Certainly she remembers everything about that sunny afternoon, a few days into the new year, when Patria, Mate, and Minerva came over to see her.
She had been preparing a new bed in the garden, enjoying the rare quiet of an empty house. The girl had the day off, and as usual on a Sunday afternoon, Jaimito had gone to the big gallera in San Francisco, this time taking all three boys. Dedé wasn’t expecting them back till late. From Mamá’s house on the main road, her sisters must have seen Jaimito’s pickup drive away without her and hurried to come over and pay Dedé this surprise visit.
When she heard a car stop in front of the house, Dede considered taking off into the cacao grove. She was getting so solitary. A few nights ago Jaimito had complained that his mother had noticed that Dedé wasn’t her old lively self. She rarely dropped by Dona Leila’s anymore with a new strain of hibiscus she’d sprouted or a batch of pastelitos she’d made from scratch. Miss Sonrisa was losing her smiles, all right. Dedé had looked at her husband, a long look as if she could draw the young man of her dreams out from the bossy, old-fashioned macho he’d become. “Is that what your mother says?”
He’d brought this up as he sat in slippers in the galería enjoying the cool evening. He took a final swallow from his rum glass before he answered, “That’s what my mother says. Get me another one, would you, Mami?” He held out the glass, and Dedé had gone obediently to the icebox in the back of the house where she burst into tears. What she wanted to hear from him was that he had noticed. Just his saying so would have made it better, whatever it was. She herself wasn’t sure what.
So when she saw her three sisters coming down the path that afternoon, she felt pure dread. It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised to snip the knot that was keeping Dedé’s life from falling apart.
She knew why they had come.
Patria had approached her in the fall with a strange request. Could she bury some boxes in one of the cacao fields in back of their old house?
Dedé had been so surprised. “Why, Patria! Who put you up to this?”
Patria looked puzzled. “We’re all in it, if that’s what you mean. But I’m speaking for myself.”
“I see,” Dedé had said, but really what she saw was Minerva in back of it all. Minerva agitating. No doubt she had sent Patria over rather than come herself since she and Dede were not getting along. It had been years since they’d fought openly—since Lío, wasn’t it?—but recently their hot little exchanges had started up again.
What could Dedé say? She had to talk to Jaimito first. Patria had given her a disappointed look, and Dedé had gotten defensive. “What? I should go over Jaimito’s head? It’s only fair. He’s the one farming the land, he’s responsible for this place.”
“But can’t you decide on your own, then tell him?”
Dedé stared at her sister, disbelieving.
“That’s what I did,” Patria went on. “I joined, and then I talked Pedrito into joining me.”
“Well, I don’t have that kind of marriage,” Dedé said. She smiled to take the huffiness out of her statement.
“What kind of marriage do you have?” Patria looked at her with that sweetness on her face that could always penetrate Dedé’s smiles. Dedé looked away.
“It’s just that you don’t seem yourself,” Patria continued, reaching for Dedé’s hand. “You seem so—I don’t know—withdrawn. Is something wrong?”
It was Patria’s worried tone more than her question that pulled Dedé back into that abandoned part of herself where she had hoped to give love, and to receive it, in full measure, both directions.
Being there, she couldn’t help herself. Though she tried giving Patria another of her brave smiles, Miss Sonrisa burst into tears.
After Patria’s visit, Dedé had talked to Jaimito. As she expected, his answer was an adamant no. But beyond what she expected, he was furious with her for even considering such a request. The Mirabal sisters liked to run their men, that was the problem. In his house, he was the one to wear the pants.
“Swear you’ll keep your distance from them!”
When he got upset, he would just raise his voice. But that night, he grabbed her by the wrists and shoved her on the bed, only—he said later—to make her come to her senses. “Swear!”
Now, when she thinks back, Dedé asks herself as Minou has asked her, Why? Why didn’t she go along with her sisters. She was only thirty-four. She could have started a new life. But no, she reminds herself. She wouldn’t have started over. She would have died with them on that lonely mountain road.
Even so, that night, her ears still ringing from Jaimito’s shout, Dedé had been ready to risk her life. It was her marriage that she couldn’t put on the line. She had always been the docile middle child, used to following the lead. Next to an alto she sang alto, by a soprano, soprano. Miss Sonrisa, cheerful, compliant. Her life had gotten bound up with a domineering man, and so she shrank from the challenge her sisters were giving her.
