The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  Spanish Catholicism in the sixteenth century looks unbelievably chauvinistic and harsh. As if making a last-gasp stand against the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, Spain was the arch-reactionary of Europe. Reactionary in rejecting Protestantism, in battling Islam, in rooting out Jews, in conquering and converting Native Americans, and yet each of the cleansing, cauterizing campaigns was conducted in the name of Jesus Christ, and that is the hardest thing about those Catholics to understand, let alone identify with. Present-day sensibility is dismayed by the medieval Catholic mind.

  Witchcraft and enchantment have to be factored in. Awareness and respect for the dark side of their minds are key to understanding how these Catholics felt, or at least to feeling how they must have thought. Prescientific Spaniards believed in witchery and in the witches’ evil taskmaster, Satan, who was walking about half-seen on the earth, fleeting in the air, and interfering in human affairs. The devil sent witches to ruin people’s crops, sicken their children, and torment their bodies and minds. Outside the arena of popes, princes, and prelates, the theological politicians who directed the Inquisition and other historical forces, the lion’s share of Catholics, ignorant and afraid, channeled their anxieties through folk religion. Folk Catholicism was a superstitious, populist reaction to the war that was underway between Christ’s forces and those of the devil.

  Superstition—arguably the wrong word. Is belief in Christ and the holy works of saints superstition? As science gained strength in Europe, it exorcised the evil half of the dueling pair, which left God solely in charge of the supernatural realm. In the meantime, since the boundary between the natural and the supernatural did not exist or could not be located, armoring yourself with Christian superstition was a normal, perhaps even rational, response to the combat between God and Satan. Similarly the crucifixes, rattles, relics, and effigies on display in the San Luis Museum’s morada were church-sanctioned shields against the dark side.

  What would the Inquisition have made of Shonnie and her coreligionists in the Jehovah’s Witnesses? Their rejection of political authority would have been a problem, though they would not have been subversives. Their Christian superstitions (they reject Darwin and evolution) may well have passed muster. The Witnesses do fundamentally accept the reality of Satan, without believing in his witches; they think the devil has adjusted his methods to the scientific age. It is time to debrief a Witness.

  Guests at El Convento take breakfast in a small, handsome dining room. Coming up the walk to have breakfast this morning is Chavela (Chavelita) Medina Salcido, who is Joseph’s sister and Shonnie’s aunt. Cool and composed, Chavela was the first in the family to take up the Jehovah’s Witnesses, about thirty years ago, and her example encouraged the others. She was the second in the family, after Shonnie, to find out that she’d inherited the breast-cancer mutation. Her expression as she got out of her car today was pensive. She volunteered that she didn’t like to come to San Luis because the memories made her sad. My memories of childhood, she said unexpectedly. My father was an angry . . . abusive . . . alcoholic who beat my mother every day.

  Chavela’s sister Lupita has a similar memory of her father. Why was he so mean? Lupita wondered. He beat her up for no reason, for jealousy, I guess, Lupita said. But Joe U. Medina had a generous side as well, according to Joseph, the eldest and most loyal son, and Wanda, another sibling, agreed. He was kindhearted, he’d give you the shirt off his back, she said. He was just—who’s that guy?—Jekyll and Hyde when he was drinking. Eventually his wife, Dorothy, fled and divorced him.

  Joe U. was never a Witness. He belonged to the San Francisco morada, but was a listless Catholic. He seems to have cared mainly about the camaraderie of the penitentes and his social standing in the brotherhood. That time when Marianne quit the morada, Shonnie clutching her right hand and Iona her left, Joe U. had been angry. He criticized Joseph, saying, Smack her and make her come back. My father-in-law, Mr. Macho, sniffed Marianne at the memory. As a boy, Joseph had been beaten by his father, and as a teenager he had paid others in kind, but he wouldn’t bad-mouth his father today and he never struck Marianne.

  So here was Chavela Medina Salcido, cool, composed, and neatly dressed for the appointment. A waitress in Alamosa, aged fifty-one. Five children from two marriages. A grandmother through her eldest child, Shannon. Became a Jehovah’s Witness because she liked reading the Bible and finding out for herself what was true, as opposed to being told by a priest. That level Medina gaze, which soaks you up without being impolite.

  About her niece, Chavela said, She was gorgeous, beautiful, tall. Shonnie was the perfect model of a young lady. When she’d be going door-to-door, she’d be well dressed. And bubbly. She loved talking to people about the Bible.

  Well, how do you handle going door-to-door when people are rude to you?

