argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Herennes
June Fernández 2018ko apirilaren 10

I must confess a secret: my second surname is Casete. Yes, Casete, like the ribbons, but with a “s” and a “t”. Many friends and family have encouraged me to take this curious last name out of the closet, but it is useless. I can hear the pleas of a teenager who still fears mocking on me. That's why it's going to cost you to find a public trail of my second last name.

In 2012, I made an exception, when I learned that the 50th anniversary of the creation of the cassete tapes was celebrated. I wrote an article on my blog at the time, and a journalist from Euskadi Radio read it to me and did an interview. My grandfather, Isidro Casete, was proud.

The importance of tapes in my life should be enough to claim my surname. The first proof that I was called a journalist -- cassettari -- is a radiocassette taped radio show at the age of 6 at my grandmother's house. When I was 8 years old, I won a competition in Bizkaia Irratia and in the radio cassette that they gave me, I recorded my favorite songs from Euskadi Gaztea. However, only when I was in summer in Boiro did I feel proud of my cassette name. I liked the Casete family very much: noisy, juerguists, slender, very well known in the town.

Aitit always says that his father, the Galician shoemaker Ventura Casete, was ironic in responding to the birth of the ribbons: "Wow! Now they sell us cheaply!” Until then, it had been nothing more than a strange French last name, a little Aquitan, according to the investigation of a fir. He has now become a “vintage” of surnames. My younger cousin hasn't had too much fun at school, and at most, he's going to have to migrate to the mp3 format. According to data from the National Statistics Institute, only 28 people carry this last name. Like tapes, we also have an expiration date.

When I was growing up studying the list of my last names – without a trace of the Basque surnames; “Casete, that is a good last name for a mockup!”, a friend once told me – I found out that my great-grandfather’s name was Ventura Casete Casete. Double pletine! Her mother had been single. I had always imagined that an impertinent man had let himself get pregnant and had not worried.

Well, I’ve been “flushed” like the cassettes, but I needed to give this explanation so I could tell the next story. When I was growing up studying the list of my last names – without a trace of the Basque surnames; “Casete, that is a good last name for a mockup!”, a friend once told me – I found out that my great-grandfather’s name was Ventura Casete Casete. Double pletine! Her mother had been single. I had always imagined that an impertinent man had let himself get pregnant and had not worried. But recently my grandfather told me the true version: his grandmother, my great-great-great-grandmother, had no calling as a wife; instead of getting married, he had four children with four holidays. When my grandfather made a travesura and his grandmother rebuked him by saying, "What have you done, Isidro? ", Isidro responded maliciously: “And you, grandmother, what have you done?”

When I remembered at Christmas, Dad explained to me that the protagonist of this story was not Ventura Casete's mother, but her maternal grandmother. See if you don't miss this knot: Isidro's two grandmothers were single! And both of them by their own decision! Or, at least, my grandfather reminds you of that.

Somehow, I believed that the story of violations of family moral norms started with my mother, because in the 1980s, civil marriage was celebrated and then divorced. When I imagined the lives of my grandmother, my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother, I didn't suspect an apex of rebellion. Breaking this prejudice can also be a good reason to claim all my surnames, all my ancestors.