In the Time of the Butterflies: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

(Complications: 1938) The story is now told from Minerva’s point of view. Minerva wonders how Papá was ever convinced to send the girls away to school, as at home the sisters always had to ask him permission for everything. Minerva used to watch the family’s rabbits in their pens and feel that she was like them. One day she tried to set one free, but the rabbit didn’t want to leave its cage. Minerva then realized that the rabbit wasn’t like her after all.

The girls leaving home starts with Patria wanting to be a nun. Papá says that this is a “waste of a pretty girl,” but Mamá finally convinces him to at least send her to a convent school. Minerva then asks Papá if she can “chaperone” her older sister at the school by attending as well. Minerva seems to be Papá’s favorite, though she is the one who argues the most with him. Papá half-jokingly laments what will happen when all his “little chickens go.”

Mamá doesn’t know how to read, though she pretends her eyesight is just bad, and she convinces Papá to let the girls go to school so they will have a better education than their parents. The family has been making a lot of money lately, so they can afford a good school. Papá finally agrees, but says that one sister needs to stay home and help with the store. He clearly wants Minerva to volunteer, but she stays silent. Dedé volunteers.

Minerva says that this is how she finally “got free.” It wasn’t just the freedom of leaving home, but a freedom inside her head when she realized she had “just left a small cage to go into a bigger one, the size of our whole country.”

When Minerva first goes off to school she befriends a girl named Sinita, who looks poorer and angrier than the other children. She first arrives dressed in black for mourning. Minerva offers her a button. Sinita first rejects it as charity, but accepts it when Minerva calls it a “friendship button.”

Minerva notes how few possessions Sinita brings to school. The other girls start to make fun of Sinita as a “charity student,” but Minerva defends her. The girls are taken to their dormitory for the first night and assigned to their beds by Sor Milagros, one of the nuns. The mosquito nets around the beds make it like “a room of little bridal veils.”

Sor Milagros arranges the bunks in alphabetical order. Minerva asks if she can bunk with Sinita, and Sor Milagros agrees. Minerva then says that she shouldn’t make an exception just for her, which surprises Sor Milagros. Sor Milagros agrees to let all the girls choose their own bunks, and then she tells Minerva to “take care of our dear Sinita.”

A few days later Sor Milagros gives the girls a vague lesson about menstruation. Sinita is confused and asks Minerva about it afterward. Minerva has already learned all about menstruation from Patria, so she explains it to Sinita. Sinita offers to trade her the “secret of Trujillo” in exchange.

Sinita delays telling this secret for a few weeks. Minerva and Sinita become close friends with two other girls, Lourdes and Elsa. One night Sinita is crying, and she tells Minerva that she is crying about her brother, who died soon before. He was the reason Sinita was mourning when she first came to school. Minerva asks her to tell the “secret of Trujillo.” Sinita is afraid, but she finally agrees.

Sinita says that her family used to be rich and important. Three of her uncles were friends with Trujillo, but then they turned against him when “they saw he was doing bad things.” Minerva is shocked at this idea, and compares Trujillo doing bad things to learning that “Jesus had slapped a baby.” She thinks about the portrait of Trujillo that hangs in her family’s house next to a picture of Jesus and a flock of cute lambs. Sinita continues – someone informed on her uncles, and then they were all shot.

Minerva asks what “bad things” Trujillo was doing, and Sinita explains his rise to power. She uses childlike terms, but explains that Trujillo was a soldier who played people’s jealousies against each other and eventually became head general. He then stirred up a rebellion against the old president, and refused to help him when the president asked for the army’s help. Trujillo then announced that he was the new president.

Minerva asks why someone didn’t tell Trujillo that this wasn’t right, but Sinita says that people who criticized him “didn’t live very long.” Her own three uncles were killed, and then two more uncles, and then her father, and then her brother. Minerva suddenly feels nauseated and asks Sinita to stop talking, but Sinita says she can’t now.

Sinita tells the story of how her brother was killed. He was the last male in the family, and had been talking about avenging his father and uncles. One day he was stabbed in front of the whole family by the man who sold them lottery tickets. The head of the convent school knew the family, so she later allowed Sinita to attend for free. Sinita finally says that “Trujillo’s secret” is that he is having everyone killed.

