The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess Page 2

  Its plasticity is thought to have developed because during its evolutionary past the plant bred with other types of sunflowers in North America and picked up from them useful varieties of critical genes. In this region the nearest relative to the common sunflower is the prairie sunflower, H. petiolaris. It can be distinguished from the other by its narrower, more lance-shaped leaves and its preference for sandy soil. Also, there’s a tall but small-blossomed sunflower that you see occasionally in people’s gardens. It differs from the rest in having an underground identity, an edible tuber, hence the scientific name H. tuberosus. This sunflower too was taken from America to Europe, and when it returned, it was known as the Jerusalem artichoke or Jewish potato. In fact, Marianne Medina, in Culebra, had the impression that Jewish potato was the nickname for all sunflowers in general. Marianne’s uncle used to grow Jewish potatoes, uprooting them in the fall and saving some of the knobby tubers to start the next year’s crop. A proud and hardy perennial, Jewish potato will not mingle its genes with the genes of an annual sunflower, even when the two are grown side by side.

  At any rate, it is easy to get carried away with genes when so much progress is being reported today in genetics. The idea of DNA has become so familiar that the metaphor may mean more than the material. To say that something is in your DNA is to enunciate a defining element of your character, an unshakable part of your core. But lurking below the metaphor is the bigger and darker idea known as genetic determinism, the belief that a person’s life is prefigured in her genetic inheritance without her being able to do anything about it. Here is an unromantic picture of genes riding roughshod over the landscapes of human potential. Genetic determinism implies that, at best, your DNA hands you a circumscribed or pigeonholed existence, and, at worst, a tragically truncated life. The original and still most powerful basis for genetic determinism is heritable disease, the kind that cut into the Medina clan.

  Still, the outcomes of a life are not predestined in the biochemical lettering of DNA. The genetic text of a plant or a person is not determinative except in those very rare instances where a vital gene is marred beyond repair. Rather, the landscape evokes the life, the particulars of the landscape. The DNA of a seed, reacting to the world where the seed fell, is directed down one path of development or another. What better illustration of the commanding role of the environment than the sun and sunflower, the plant faithfully twisting its head to follow the arc of the star? Likewise, a human being starts to be molded by the outside world even before exiting the womb and experiencing the light. In this depiction of the nature–nurture question, the landscape informs the life, and simultaneous other lives are implicit in the roads not taken, in the environments where life did not happen to take root.

  So the environment of northern New Mexico—the thin air, the mesas and sagebrush, the mountains filing by, the cold, captured creeks—surely evoked special traits in the people who settled here. Reciprocally, a plaintive Spanishness and a primitive Catholicism seeped into the sandstone hills and mingled with the mute substrate laid down by the Indians. Almost everywhere else in the region, the ore of Old New Mexico has been buried by progress, but its seams still lie on the surface in the San Luis Valley, and particularly in Culebra. Here, in this sprinkle of Hispano villages hard by la sierra, Shonnie Medina inherited a genetic mutation older than Christ (and from the same place as Christ) that determined her life. In this meeting of nature and nurture, the double helix ignored the coaxing of the landscape.

  When summer clouds appear in the morning over the Valley, they tend toward streaks and smears. As the day decides what to do, southwest winds make the clouds clump and swell with moisture. On this August afternoon, more humid than the day Shonnie married, cumulus clouds are gathering to the east. The Sangre de Cristo summons fluffy clouds to its crest like a shepherd calling for his sheep, and already there is some grumbling on high. Either it will rain hard where you are standing or not at all, for the cloudbursts are brief and focal in an alpine desert that receives only eight inches of precipitation a year. Following the rain or not, the clouds flatten out again and float more freely, backing away from the mountains and mottling the sky. For the original Puebloans, clouds and lightning were symbols of male fertility (women’s fertility being earth- and crop-centered) because of the way that clouds built to a climax and groaningly released. Clouds replenished the serpentine creeks. On quite another level, clouds represented the spirits of the dead. It was a comfort to everyone when clouds appeared.