Dedé sent Patria a note: Sorry. jaimito says no.
And for weeks afterwards, she avoided her sisters.
And now, here they were, all three like a posse come to rescue her.
Dede’s heart was beating away as she stood to welcome them. “How wonderful to see you!” She smiled, Miss Sonrisa, armed with smiles. She led them through the garden, delaying, showing off this and that new planting. As if they were here on a social call. As if they had come to see how her jasmine shrubs were doing.
They sat on the patio, exchanging the little news. The children were all coming down with colds. Little Jacqueline would be one in a month. Patria was up all hours again with Raulito. That boy was still not sleeping through the night. This gringo doctor she was reading said it was the parents of colicky babies who were to blame. No doubt Raulito was picking up all the tension in the house. Speaking of picking up things: Minou had called Trujillo a bad word. Don’t ask. She must have overheard her parents. They would have to be more careful. Imagine what could happen if there were another spying yardboy like Prieto on the premises.
Imagine. An awkward silence fell upon them. Dedé braced herself. She expected Minerva to make an impassioned pitch for using the family farm for a munitions storage. But it was Mate who spoke up, the little sister who still wore her hair in braids and dressed herself and her baby girl in matching dresses.
They had come, she said, because something big, I mean really big, was about to happen. Mate’s eyes were a child‘s, wide with wonder.
Minerva drew her index finger across her throat and let her tongue hang out of her mouth. Patria and Mate burst into nervous giggles.
Dedé couldn’t believe it. They’d gone absolutely mad! “This is serious business,” she reminded them. Some fury that had nothing to do with this serious business was making her heart beat fast.
“You bet it is,” Minerva said, laughing. “The goat is going to die.”
“Less than three weeks!” Mate’s voice was becoming breathy with excitement.
“On the feast day of the Virgencita!” Patria exclaimed, making the sign of the cross and rolling her eyes heavenward. “Ay, Virgencita, watch over us.”
Dedé pointed to her sisters. “You’re going to do it yourselves?”
“Heavens, no,” Mate said, horrified at the thought. “The Action Group does the actual justice, but then all the different cells will liberate their locations. We’ll be taking the Salcedo Fortaleza.”
Dedé was about to remind her little sister of her fear of spiders, worms, noodles in her soup, but she let Mate go on. “We’re a cell, see, and there are usually only three in a cell, but we could make ours four.” Mate looked hopefully at Dedé.
As if they were inviting her to join a goddamn volleyball team!
“This is a little sudden, I know,” Patria was saying. “But it’s not like with the boxes, Dedé. This looks like a sure thing.”
“This is a sure thing,” Minerva confirmed.
“Don’t decide now,” Patria went on as if afraid what Dedé’s snap decision might be. “Think about it, sleep on it. We’re having a meeting next Sunday at my place.”
“Ay, like old times, all four of us!” Mate clapped her hands.
Dedé could feel herself being swayed by the passion of her sisters. Then she hit the usual snag. “And Jaimito?”
There was another awkward silence. Her sisters looked at each other. “Our cousin is also invited,” Minerva said with that stiff tone she always used with Jaimito. “But you know best whether it’s worth asking him.”
“What do you mean by that?” Dedé snapped.
“I mean by that that I don’t know what Jaimito’s politics are.”
Dedé’s pride was wounded. Whatever their problems, Jaimito was her husband, the father of her children. “Jaimito’s no trujillista, if that’s what you’re implying. No more than ... than Papa was.”
“In his own way, Papá was a trujillista,” Minerva announced.
All her sisters looked at her, shocked. “Papá was a hero!” Dedé fumed. “He died because of what he went through in prison. You should know. He was trying to keep you out of trouble!”
Minerva nodded. “That’s right. His advice was always, don’t annoy the bees, don’t annoy the bees. It’s men like him and Jaimito and other scared fulanitos who have kept the devil in power all these years.”
“How can you say that about Papá?” Dede could hear her voice rising. “How can you let her say that about Papá?” She tried to enlist her sisters.
Mate had begun to cry.
“This isn’t what we came for,” Patria reminded Minerva, who stood and walked to the porch rail and stared out into the garden.