Minerva is traumatized by this, and she sleeps very little that night. When she wakes up she thinks that she has wet the bed, but then realizes that she has begun menstruating, and her “complications had started.”

(¡Pobrecita!: 1941) Minerva describes how she is directly affected by Trujillo three years later. At school she and her friends befriend and admire an older girl named Lina Lovatón, who is very beautiful. One day the girls are playing volleyball, and Lina is the captain. One of the nuns then hurries out and says that Lina has an important visitor. Lina goes inside, and when she returns she has a medal pinned to her uniform. She says that Trujillo was her visitor. He had seen her from an official’s house next door and had immediately sent for her, taken a medal from his uniform, and pinned it to hers.

Every time Trujillo comes to town after that he stops by and visits Lina. He starts sending gifts to her and also to the school. Whenever he visits, all the classes are cancelled. Lina describes their encounters – Trujillo recites some poetry, and then they play a game where she takes the medals off of his chest and puts them back on. Sinita disgustedly asks Lina if she loves Trujillo, and Lina says “with all my heart.”

As the girls hear more about Trujillo they all start falling in love with him through Lina – except for Sinita. Minerva chooses to forget Sinita’s story of years before. When Lina turns seventeen Trujillo throws her a party and takes her away for a week. On her birthday there is a poem devoted to her in the newspaper, supposedly written by Trujillo himself.

Then time passes and Lina doesn’t return. The nuns say that she will get her degree in absentia, but they can’t explain why. That summer Minerva is driving by a mansion with Papá, and he says that “one of Trujillo’s girlfriends” lives there – Lina. Minerva asks how Trujillo can have girlfriends if he’s married, and Papá says that Trujillo has girlfriends set up all over the island. Lina is especially pitiable because she actually loves him.

The next year at school Minerva hears the rest of the story. Lina got pregnant, and Trujillo’s wife attacked her. Trujillo then shipped Lina off to a mansion. She waits for him there, but he has moved on to another pretty girl. Minerva starts wearing bandages around her chest so her breasts won’t grow, as she doesn’t want to end up like Lina. Sinita says that “Trujillo is a devil,” but Minerva is still convinced that he is a man who probably feels bad about what he has done.

(The Performance: 1944) Three years later it is the country’s centennial year, and they are supposed to have celebrations honoring Trujillo. The Mirabals get around this by celebrating Patria’s twentieth birthday instead, but making everyone wear red, white, and blue. Patria is married and has a son now – she has given up on being a nun.

Minerva says that the whole country is “putting on a big loyalty performance” at this point. At school they get new textbooks with Trujillo’s picture on the front. The country’s history books now echo the plot of the Bible, all leading up to Trujillo’s birth, which they call “God’s glory made flesh in a miracle.”

At school they have a new gymnasium from Trujillo’s donation, which is called the “Lina Lovatón Gymnasium.” The school has a contest there to celebrate the “Benefactor” (Trujillo), where the girls are supposed to put on performances. Minerva, Sinita, Elsa, and Lourdes make a symbolic play about Liberty and Glory freeing the enslaved Motherland.

On the night of the contest Minerva’s team wins, and they are later sent to perform their skit for Trujillo on his birthday. Minerva tries to decline, but Sinita wants to do it. Sinita says that the play is like a “hidden protest,” because it is about a past when the country was free. Minerva agrees, but insists that they perform dressed as boys.

On the night of the performance one of the nuns, Sor Asunción, escorts the girls to the capital and warns them to act like “jewels” and impress Trujillo. They arrive and Minerva sees Trujillo for the first time. He looks small in his big golden armchair, and he is covered with medals. His handsome son Ramfis is sitting next to him.

The performance begins, and Minerva is so nervous she is shaking. The skit goes smoothly, until the part where Sinita (dressed as Liberty) is supposed to free Minerva, the Fatherland. Sinita draws her bow and then points an imaginary arrow straight at Trujillo. Ramfis leaps up, grabs Sinita’s bow, and breaks it over his knee.

Minerva tries to cover for Sinita, saying that it was part of the play, but Ramfis warns them not to play that way. He then makes Sinita untie Minerva with her teeth, and calls her “bitch.” When Minerva is free, she starts a chant of “Viva Trujillo!” to defuse the situation. On the way home Sor Asunción is disappointed in the girls.