform to make the skirt
fall straight. The rest of us resumed our game, but it wasn’t as
much fun now that our beloved captain was gone.
When Lina came back, there was a shiny medal pinned
on her uniform just above her left breast. We crowded around her,
wanting to know all about her important visitor. “Trujillo?” we all
cried out. “Trujillo came to see you?” Sor Socorro rushed out for a
second time that day, hushing and rounding us up. We had to wait
until lights-out that night to hear Lina’s story.
It turned out that Trujillo had been visiting some
official’s house next door, and attracted by the shouts from our
volleyball game below, he had gone out on the balcony. When he
caught sight of our beautiful Lina, he walked right over to the
school, followed by his surprised aides, and insisted on meeting
her. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Sor Asunción finally gave
in and sent for Lina Lovatón. Soldiers swarmed about them, Lina
said, and Trujillo took a medal off his own uniform and pinned it
on hers!
“What did you do?” we all wanted to know In the
moonlight streaming in from the open shutters, Lina Lovatón showed
us. Lifting the mosquito net, she stood in front of us and made a
deep curtsy.
Soon, every time Trujillo was in town—and he was in
La Vega more often than he had ever been before—he stopped in to
visit Lina Lovatón. Gifts were sent over to the school: a porcelain
ballerina, little bottles of perfume that looked like pieces of
jewelry and smelled like a rose garden wished it could smell, a
satin box with a gold heart charm inside for a bracelet that
Trujillo had already given her with a big L charm to start it
off.
At first the sisters were frightened. But then,
they started receiving gifts, too: bolts of muslim for making
convent sheets and terrycloth for their towels and a donation of a
thousand pesos for a new statue of the Merciful Mother to be carved
by a Spanish artist living in the capital.
Lina always told us about her visits from Trujillo.
It was kind of exciting for all of us when he came. First, classes
were cancelled, and the whole school was overrun by guards poking
through all our bedrooms. When they were done, they stood at
attention while we tried to tease smiles out of their on-guard
faces. Meanwhile, Lina disappeared into the parlor where we had all
been delivered that first day by our mothers. As Lina reported, the
visit usually started with Trujillo reciting some poetry to her,
then saying he had some surprise on his person she had to find.
Sometimes he’d ask her to sing or dance. Most especially, he loved
for her to play with the medals on his chest, taking them off,
pinning them back on.
“But do you love him?” Sinita asked Lina one time.
Sinita’s voice sounded as disgusted as if she were asking Lina if
she had fallen in love with a tarantula.
“With all my heart,” Lina sighed. “More than my
life.”
Trujillo kept visiting Lina and sending her gifts
and love notes she shared with us. Except for Sinita, I think we
were all falling in love with the phantom hero in Lina’s sweet and
simple heart. From the back of my drawer where I had put it away in
consideration for Sinita, I dug up the little picture of Trujillo
we were all given in Citizenship Class. I placed it under my pillow
at night to ward off nightmares.
For her seventeenth birthday, Trujillo threw Lina a
big party in a new house he had just built outside Santiago. Lina
went away for the whole week of her birthday. On the actual day, a
full-page photograph of Lina appeared in the papers and beneath it
was a poem written by Trujillo himself:
She was born a queen, not by dynastic
right,
but by the right of beauty
whom divinity sends to the world only rarely.
but by the right of beauty
whom divinity sends to the world only rarely.
Sinita claimed that someone else had written it
for him because Trujillo hardly knew how to scratch out his own
name. “If I were Lina—” she began, and her right hand reached out
as if grabbing a bunch of grapes and squeezing the juice out of
them.
Weeks went by, and Lina didn’t return. Finally, the
sisters made an announcement that Lina Lovatón would be granted her
diploma by government orders in absentia. “Why?” we asked
Sor Milagros, who was still our favorite. “Why won’t she come back
to us?” Sor Milagros shook her head and turned her face away, but
not before I had seen tears in her eyes.
That summer, I found out why. Papá and I were on
our way to Santiago with a delivery of tobacco in the wagon. He
pointed out a high iron gate and beyond it a big mansion with lots
of flowers and the hedges all cut to look like animals. “Look,
Minerva, one of Trujillo’s girlfriends lives there, your old
schoolmate, Lina Lovatón.”
“Lina?!” My breath felt tight inside my chest as if
it couldn’t get out. “But Trujillo is married,” I argued. “How can
he have Lina as a girlfriend?”
Papá looked at me a long time before he said, “He’s
got many of them, all over the island, set up in big, fancy houses.
Lina Lovatón is just a sad case, because she really does love him,
pobrecita.” Right there he took the opportunity to lecture
me about why the hens shouldn’t wander away from the safety of the
barnyard.
Back at school in the fall during one of our
nightly sessions, the rest of the story came out. Lina Lovatón had
gotten pregnant in the big house. Trujillo’s wife Doña María had
found out and gone after her with a knife. So Trujillo shipped Lina
off to a mansion he’d bought for her in Miami where he knew she’d
be safe. She lived all alone now, waiting for him to call her up. I
guess there was a whole other pretty girl now taking up his
attention.
