Salcedo

Two weeks ago.

The first thing you see at the Mirabal house in Salcedo is the gardens. You could lose yourself in those gardens, given the chance—they are at once impecible and mysterious. The lawn is well kept and garnished with pebble paths and a giant deciduous tree. There is a fountain made of a white sand-colored stone with a koi living in the bright blue pool. The three sisters and Manolo are buried there under stones of the same color. And the sub-tropical flowers and grasses of all colors which surround the lawn and the little brown house attract butterflies of all kinds.

Dedé loves to garden. I imagine the yard around that house is something of a passion for her.

And I imagine that if I was dubbed the official caretaker of a legend—make that three legends—which started with my family, I’d want everything to be just right too.

The house is a museum. There’s a little office with a gift shop. The inside of the house is all set up to show how the girls and their family lived in the last months of their lives—it reminded me of how the Mayo house is arranged. Collections of knicknacks in the

living room. China sets in the dining room. Furniture in the bedrooms behind velvet ropes. Patria’s rosary. Minerva’s law school books on a shelf. Maria Teresa’s favorite dress in a glass case. Pictures of the women hanging in the hall. Where they made their meals, where they went to the bathroom, how they washed up for dinner. But it’s eerier and more mystical than any museum I’ve ever been in. It’s hard to put my finger on why—because they changed the course of history of this country, because it all happened relatively recently, because their sister is still here to tell the tale.

Dedé wasn’t quite who I’d pictured in In the Time of the Butterflies. She was wearing a loose colorful pantsuit and make-up, and a shock of white in her thick black hair fell near her eyes. She threw out her arms when she introduced herself, crying, “I’m

Dedé, the surviving sister.” She sat in a wooden rocking chair on the porch of the house, and we crowded around her on the floor like little children. She told us the story of the 14^th of July movement, the involvement of her sisters, their relations with Trujillo, the doings of Trujillo, and the assassination of her sisters. We had trouble following it because she talked so fast, but I can’t imagine anything she said isn’t in the books. She was the perfect combination of animated and solemn. It didn’t seem real somehow, as if she had adopted a personality perfectly suited to tell this story. I watched her carefully for signs of something outside that persona—some sign she really was a unique person—but they only thing I could see was in the crinkles around her eyes, a deep exhaustion.

She never broke character, so to speak. I asked about what her sisters were like. Yes, they really were pretty similar to the characters in the novel. I listened hard when she talked about Minerva and her fearless dedication to human rights. Some of the students bought her book about the sisters, and I think I will learn more when I read that later.