Everyone said that Mother’s paternal grandfather, the man I only knew as Abuelito Agustín, had been fortunate in the possession of a proper last name—the kind of name that when spoken, confirmed its origins by the way that it was pronounced, all full of Zs and Qs. I remember the family saying that his speech declared that he spoke with a proper Castilian tongue—Por supuesto que el era español. ¿No te acuerdas como hablaba? This was enough to open doors for him not available to other men with lesser family names. But he was no longer young by the time I was born, and my remembrance of him is that of a small, wrinkled man who spoke in the quiet, raspy voice of age rather than a distinct accent that I could recognize.
Some said that he had inherited a large fortune and traveled to Cuba looking for land. Others claimed he was a soldier who fought for Spain, but then stayed behind at the end of the Spanish-American War. No one ever really knew how he arrived, but this didn’t matter. In a country of so many immigrants with questionable pasts, it was best to never ask. He had the name, he had the land, and that was all that mattered back then.
Abuelita Elvira, Augustín’s wife, as with so many people in the province where my family comes from, was born in the Canary Islands. She had reached Cuba with her two brothers and her parents as a small child of two years old, and held no memories from that life. Unlike her husband, she saw herself as a Cuban woman, not as an immigrant.
Her still-unwrinkled face was the color of a Saharan Bedouin; to me it seemed as if she had been caressed by the sun.
She was a tiny woman with ash-colored hair tightly bound in a small bun at the back of her head. An unassuming old woman who dressed in simple shades of tans and browns. A slight woman whose voice echoed the lilt of her heart. I loved Abuelita, and I find pride in believing that the small, faded image that sits by my bedside table today is the last known remaining image of her.