In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Álvarez Page A

accomplish your goals?”
    Thinking back, Dedé remembers a long lecture about the rights of the campesinos, the nationalization of sugar, and the driving away of the Yanqui imperialists. She had wanted something practical, something she could use to stave off her growing fears. First, we mean to depose the dictator in this and this way. Second, we have arranged for a provisional government. Third, we mean to set up a committee of private citizens to oversee free elections. She would have understood talk like that.
    “Ay, Lío, ”she said at last, weary with so much hope, so little planning. “Where is it you get your courage?”
    “Why, Dedé,” he said, “it’s not courage. It’s common sense.”
    Common sense? Sitting around dreaming while the secret police hunted you down! To keep from scolding him, Dedé noted that she liked his shirt. He ran his hand down one side, his eyes far away, “It was Freddy‘s,” he said in a thick voice. Freddy, his comrade, had just been found hanging in his prison cell, a supposed suicide. It seemed weird to Dedé that Lío would wear the dead man’s shirt, and even weirder that he would admit it. In so many ways, Lío was beyond her.

    Lio’s name started to appear regularly in the papers. His opposition party had been outlawed. “A party for homosexuals and criminals,” the papers accused. One afternoon, the police came to the Mirabal residence, asking after Virgilio Morales. “We just want him to clear up a little matter,” the police explained. Mama, of course, swore she hadn’t seen Virgilio Morales in months, and furthermore, that he wasn’t allowed in her house.
    Dedé was scared, and angry at herself for being so. She was growing more and more confused about what she wanted. And uncertainty was not something Dedé could live with easily. She started to doubt everything—that she should marry Jaimito and live in Ojo de Agua, that she should part her hair on the left side, that she should have water bread and chocolate for breakfast today like every day. 1
    “Are you in your time of the month, m‘ija?” Mama asked her more than once when Dedé set to quarreling about something.
    “Of course not, Mamá,” Dedé said with annoyance in her voice.
    She decided not to read the papers anymore. They were turning her upside down inside. The regime was going insane, issuing the most ludicrous regulations. A heavy fine was now imposed on anyone who wore khaki trousers and shirts of the same color. It was against the law now to carry your suit jacket over your arm. Lio was right, this was an absurd and crazy regime. It had to be brought down.
    But when she read the list to Jaimito, she did not get the reaction she expected. “Well?” he said when she was through and looked up at him.
    “Isn’t it ridiculous? I mean, it’s absurd, insanely ridiculous.” Unlike her golden-tongued sister, Dedé was not eloquent with reasons. And my God, what reasons did she need to explain these ridiculous insanities!
    “Why are you so worked up, my love?”
    Dedé burst into tears. “Don’t you see?”
    He held her as she cried. And then in his bossy, comforting voice, he explained things. Same-color khaki outfits were what the military wore, and so a dress distinction had to be made. A jacket over the arm could be hiding a gun, and there had recently been many rumors about plots against El Jefe. “See, my darling?”
    But Dedé didn’t see. She shut her eyes tight and wished blindly that everything would turn out all right.
    One night not long after that, Lio told them that as soon as his contact in the capital could arrange for asylum, he and several others would be going into exile. Minerva was deathly quiet. Even Jaimito, who wouldn’t give a rotten plantain for risky politics, felt Lío’s plight. “If he’d just relax, and stop all this agitating,” he argued later with Dede, “then he could stay and slowly work his changes in the country. This way, what good is he to