“Pobrecita,” we chorused, like an
amen.
We were quiet, thinking of this sad ending for our
beautiful Lina. I felt my breath coming short again. At first, I
had thought it was caused by the cotton bandages I had started
tying around my chest so my breasts wouldn’t grow. I wanted to be
sure what had happened to Lina Lovatón would never happen to me.
But every time I’d hear one more secret about Trujillo I could feel
the tightening in my chest even when I wasn’t wearing the
bandages.
“Trujillo is a devil,” Sinita said as we tiptoed
back to our beds. We had managed to get them side by side again
this year.
But I was thinking, No, he is a man. And in spite
of all I’d heard, I felt sorry for him. iPobrecito!
At night, he probably had nightmare after nightmare like I did,
just thinking about what he’d done.
Downstairs in the dark parlor, the clock was
striking the hours like hammer blows.
The Performance
1944
1944
It was our country’s centennial year. We’d been
having celebrations and performances ever since Independence Day on
February 27th. Patria had celebrated her twentieth birthday that
day, and we’d thrown her a big party in Ojo de Agua. That’s how my
family got around having to give some sort of patriotic affair to
show their support of Trujillo. We pretended the party was in his
honor with Patria dressed in white, her little boy Nelson in red,
and Pedrito, her husband, in blue. Oh yes, the nun thing had fallen
through.
It wasn’t just my family putting on a big loyalty
performance, but the whole country. When we got to school that
fall, we were issued new history textbooks with a picture of
you-know-who embossed on the cover so even a blind person could
tell who the lies were all about. Our history now followed the plot
of the Bible. We Dominicans had been waiting for centuries for the
arrival of our Lord Trujillo on the scene. It was pretty
disgusting.
All through nature there is a feeling of
ecstasy. A strange otherworldly light suffuses the house smelling
of labor and sanctity. The 24th of October in 1891. God’s glory
made flesh in a miracle. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo has been
born!
At our first assembly, the sisters announced that,
thanks to a generous donation from El Jefe, a new wing had been
added for indoor recreation. It was to be known as the Lina Lovatón
Gymnasium, and in a few weeks, a recitation contest would be held
there for the entire school. The theme was to be our centennial and
the generosity of our gracious Benefactor.
As the announcement was being made, Sinita and Elsa
and Lourdes and I looked at each other, settling that we would do
our entry together. We had all started out together at Inmaculada
six years ago, and everyone now called us the quadruplets. Sor
Asunción was always joking that when we graduated in a couple
years, she was going to have to hack us apart with a knife.
We worked hard on our performance, practicing every
night after lights out. We had written all our own lines instead of
just reciting things from a book. That way we could say what we
wanted instead of what the censors said we could say.
Not that we were stupid enough to say anything bad
about the government. Our skit was set way back in the olden days.
I played the part of the enslaved Motherland, tied up during the
whole performance until the very end when Liberty, Glory, and the
narrator untied me. This was supposed to remind the audience of our
winning our independence a hundred years ago. Then, we all sang the
national anthem and curtsied like Lina Lovatón had taught us.
Nobody could get upset with that!
The night of the recitation contest we could
hardly eat our dinners, we were so nervous and excited. We dressed
in one of the classrooms, helping each other with the costumes and
painting our faces, for the sisters did allow makeup for
performances. Of course, we never washed up real good afterwards,
so that the next day we walked around with sexy eyes, rosy lips,
and painted-on beauty marks as if we were at a
you-know-what-kind-of-a-place instead of a convent school.
And the quadruplets were the best, by far! We took
so many curtain calls that we were still on stage when Sor Asunción
came up to announce the winners. We started to exit, but she
motioned us back. The place broke into wild clapping, stomping, and
whistling, all of which were forbidden as unladylike. But Sor
Asunción seemed to have forgotten her own rules. She held up the
blue ribbon since no one would quiet down to hear her announce that
we had won.
What we did hear her say when the audience finally
settled down was that we would be sent along with a delegation from
La Vega to the capital to perform the winning piece for Trujillo on
his birthday. We looked at each other, shocked. The nuns had never
said anything about this added performance. Later as we undressed
in the classroom, we discussed turning down the prize.
“I’m not going,” I declared, washing off all the
goop on my face. I wanted to make a protest, but I wasn’t sure what
to do,
“Let’s do it, oh please,” Sinita pleaded. There was
such a look of desperation on her face, Elsa and Lourdes readily
agreed, “Let’s.”
“But they tricked us!” I reminded them.
“Please, Minerva, please,” Sinita coaxed. She put
her arm around me, and when I tried to pull away, she gave me a
smack on the cheek.
I couldn’t believe Sinita would really want to do
this, given how her family felt about Trujillo. “But Sinita, why
would you want to perform for him?”
Sinita drew herself up so proud she looked like
Liberty all right. “It’s not for him. Our play’s about a time when
we were free. It’s like a hidden protest.”
