My grandfather’s name is Domingo, which means ‘Sunday’ in Spanish. I don’t know how he got that name, but his parents were hard-working farmers so I like to think they named him after the only day in the week in which they got to rest. He is ninety years old; or so I’ve been told. In truth, none of us actually know with total certainty how old he is, because none of our living family knows the exact date of his birthday.
His birth certificate states he was born on May 9th, 1932. But that’s just the date his parents provided when they were finally able to bring him into an official government building in order to validate his existence by putting it on record. That’s because my grandfather lived in “el campo”, which translates to ‘countryside’ in English. To me that word evokes images of rolling hills and plains and wheat-fields. That’s not what my grandfather’s countryside looked like. My grandpa’s campo had rich red earth which turned into mud and clay and stuck to your shoes and stained your clothes when it rained. My grandpa’s campo grew rice and raised pigs, more for sustenance than for commerce. My grandpa’s campo was impenetrable except for one dirt road, as it was surrounded by swamp, forest, and mountain; a road that in Cuba, in the early 1930’s, was almost exclusively trafficked by foot, mule, and horse. To say that his house in the countryside was inconveniently far away from any population center would be a negligent understatement, especially since his parents did not own a car. And so he was born, and he was raised, and when the opportunity arose to go into town to write his birth date on paper, his parents made the trek in order to sign documents they couldn’t even read; because if you lived in the campo in those years, you were probably illiterate. Do we know if his parents were certain of the date? Did they write it down? Or did they maybe estimate and put down something that seemed right? We don’t know that either. Because his parents died when was very young. This meant that he and his six siblings were raised by their eldest sister who at sixteen became their matriarch by default. A kid raising kids in those conditions, astounding, like a wholesome version of Lord of the Flies.
Given the circumstances, my grandfather had to work hard from a very young age. In those days, to survive meant to labor incessantly on the fields. The value and necessity of being industrious was ingrained in his young psyche. He was relentless in his approach to work. Even now, in the twilight of his years, he seems liveliest when he is attending to whatever simple chore he’s still physically able to do around the house. Time is a skilled thief. Time has robbed my grandfather of his strength, vigor, and now, some of his mind. But time has failed to rob him of his work-ethic. Some things about person can only be stolen when they’re a corpse.
He was once tall, handsome, and charismatic, and you can still see the remnants of that man in his eyes. Some years ago he had a stroke and lost the ability to speak, never to regain it. His mind stayed sharp, but his voice faded. And time robbed me of the memory of that voice. Yet his laughter is eerily intact, stubbornly unchanged through the years. To hear him laugh feels like opening a time capsule and getting a whiff of a long-ago summer, and remembering how great you felt at that moment but unable to remember why.
His once strong body is now skinny and frail, weakened by over half a century of hard labor. His skin, battered by the hard Cuban sun for so many years, is now thin and delicate. He carries his years with pride, for they were hard-lived years. And while time has taken most men at a much younger age, he can still stand, and move, and live at ninety. For his age and history, my grandfather is a wonder. One day I’d like to write more in depth about his life, someone should anyway. From living in the middle of nowhere and working as a farmer, to becoming a cop, then fighting in the Cuban revolution for the losing side and being held prisoner, to making it out of that ordeal and becoming a truck driver and pig farmer again, all while building a home by hand and raising two children alongside my grandmother, another person who deserves to have a book written about her. My grandfather is one of the legions of great men lost to history because they didn’t design a bridge or win a war. In a long enough time-line, all our names will be forgotten, his name sooner than most and that’s a shame, because he is more deserving of being commemorated than a lot of “great” men I’ve learned about.
As I mentioned before, his mind has begun to fade much like his voice did. It’s been difficult to see the signs since he is limited in his ability to communicate. But last week I went to visit him, and for the first time, he did not remember who I was. My grandfather was my only father-figure until the age of nine, when my mother and I came to the United States and left my grandparents behind. My mom likes to say that my uncle and I are the apples of my grandfather’s eyes. I think it’s true. And that makes the fact that he has begun to forget me that much more affecting. As I stood there smiling down at him, pronouncing my name loudly and slowly so he could understand, my grandmother reminded him that I was his ‘nieto’ (grandson); his eyes lit-up and he wrapped his shaky arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. He may have forgotten what I looked like but not how he felt about me. That’s another strike against time.
To look at him now is to be reminded of the inevitability of our mortality. There are only so many battles one can win. Here sits this wonderful man who faced adversities unlike most of us ever will. A man who for so many years was the image of strength and endurance. A man who routinely worked twelve-hour days in the fields, now struggles to get up from a couch on his own. We are all at the mercy of time, he is just more so now.
Seeing my grandfather’s body decay has not been the hardest thing to process. That, for some reason, is easier to accept than seeing his mind dim. Our bodies after all are just blood and bone and flesh. But it is our minds that give shape to who we are. A mind that carries the thoughts, ideologies, and memories that make up our personality. So long as the mind is intact, the person carries on, but what happens when even the most foundational aspects of a person begin to waste away into oblivion? What are we then? Every memory you have, every stance you feel passionate about, every joke you find funny; these are all pillars holding up The Pantheon that is self. But as time passes, these columns begin to fall, that grand structure of you that took decades to build becomes unstable, and then, as all things that challenge time, crumbles and falls.
Lando Writes Sometimes 