  As you come down off the tableland, Culebra presents itself as a shadow-spattered mosaic of green rectangles. The rectangles are fields whose edges contain water; the water is being shunted from the creeks by a colonial-era system of canals, or acequias. On your right is San Francisco Creek, a tributary of Culebra Creek, flowing out of the flank of the mountains. A long mesa rises sharply to your left, directing the checkerboard flows of water toward the north. Eventually the water reaches the town of San Luis, funnels through a gap in the mesa, and turns south toward the Rio Grande. But Culebra Creek never gains the river. It is exhausted by big Anglo farms west of the mesa.

  A few miles up San Francisco Creek is a hamlet alternatively known as San Francisco and La Valley. When Shonnie was a teenager, she rode her horse, Hot Smoke, in the piñons and junipers above the village. San Francisco today consists of some small houses, a little store at an intersection, and a striking, spindly, stuccoed church. A cameo-style portrait of Saint Francis surmounts the door, and a portable confessional—a miniature replica of the church in warped plywood—rests on skids near the steps. As at the Santo Niño cemetery, the landscaping is bare and impoverished. Actually, there is no landscaping, the slats sag in the belfry bays, and the building could use some fresh white paint. The overwhelming impression is of a rickety and attenuated faith. But if you walk around and view the church from the side, it’s much more substantial, and when you peek in the window, the polished space is full of light.

  The church is paired with another building, its spiritual complement, located a little higher on the road: the morada. This low, shuttered, brown structure looks as if it wants to worm into the hillside. Part clubhouse and part haunted house, the morada hosts the local council of penitentes, who are religious devotees. The membership today is down to eight or ten aging men. A century ago, the brotherhood, a force in every village, was banned because of the zeal of the penances, which included self-flagellation. The penitentes represented all that was held to be wrong with Spain’s Catholic fervor when it was transplanted to America. A little way above the morada is a tilted, weathered cross, still used for reenacting Golgotha, and above the cross are the wild woods of the mountains, where witches once roamed.

  Back on the straight road to San Luis, it’s not far to Marianne and Joseph Medina’s restaurant. The two-story building is surrounded by hay fields. It is cupped within a fine prospect of 14,000-foot Mount Blanca, the cynosure of San Luis Valley. Technically a massif or conglomeration of peaks, Blanca steps off the axis of the Sangre de Cristo range like a well-formed pedestrian hailing a cab. The Navajo knew the mountain as Sisnaajinii (White Shell Mountain), and it was sacred to them because the first man and woman were said to have emerged from the earth here. The native people likened the features of the landscape to body parts. If the two mountain ranges clasping the Valley are comparable to a rib cage, the breasts are Blanca, the belly is the Taos Plateau, and the thighs are the Rio Grande Valley, fringed on the river banks by willow and cottonwood.

  The Medinas’ restaurant is called T-ana’s. That was Marianne’s childhood nickname, an Indian transliteration of Marianne, the T (or Tae) meaning Mary. The building is made of adobe bricks and layered with stucco. The color both inside and out is southwestern pink, a muted pink, a reserved pink dreaming of mauve. The couple built the restaurant themselves, stop-and-go. A barterer like his Hispano forebears, Joseph traded logs or did engine repair in exchange for materials or for specialty wor
k like plumbing. Shonnie had been against the project, arguing that her mother’s catering business ought to be sufficient and why did they have to expand? Married by then and living in Alamosa, Shonnie had wanted Marianne to spend more time with her on religious service instead. The young woman often got her way but not on this. Construction began in 1997, stopped when Shonnie got sick, and was completed five years after her death. Blanca on this heavy, late Saturday afternoon looked smudged, as if the mountain were painted on the horizon with ashes.

  This would be my second meeting with them. The first time, sitting with her husband in a booth at the restaurant, Marianne Medina got right to the heart of the matter. Shonnie had genetic cancer, Marianne said, by which she meant hereditary. He [the doctor] cut her . . . The lump was too dense . . . Shonnie fought them. . . . Marianne’s words spilled out defiantly. It spread . . . The cancer was always a step ahead of us. She held a piece of paper with her daughter’s genetic test result: BRCA1.185delAG. We raised them [Shonnie and her sister] healthy, Marianne insisted, signaling the discord between nature and nurture, between biology and culture.