That settled it. I agreed to go on the condition
that we do the skit dressed as boys. At first, my friends grumbled
because we had to change a lot of the feminine endings, and so the
rhymes all went to pot. But the nearer the big day approached, the
more the specter of Lina haunted us as we did jumping jacks in the
Lina Lovatón Gymnasium. Her beautiful portrait stared across the
room at the picture of El Jefe on the opposite wall.
We went down to the capital in a big car provided
by the Dominican Party in La Vega. On the way, Sor Asunción read us
the epistle, which is what she called the rules we were to observe.
Ours was the third performance in the girls‘-school division. It
would begin at five, and we would stay to the conclusion of the La
Vega performances, and be back at el colegio for bedtime juice.
“You must show the nation you are its jewels, Inmaculada Concepción
girls. Is that perfectly clear?”
“Yes, Sor Asunción,” we chorused back absently. But
we were too excited about our glorious adventure to pay much
attention to rules. Along the way, every time some cute fellows
passed us in their fast, fancy cars, we’d wave and pucker up our
mouths. Once, a car slowed, and the boys inside called out
compliments. Sister scowled fiercely at them and turned around to
see what was going on in the back seat of the car. We looked
blithely at the road ahead, quadruplet angels. We didn’t have to be
in a skit to give our best performance!
But as we neared the capital, Sinita got more and
more quiet. There was a sad, wistful look on her face, and I knew
who she was missing.
Before long we were waiting in an anteroom of the
palace alongside other girls from schools all over the country. Sor
Asunción came in, swishing her habit importantly and motioned for
us. We were ushered into a large hall, bigger than any room I’d
ever been in. Through a break in a row of chairs, we came to the
center of the floor. We turned circles trying to get our bearings.
Then I recognized him under a canopy of Dominican flags, the
Benefactor I’d heard about all my life.
In his big gold armchair, he looked much smaller
than I had imagined him, looming as he always was from some wall or
other. He was wearing a fancy white uniform with gold fringe
epaulets and a breast of medals like an actor playing a part.
We took our places, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He was turned towards a young man, sitting beside him, also wearing
a uniform. I knew it was his handsome son, Ramfis, a full colonel
in the army since he was four years old. His picture was always in
the papers.
Ramfis looked our way and whispered something to
his father, who laughed loudly. How rude, I thought; after all, we
were here to pay them compliments. The least they could do was
pretend that we didn’t look like fools in our ballooning togas and
beards and bows and arrows.
Trujillo nodded for us to start. We stood frozen,
gawking, until Sinita finally pulled us all together by taking her
place. I was glad I got to recline on the ground, because my knees
were shaking so hard I was afraid that the Fatherland might faint
right on the spot.
Miraculously, we all remembered our lines. As we
said them out loud, our voices gathered confidence and became more
expressive. Once when I stole a glance, I saw that the handsome
Ramfis and even El Jefe were caught up in our performance.
We moved along smoothly, until we got to the part
when Sinita was supposed to stand before me, the bound Fatherland.
After I said,
Over a century, languishing in chains,
Dare I now hope for freedom from my woes?
Oh, Liberty, unfold your brilliant bow,
Dare I now hope for freedom from my woes?
Oh, Liberty, unfold your brilliant bow,
Sinita was to step forward, show her brilliant
bow. Then, having aimed imaginary arrows at imaginary foes, she was
to set me free by untying me.
But when we got to this part, Sinita kept on
stepping forward and didn’t stop until she was right in front of
Trujillo’s chair. Slowly, she raised her bow and took aim. There
was a stunned silence in the hall.
Quick as gunfire, Ramfis leapt to his feet and
crouched between his father and our frozen tableau. He snatched the
bow from Sinita’s hand and broke it over his raised knee. The crack
of the splintering wood released a hubbub of whispers and murmurs.
Ramfis looked intently at Sinita, who glared right back at him.
“You shouldn’t play that way.”
“It was part of the play,” I lied. I was still
bound, reclining on the floor. “She didn’t mean any harm.”
Ramfis looked at me, and then back at Sinita.
“What’s your name?”
“Liberty,” Sinita said.
“Your real name, Liberty?” he barked at her as if
she were a soldier in his army.
“Perozo.” She said it proudly.
He lifted an eyebrow, intrigued. And then, like a
hero in a storybook, he helped me up. “Untie her, Perozo,” he
ordered Sinita. But when she reached over to work the knots loose,
he grabbed her hands and yanked them behind her back. He spit these
words out at her: “Use your dog teeth, bitch!”
His lips twisted into a sinister little smile as
Sinita bent down and untied me with her mouth.
My hands freed, I saved the day, according to what
Sinita said later. I flung off my cape, showing off my pale arms
and bare neck. In a trem- bly voice I began the chant that grew
into a shouting chorus ¡Viva Trujillo!
¡Viva Trujillo! ¡Viva Trujillo!
On the way home, Sor Asunción scolded us. “You were
not the ornaments of the nation. You did not obey my epistle.” As
the road darkened, the beams of our headlights filled with hundreds
of blinded moths. Where they hit the windshield, they left blurry
marks, until it seemed like I was looking at the world through a
curtain of tears.