By Marylou Tousignant

Sunday, December 27, 1998; Page B05

In the photograph that was handed out at her funeral Mass in October, Elena Borges is looking directly at the camera, her eyes twinkling with joy, her trademark smile uninhibited and all-encompassing. She is dancing with Henry, her husband of 46 years, and he is gazing adoringly at her.

Perhaps there is no more fitting way to remember Borges, who friends say devoted her life to her husband, their seven children and, in recent years, seven grandchildren, as well as their extended Cuban American family that now numbers in the hundreds.

"Even though it was a huge family, she always had time for each of us," said her son Ignacio, recalling lengthy phone conversations with his mother that, "even at age 40, were very comforting."

Borges died Oct. 5 after suffering a heart attack two days earlier at church, which she attended almost daily. She was 67. An emigrant who left Cuba with her husband and four young children in 1959, she was well-known in Northern Virginia's Hispanic community, particularly in Falls Church, where she had been a successful real estate agent for three decades.

"She always had a smile on her face," said Ardis Morriss, her friend and neighbor for 38 years. "No matter how bad things got, she always looked on the bright side."

Daniel O'Flaherty, her onetime boss at Mary Price Realtor, remembered Borges as "Type-A on the inside, churning and running. But on the outside, she was a serene princess."

Real estate ran in her blood, he said, and she was well-respected for her professional ethics.

"She was really ahead of her time because there was no glass ceiling for her," O'Flaherty said. "She came from Cuba with four little kids . . . and had to start a whole new life here. She had maids there, and here she went to work -- a supermom who raised her kids, had a very loving marriage and was one of the top-producing [Realtors] in Northern Virginia."

Marta Wyatt, executive director of the Hispanic Committee of Virginia, often referred clients looking to buy their first home to Borges. "If it was a poor family, she would do anything she could to help them find a house that was affordable," Wyatt said. "It would make her day to help steer them to the right lender for the best deal."

Many Cuban immigrants turned to her again and again, and in later years their children did the same when they went house-hunting, O'Flaherty said. "That's why today there is a large Cuban community in the Falls Church area . . . because of Elena."

A child of relative affluence, she grew up the older daughter of a prominent lawyer in Havana. She met Henry, an architect in business with his father, when she was 19; he was 24 and was immediately smitten by the dark-haired beauty.

"I told somebody that whoever marries her will be very happy," he said. Two years later, that someone was him.

After Fidel Castro took over Cuba, the young couple fled their homeland, leaving behind a new house Henry had just built in Havana for his growing family. Today, it is the embassy of Sri Lanka.

Although Borges came to love her adopted country, her daughter Maria believes she never quite got over leaving Cuba. A song from home, or a memory, could bring a tear to her eye.

Once settled in Fairfax, the family opened their home to other Cubans coming to Washington in search of a new life. Elena, pregnant with her fifth, then sixth child, would cook her famous black beans and escort her guests around. In recent years, she and her sister, Carmen Fernandez, taught sewing to young Hispanics.

"She was an example by the way she lived," Fernandez said. "You always hear that, that you should teach by example, but very few people actually do it. Elena did, in her moments of joy and in her moments of pain and suffering."

The night before her family said goodbye to Borges, they gathered around and lit candles in her memory. They lit them from the center outward because, they said, "she was and will always be our center."