  Marianne this time was in the kitchen, wearing a full white apron, her black hair tucked into a baseball cap. Joseph and Iona, the remaining daughter, were preparing the tables and getting ready to open for the evening. The way the restaurant is laid out, the main dining room is on one side and the booths and a sandwich counter are on the other. In the corridor between the eating areas is a large print by the regional painter Maija, who does scenes featuring Indians and wild animals and raven-haired females. In the Medinas’ picture, a young woman, reclining on a bearskin rug, a blazing fire behind her, has come up quizzically onto an elbow; her pale shoulders are bare. A yellow-eyed wolf-dog guards her. Without stretching, you could believe that Shonnie, Iona, or a younger Marianne had modeled for the painting. Superficially the two girls took after their mother, having in common black hair, snapping eyes, and high, flaring nostrils. They were like a team of ebony-maned horses. In fact, Shonnie did model occasionally, just for fun, and Marianne had too, when she was younger.

  Genetically speaking, nearly all of Shonnie was contained in the two women and the man at the restaurant. Each person had about half of her DNA. Indeed by an energetic concentration on their bodies a hologram of Shonnie could be willed into being—an extraction of Shonnie, derived from the physical features (the outward form or phenotype) and the hidden DNA (the interior program or genotype) of her three closest relatives. More or less this is how nature had created her in the first place, by making methodical yet unpredictable selections from the chromosomes of her parents.

  According to Iona, the sisters didn’t look alike. Looks—I got my Mom’s, Iona said. Shonnie, she would be told she looked more like Dad. The older sibling of the family was the known beauty, yet some people found Iona even better-looking than Shonnie. Iona herself didn’t agree, because if she had gotten her mother’s looks, she had also inherited her father’s diffident temperament. Iona smiled. ‘Heinz 57’ I call ourselves, she said. For all the ingredients, you know. We’re three or four things mixed. I have more Indian than Shonnie. And she was more Oriental-looking, yes. She had a pointy nose and uplifted eyes. Mine turn down. She had lighter hair, and her skin was porcelain-white.

  In Old New Mexico, which was never a melting pot in the democratic sense, genes met and mixed by cruel chance. Later, light skin was the phenotype on which to construct a Spanish pedigree and paper over the Indian one. Neither Iona nor her mother had any problem talking about their blended ancestry. Not quite sure of her own paternity, Marianne thought she might have Chinese blood on top of the rest—hence the slightly Asian cast to her older daughter—though you wouldn’t have remarked on any Chinese in Marianne herself. Native Americans having descended from Asians, the younger race could easily have masked the older race in Marianne. A population geneticist wouldn’t put it that way.

  If Shonnie had such a nice complexion, why was she obsessive about tanning? Year-round tans, Iona explained. That was the look for being noticed. To get it, we would go to tanning booths together or lay out in the sun. We did everything together, Iona said with a level gaze. We were best friends. You plan on having your best friend there with you always. I don’t have a best friend even today.

  On Saturday nights, if there was a decent crowd, Joseph sang karaoke. A decent crowd for T-ana’s was twenty people, but there weren’t that many when he began to set up the microphone and karaoke machine at about 6:30. West light slanted into the dining room. One of the long tables was celebrating the birthday of a family member; two couples sitting at the other tables shifted their chairs to face the low platform where the music was. For a short time in his younger days, Joseph had left the Valley and worked in the musician business, as he put it. He’d played bass in a rock band in Denver and Colorado Springs, and he had a smooth baritone.

  Now, at fifty-six, humble, devout, and close to the land, Joseph Medina was a fixture of Culebra. In his attachment to tradition he might well be the last Culebran. He was a private, self-reliant man who had made the women of his family the pillars of his life. Most people, even his wife, called him Joe because that was what his father had been called, and though not objecting to Joe, the eldest son and namesake was more formal and fastidious than his father had been. He had fair skin, brown eyes, a small mustache, and a deliberate, dapper way about him that, tonight at least, recalled Xavier Cugat, the band leader of the forties and fifties. Apart from these surface traits, Joseph was what geneticists call an obligate carrier, because, although his DNA was never tested, he had almost certainly transmitted the 185delAG mutation to his daughter. Shonnie’s mutation must have come from one parent or the other, and Joseph’s family’s history pointed to him. He never spoke of it, but he knew.