  You shake the dust off your feet, shrugged Chavela, quoting Luke 9:5. The part where Jesus calls the disciples together and, as Luke puts it, gives them authority over all the demons and the power to cure sicknesses. As a tough-love initiation of the disciples, Jesus sends them out in pairs preaching from village to village, and they have to go with absolutely no possessions or money. They are told to depend on charity for their food and shelter. They shake dust from their feet to be a witness, or in other Bibles, a testimony, against the people rejecting them. The dust on their feet was the only personal item they could spare. Franciscan friars and Carmelite nuns as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses have zeroed in on this part of the Gospels for instruction on evangelism.

  Chavela shook her head sadly when she was asked about Shonnie’s cancer. You wonder why something like that happens to good people, she said.

  Do you believe that a disease like that was God’s will?

  She sat up straight in the dark dining room. All the illnesses that we have, she replied, they don’t come from God. We know that Satan targets good people sometimes. To discourage them and their parents, so they’ll blame God. It’s not God. God doesn’t try anybody with evil.

  What about Job?

  Chavela spoke without hesitation: God gave Satan permission to put Job through his trials. God told Satan, Just don’t take his life.

  The Book of Job is the only one in the Hebrew Bible to probe the problem of deliberate evil. Well versed on Job, Jehovah’s Witnesses point out that the case was exceptional—God decided to withhold his protection from this impeccable man because of Satan’s very serious challenge. Sadistically Job was made sick but through fidelity to Jehovah he recovered. He prevailed and was rewarded. As far as the rest of humanity is concerned, Witnesses believe that the origin of sickness, like the origin of sin, can be charged to Adam and Eve. Those two humans had perfectly healthy, no, immortally healthy bodies until they disobeyed God. Then they became defective, so a Witness document states, and got sick and died, and passed on the imperfection to their children. Death and sinfulness are hereditary. What Does the Bible Really Teach?, a booklet that Shonnie carried with her door-to-door, likens mankind’s original sin to “a terrible inherited disease from which no one can escape.”

  In 2002, Chavela was prodded by Marianne Medina, her sister-in-law, to meet with Jeffrey Shaw, the genetic counselor. The two women drove to Colorado Springs together, each bringing their daughters. Marianne didn’t merit BRCA testing because the breast and ovarian cancers were on Joseph’s side of the family. Her daughter, Iona, manifestly was at risk because of Shonnie, but Iona asked for more time to decide. Shannon, Chavela’s daughter, was advised to wait for her mother’s test result, because Shannon would be a candidate for testing only if her mother was a carrier.

  Of the four, then, only Chavela went forward, and after providing a blood sample she learned that she was positive for 185delAG. She had thought it best not to use her real name on the test application, in case there might be trouble with her life-insurance policy in the future. A year later, when she had a hysterectomy due to a
n unrelated gynecological issue, the surgeon recommended that Chavela have her ovaries removed at the same time, since BRCA carriers have a much greater chance of developing ovarian cancer than other women do. Removing the ovaries lessens the chance of breast cancer too. Chavela agreed and immediately was plunged into menopause, the normal complication after the operation. Nobody told me about that, she said.

  I have the gene, Chavela continued calmly. But I haven’t had [breast] cancer. I don’t know what I am going to do. Because I’ve had many children—here she named her daughter and her five sons in order—I was told I may not get it. My mom had fourteen kids and never had cancer, and maybe that’s why. Shaw, the counselor, evidently had told Chavela that pregnancy and breastfeeding disrupt a woman’s estrogen cycles in a protective manner. The breast tissue receives fewer doses of estrogen overall, and that’s good for warding off tumors. Conversely, it might be mentioned, this being El Convento, that nuns, not bearing any children, have higher rates of breast cancer than other women. The observation about nuns and breast cancer dates to the time of Saint Teresa of Avila.

  The big counseling session by Shaw with the Medina-Martinez clan had taken place at T-ana’s the day before. The meeting yesterday made me think I should be prepared, Chavela said. A lot of times we don’t think it’s going to happen and we push it away. I have been putting off getting my mammogram. Maybe we should have a girls’ day out and all get screened. Shonnie’s aunt was saying the right things, and if a little slow to act on them, she had proceeded the way that scientific medicine tells women to do when they are surrounded by heritable cancer. Talk to your relatives, consult a genetic counselor, get tested, have surgery to reduce your risk, stay vigilant; but then Chavela threw a curveball into the proceedings.

