I want to write this note with care, because I know—I can almost sense it, maybe I want to, or need to believe it—that my grandmothers are watching me. That they gossip about how I get through my daily routines, how I make my soups and stews, or how I rearrange the fragments of memory so they’ll fit. The way a grown man does on the brink of decline. A long time ago I shared this photograph of the two of them, even though there’s one person too many in it. The one on the right, Tía Lola, I never knew. Marina and Jacinta I knew as well, or as poorly, as a child can, or a teenager with his head in the clouds. They’ve been gone a long time.

Everything that is organic, and everything that comes from it, sooner or later falls prey to time. Perhaps this image still survives somewhere on paper. But not for much longer. Someone will gather it up with a lot of others and throw it out, all tangled up with the junk and the trash. Luckily we managed to digitize it, and today I could print it again and again if I wanted to. I could even recreate it with this new artificial intelligence and give it a new, false life. That’s the one good thing about age: memories get tangled up with dreams, and wishes, and fantasies, and there’s no longer any way to put them back in their drawer. No one cares about the muddled memories of the old.

The last time I shared it, along with a piece of writing no one will ever be able to read again, it got stuck in the limbo of canceled accounts.

On August 21, 2021, just before dawn, a cascade of Facebook messages started pouring into my phone, asking me again and again to confirm my account, to enter my passwords—a whole string of riddles that my mind, still asleep and befuddled, couldn’t solve. They asked me to prove I was the owner of my account, which is like a house we walk into just by pushing the door open. And I felt lost, trying to open it with a ring of a hundred keys.

Several people had reported my account, who knows why. To get it quarantined, to take it from me, to keep it for themselves? It was nothing much; I must have had fewer than a thousand friends. Its only worth was the pile of comments I’d traded for almost a decade with dozens of invisible companions. And yet there was a lot of life tucked away in there, a lot of experiences, memories. They told me it would be suspended for a month, then told me to wait a lifetime, and then it simply vanished into cyberspace. I lost hundreds of photos.

The one I want to post again is the one I mentioned, with my two grandmothers, both from my mother’s side, who saw me through my childhood and into my teens. Jacinta, in the middle, was pure lightness. I never once saw her upset or sulking. A devout Catholic, she took me to church every single day of my life until I started grade school and joined that Moncadistas Pioneers* nonsense. Children of Satan, my grandmother called them. And she’d cross herself.

Marina—on the left—never taught me to cook, but she schooled my palate with dishes beyond reproach. Always at home, always in the kitchen. I could have learned so much from her, but you’re a real fool until after twenty, and until after thirty, and forty.

I know they’re there, right where they always knew they’d be after lives so virtuous they put today’s to shame. Thanks to them, I don’t have one homeland, but two. And even if Spain today is a farce ruled by the cretins of political correctness, it still feeds you well and gifts you beautiful villages. On nights in the north you can savor the wind and the damp cold you need to truly understand the quiet of drawing inward, sheltered from the elements.

Like everyone, I think I had the best grandmothers anyone could have. And I see so much of myself in them, pointing out the children of Beelzebub wherever I spot them. It grieves me deeply to know their remains lie beneath the scorched stones of the Colón Cemetery. Disrespected, watching everything dead die all over again, watching everything fall apart. What I wouldn’t give to gather up their bones and carry them back to where they were born. I could have paid them more attention. I never asked them a single thing about the Atlantic.

*The Moncadistas Pioneers take their name from the 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks, the opening act of Fidel Castro’s revolution. In Cuba, almost every child joins the José Martí Pioneer Organization in first grade, at a school ceremony where they are given a blue neckerchief, often on October 8, the anniversary of Che Guevara’s death. From then on, the neckerchief is part of the school uniform, and every morning before class the children recite the pledge: “¡Pioneros por el comunismo, seremos como el Che!” (Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che!). Six-year-olds, swearing to be like a guerrilla. Joining is not formally required, but the few who stay out are left out of school activities and looked at as strange.