  Once in my life, Joseph crooned, closing his eyes. The song was “Solamente Una Vez,” made popular by Cugat and Bing Crosby many years ago. Moving to the middle of the floor, he adjusted the long cord of the microphone. He sang, “Am I blue? Yes, I’m blue,” the old Billie Holiday tune, and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The music sashayed from the speakers as the lyrics scrolled on the video monitor, words and sound having been digitized to play together exactly, time after time, just as DNA’s digital language, ATGC, the body’s tetragrammaton, intones the same message over and over across the generations.

  With night on the way, Culebra Peak and the rest of la sierra started to glow in anticipation. In the north window of the room, facing Mount Blanca, hovered a green neon sign whose four letters said Open. By now Joseph was glowing too. When he expressed his feelings through his singing, a smoother and more confident personality emerged. This song goes out to my beautiful wife, he announced to the diners, flicking the mike cord professionally. Now don’t go throwing anything sharp at me. Then he launched into “You’re My Everything.”

  Wearing an apron, for they alternated as waiters and singers, Iona took the microphone from her father. At thirty-four, she had graceful, broad shoulders and a youthful form, fuller than her sister’s. Shiny hair, thick lashes, and large hoop earrings brought out the Indianness of her face. I’ll sing a little Patsy Cline for you, Iona said. It was “Walkin’ after Midnight,” performed in a pretty voice. I’ll do “Crazy,” she said next. It’s your favorite, or it is until you hear me. Which was Iona selling herself short, not like Shonnie if she had been singing. Shonnie’s golden rays always swiveled toward the light.

  The atmosphere in the dining room was bronze. Joseph squinted at the screen and sweetly sang the Righteous Brothers. “Are you still mine?” . . . followed by “When a Man Loves a Woman,” his face perhaps too flushed for someone who never took a drink. Then a medley of Mexican songs, which leaned heavily on four basic chords and lurched forward in three-quarter time.

  The sun had gone from the room. Putting on his glasses, Joseph sang with the cord fully extended, facing the karaoke machine instead of his few remainin
g customers. He sang pretty much for himself, comforting himself.

  At nine Iona switched off the Open sign. Marianne came out unglamorously from the kitchen in her apron and ballcap, and sat down at an empty table. Eight years had passed, and all three missed her terribly.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  PREDESTINATION

  Joseph Medina’s grandfather on his mother’s side was named Luis Martinez. Born in the early 1890s—the exact date is not given—Luis grew up in San Francisco and the neighboring Culebra hamlet of San Pablo.

  In 1914, Luis Martinez married sixteen-year-old Andrellita Medina of nearby San Luis. Immediately there are grounds for confusion because you see that the name Medina appears on both sides of Joseph’s family tree. Crisscrossing lineages are the rule in northern New Mexico and San Luis Valley. This may explain New Mexicans’ interest in genealogy—more than a hobby, it’s a way to keep things straight before proceeding to the altar. Maria Clara Martinez, who lives in San Luis and who put together a pedigree of Luis Martinez’s descendants, has seventy thousand names in her computer, reaching back to the founding of the colony and beyond. Although many Hispanos are able to link themselves to forebears in Spain, usually by way of a conquistador and other notable figures of the New Mexico colony, Clara Martinez can do this for whole communities. It doesn’t take many generations for her to prove that almost everyone in Culebra is related by blood.

  But to get back to the young marrieds, Luis and Andrellita. Their first child arrived quickly, in January 1915. The baby, Pedro, did not live long, and the couple would lose other children as the years scrolled by. In those days, when infants perished, especially if they died before they were christened, they tended not to make it into the church records that are the mainstay of genealogists. The Martinez descendants don’t agree on the number of children the couple had—nineteen is the highest number you hear, which includes a set of twins who died young. Dorothy Martinez, Joseph Medina’s mother, was born in 1932 and is still living. Dorothy is at her son’s restaurant today, sitting in the front row of chairs in a red dress and white shawl, bright as a button, surrounded by many relatives. She’s the oldest of the clan present.