Dedé raked her eyes over the yard, half-afraid her sister was finding fault there, too. But the crotons were lusher than ever and the variegated bougainvilleas she hadn’t thought would take were heavy with pink blossoms. All the beds were neat and weedless. Everything in its place. Only in the new bed where she’d just been working did the soil look torn up. And it was disturbing to see—among the established plantings—the raw brown earth like a wound in the ground.
“We want you with us. That’s why we’re here.” Minerva’s eyes as she fixed them on her sister were full of longing.
“What if I can’t?” Dedé’s voice shook. “Jaimito thinks it’s suicide. He’s told me he’ll have to leave me if I get mixed up in this thing.” There, she’d said it. Dedé felt the hot flush of shame on her face. She was hiding behind her husband’s fears, bringing down scorn on him instead of herself.
“Our dear cousin,” Minerva said sarcastically. But she stopped herself on a look from Patria.
“Everyone has their own reasons for the choices they make,” Patria said, defusing the charged atmosphere, “and we have to respect that.”
Blessed are the peacemakers, Dedé thought, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what the prize was that had been promised them.
“Whatever you decide, we’ll understand,” Patria concluded, looking around at her sisters.
Mate nodded, but Minerva could never leave well enough alone. As she climbed in the car, she reminded Dedé, “Next Sunday at Patria’s around three. In case you change your mind,” she added.
As she watched them drive away, Dedé felt strangely mingled surges of dread and joy. Kneeling at the new bed helped calm the shaking in her knees. Before she had finished smoothing the soil and laying out a border of little stones, she had worked out her plan. Only much later did she realize she had forgotten to put any seeds in the ground.
She would leave him.
Next to that decision, attending the underground meeting over at Patria’s was nothing but a small step after the big turn had been taken. All week she refined the plan for it. As she beat the mattresses and fumigated the baseboards for red ants, as she chopped onions for the boys’ breakfast mangú and made them drink limonsillo tea to keep away the cold going around, she plotted. She savored her secret, which tasted deliciously of freedom, as she allowed his weight on her in the dark bedroom and waited for him to be done.
Next Sunday, while Jaimito was at his gallera, Dedé would ride over to the meeting. When he came back, he would find the note propped on his pillow.
I feel like I’m buried alive. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.
Their life together had collapsed. From puppydog devotion, he had moved on to a moody bossiness complicated with intermittent periods of dogged remorse that would have been passion had there been less of his hunger and more of her desire in it. True to her nature, Dedé had made the best of things, eager for order, eager for peace. She herself was preoccupied—by the births of their sons, by the family setbacks after Papa was jailed, by Papá’s sad demise and death, by their own numerous business failures. Perhaps Jaimito felt broken by these failures and her reminders of how she had tried to prevent them. His drinking, always social, became more solitary.
It was natural to blame herself. Maybe she hadn’t loved him enough. Maybe he sensed how someone else’s eyes had haunted her most of her married life.
Lío! What had become of him? Dedé had asked Minerva several times, quite casually, about their old friend. But Minerva didn’t know a thing. Last she’d heard Lio had made it to Venezuela where a group of exiles was training for an invasion.
Then, recently, without her even asking, Minerva had confided to Dedé that their old friend was alive and kicking. “Tune into Radio Rumbos, 99 on your dial.” Minerva knew Jaimito would be furious if he found Dedé listening to that outlawed station, yet her sister taunted her.
One naughty night, Dedé left Jaimito sleeping heavily after sex and stole out to the far end of the garden to the little shack where she kept the garden tools. There, in the dark, sitting on a sack of bark chips for her orchids, Dedé had slowly turned the dial on Jaimito Enrique’s transistor radio. The static crackled, then a voice, very taken with itself, proclaimed, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!”
Fidel’s speech was played endlessly at these off hours, as Dedé soon found out. But night after night, she kept returning to the shack, and twice she was rewarded with the unfamiliar, blurry voice of someone introduced as Comrade Virgilio. He spoke his high-flown talk which had never been what had appealed to Dedé. Even so, night after night, she returned to the shed, for these excursions were what mattered now. They were her secret rebellion, her heart hungering, her little underground of one.
Now, planning her exodus, Dedé tried to imagine Lio’s surprise at hearing Dedé had joined her sisters. He would know that she, too, was one of the brave ones. His sad, sober eyes that had hung before her mind’s eye for so many years melted into the ones that looked back at her now from the mirror. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.
As the day drew closer, Dedé was beset by doubts, particularly when she thought about her boys.
Enrique, Rafael, David, how could she possibly leave them?
Jaimito would never let her keep them. He was more than possessive with his sons, claiming them as if they were parts of himself. Look at how he had named them all with his first name as well as his last! Jaime Enrique Fernández. Jaime Rafael Fernández. Jaime David Fernández. Only their middle names, which perforce became their given names, were their own.
It wasn’t just that she couldn’t bear losing her boys, although that in itself was a dread large enough to stop her in her tracks. She also couldn’t desert them. Who would stand between them and the raised hand when their father lost his temper? Who would make them mangú the way they liked it, cut their hair so it looked right, and sit in the dark with them when they were scared and the next morning not remind them she had been there?
She needed to talk to someone, outside her sisters. The priest! She’d gotten lax in her church attendance. The new militancy from the pulpit had become like so much noise in a place you had come to hear soothing music. But now that noise seemed in harmony with what she was feeling inside. Maybe this new young priest Padre de Jesus would have an answer for her.
She arranged for a ride that Friday with Mamá’s new neighbors, Don Bernardo and his wife Doña Belén, old Spaniards who had been living down in San Cristóbal for years. They had decided to move to the countryside, Don Bernardo explained, hoping the air would help Dona Belen. Something was wrong with the frail, old woman—she was forgetting the simplest things, what a fork was for, how to button her dress, was it the seed or the meat of the mango you could eat. Don Bernardo was taking her to Salcedo for yet another round of tests at the clinic. “We won’t be coming back until late afternoon. I hope that won’t inconvenience you very much?” he apologized. The man was astonish ingly courtly
“Not at all,” Ded6 assured him. She could just be dropped off at the church.
“What have you got to do all day in church?” Doña Belen had a disconcerting ability to suddenly tune in quite clearly, especially to what was none of her business.
“Community work,” Dede lied.
“You Mirabal girls are so civic-minded,” Don Bernardo observed. No doubt he was thinking of Minerva, or his favorite, Patria.
It was harder to satisfy Jaimito’s suspicions. “If you need to go to Salcedo, I’ll take you tomorrow.” He had come into the bedroom as she was getting dressed that Friday morning.
“Jaimito, por Dios!” she pleaded. He had already forbidden her to go about with her sisters, was he now going to keep her from accompanying a poor old woman to the doctor?
“Since when has Dona Belén been a preoccupation of yours?” Then he said the thing he knew would make her feel the guiltiest. “And what about leaving the boys when they’re sick?”
“All they have is colds, for God’s sake. And Tinita’s here with them.”
Jaimito blinked in surprise at her sharp tone. Was it really this easy Dede wondered, taking command?
“Do as you please then!” He was giving her little knowing nods, his hands curling into fists. “But remember, you’re going over my head!”
Jaimito did not return her wave as they drove away from Ojo de Agua. Something threatening in his look scared her. But Dedé kept reminding herself she need not be afraid. She was going to be leaving him. She told herself to keep that in mind.
No one answered her knock at the rectory, although she kept coming back every half hour, all morning long. In between times, she idled in shops, remembering Jaimito’s look that morning, feeling her resolve draining away. At noon, when everything closed up, she sat under a shade tree in the square and fed the pieces of the pastry she’d bought to the pigeons. Once she thought she saw Jaimito’s pickup, and she began making up stories for why she had strayed from Dona Belén at the clinic.
Midafternoon, she spotted a green panel truck pulling up to the rectory gates. Padre de Jesus was in the passenger seat, another man was driving, a third jumped out from the back, unlocked the courtyard gates, and closed them after the truck pulled in.
Dedé hurried across the street. There was only a little time left before she had to meet up with Don Bernardo and Doña Belén at the clinic, and she had to talk to the priest. All day, the yeses and noes had been swirling inside her, faster, faster, until she felt dizzy with indecision. Waiting on that bench, she had promised herself that the priest’s answer would decide it, once and for all.
She knocked several times before Padre de Jesus finally came to the door. Many apologies, he was unloading the truck, hadn’t heard the knocker until just now. Please, please come in. He would be right with her.
He left her sitting in the small vestibule while he finished up with the delivery Dedé could hear going on in the adjoining choir room. Over his shoulder as he departed, Dedé caught a glimpse of some pine boxes, half-covered by a tarpaulin. Something about their color and their long shape recalled an incident in Patria’s house last fall. Dedé had come over to help paint the baby’s room. She had gone into Noris’s room in search of some old sheets to lay on the floor, and there, in the closet, hidden behind a row of dresses, she’d seen several boxes just like these, standing on end. Patria had come in, acting very nervous, stammering about those boxes being full of new tools. Not too long after, when Patria had come with her request to hide some boxes, Dedé had understood what tools were inside them.
My God, Padre de Jesus was one of them! He would encourage her to join the struggle. Of course, he would. And she knew, right then and there, her knees shaking, her breath coming short, that she could not go through with this business. Jaimito was just an excuse. She was afraid, plain and simple, just as she had been afraid to face her powerful feelings for Lío. Instead, she had married Jaimito, although she knew she did not love him enough. And here she’d always berated him for his failures in business when the greater bankruptcy had been on her part.
She told herself that she was going to be late for her rendezvous. She ran out of that rectory before the priest could return, and arrived at the clinic while Doña Belén was still struggling with the buttons of her dress.
She heard the terrible silence the minute she walked in the house.
His pickup hadn’t been in the drive, but then he often took off after a workday for a drink with his buddies. However, this silence was too deep and wide to be made by just one absence. “Enrique!” she screamed, running from room to room. “Rafael! David!”
The boys’ rooms were deserted, drawers opened, rifled through. Oh my God, oh my God. Dedé could feel a mounting desperation. Tinita, who had come to work in the household four years ago when Jaime David was born, came running, alarmed by her mistress’s screams. “Why, Doña Dedé,” she said, wide-eyed. “It’s only Don Jaimito who took the boys.”
“Where?” Dedé could barely get it out.
“To Doña Leila‘s, I expect. He packed bags—” Her mouth dropped open, surprised by something private she wished she hadn’t seen.
“How could you let him, Tinita. How could you! The boys have colds,” she cried as if that were the reason for her distress. “Have Salvador saddle the mare,” Dedé ordered. “Quick, Tinita, quick!” For the maid was standing there, rubbing her hands down the sides of her dress.
Off Dede rode at a crazy canter all the way to Mama’s. It was already dark when she turned in the drive. The house was all lit up, cars in the driveway, Minerva and Manolo just arriving from Monte Cristi, Mate and Leandro from the capital. Of course, it would be a big weekend. But every thought of the meeting had faded from Dedé’s mind.
She had told herself on the gallop over that she must stay calm so as not to alarm Mama. But the moment she dismounted, she was crying, “I need a ride! Quick!”
“M‘ija, m’ija,” Mama kept asking. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, Mama, really. It’s just Jaimito’s taken the boys to San Francisco.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” Mama was asking, suspicion deepening the lines on her face. “Is something wrong with that?”
By now, Manolo had brought the car around to the door, and Minerva was honking the horn. Off they went, Dedé telling them her story of coming home and finding the house abandoned, the boys gone.
“Why would he do this?” Minerva asked. She was digging through her purse for the cigarettes she could not smoke in front of Mama. Recently, she had picked up a bad cough along with the smoking.
“He threatened to leave me if I got involved with your group.”
“But you’re not involved,” Manolo defended her.
“Maybe Dedé wants to be involved.” Minerva turned around to face the back seat. Dedé could not make out her expression in the dim light. The end of her cigarette glowed like a bright, probing eye. “Do you want to join us?”
Dedé began to cry. “I just have to admit to myself. I’m not you—no really, I mean it. I could be brave if someone were by me every day of my life to remind me to be brave. I don’t come by it naturally.”
“None of us do,” Minerva noted quietly.
“Dedé, you’re plenty brave,” Manolo asserted in his courtly way. Then, for they were already in the outskirts of San Francisco, he added, “You’re going to have to tell me where to turn.”
They pulled up behind the pickup parked in front of Dona Leila’s handsome stucco house, and Dedé’s heart lifted. She had seen the boys through the opened door of the front patio, watching television. As they were getting out of the car, Minerva hooked arms with Dedé. “Manolo’s right, you know. You’re plenty brave.” Then nodding towards Jaimito, who had come to the doorway and was aggressively blocking their way in, she added, “One struggle at a time, sister.”