  With the same rational gaze, she explained that she had sought extra protection for her health with a machine called the Bio-Enhancement Feedback Unit. The BEFEU [Beef-ee-you] machine, she called it. I have a toxin machine, she said. You put your foot in a bucket with water and black, oily stuff comes out of your body. Internet research revealed that the devices also go by the names Aqua Detox and Aqua-Chi machines, or ionic foot baths, and by the time you pay for the copper rings and add-ons and extra filters, you have run up some real money. As Chavela indicated, you plug the thing in and sit there until the water around your feet discolors.

  It was discouraging to hear about the BEFEU because it evoked Shonnie. During her sickness, Shonnie hadn’t used that particular machine but she wouldn’t have been skeptical of it. Recently her aunts Wanda and Lupita had borrowed the device. The three Medina sisters were passing the BEFEU among their households, two of them doing it for insurance, but Wanda, who might well have a tumor, was using it for treatment.

  Sensing a chill across the table, Chavela knew a question was coming about Shonnie and her unconventional cancer therapy. Either way it wouldn’t have worked, she said flatly. It wasn’t the alternative medicine. It was not catching it in time. Chavela believed that the tumor had simply spread too fast.

  Around midnight, after the dogs have concluded their conversation, the cattle can be heard lowing from the Vega, the communal pastureland of San Luis that is watered by the acequias. The cows sound uneasy.

  Saint Teresa of Avila wrote that learning to pray properly is like watering a garden with lighter and lighter effort. At first it’s heavy, as you must lift and haul the water. But when you attain what Teresa called the third stage of effort, the spiritual schlep is over and prayer flows as easily as from a stream or spring, “although some [work] is required to channel the water the right way. But now the Lord wants to help the gardener so badly that he almost becomes the gardener.” The fourth and final stage is soaking rain, just drinking God in to your parched world, if that joy can be imagined.

  And still later, in a nameless hour, a chorus of coyotes, yipping and drifting closer to the Vega from the mountains. Joseph says that the coyotes can be triggered by the siren of a police cruiser, chasing miscreants into the Culebra night.

  Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, a happy girl, a good Catholic girl, grew up in the Spanish city of Avila during the first half of the sixteenth century. Her paternal grandfather, who had converted from Judaism, had done well in business in Toledo. Later he admitted to Judaizing, coming forward voluntarily, and for punishment the Inquisition paraded him through the streets with his children, all dressed in shameful yellow. In the next generation, Teresa’s seemingly shell-shocked father married an Old Christian and kept a low profile in life. Teresa herself grew up with verve, confidence, and wealth, the stain of her ancestry having been wiped away.

  Teresa was very good-looking, and coquettish, and she loved to show off her form at dancing. Her feet especially were admired, even after she had become a nun. For all the while that she had sparkled socially, she felt a religious calling, and when it came time for her to be married off, headstrong Teresa defied her father’s wishes and entered a convent in Avila. From the age of twenty until her death at sixty-seven, she spent most of her time strategically behind a wall.

  Strategic, because monasticism offered a haven from the concerns and unruly demands of the day. As the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno writes, “It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more free.” At the end of Moradas, her last major piece of writing, Teresa describes her spiritual interior, her soul, as a cloister in its own right. The soul was a roomy place with concentric corridors and hidden chambers, and God dwelled at its center. Addressing her sisters in the Carmelite order, she wrote, “I think you will find consolation and delight in this interior castle, where without having to ask permission from your superiors you will be able to go inside and walk around wherever you want.”

  In midcareer Teresa became a reformer of the Carmelites. Inner reform initially, as she resolved to live in holy poverty. Chafed by rough wool habits, walking barefoot or in thin hemp sandals, she and her sisters survived on alms. They plotted against the needs of their bodies and flogged themselves in penance if their bodies complained. As much as feasible, they cut their contact with the outside world. The paradoxical responsibility of the Discalced (Shoeless) Carmelites was to shine the light of their chosenness on all of mankind, yet this was a duty they could perform indirectly, by obeying the rules of their insular order.

  Next, external reform. The idea of asceticism grew strong in Spain, as it periodically does in the history of the Catholic Church. (Saint Cajetan went down the same path a little earlier in Italy.) From her spiritual garrison in Avila, Teresa made forays into Castile to establish new convents. Her second convent was at Medina, about fifty miles away. Most cities preferred nuns of Old Christian stock, but Medina was sympathetic to conversos. Teresa went door-to-door throughout the province, gathering housing and support for her austere foundations. A Franciscan missionary who was just back from saving souls in the Americas encouraged her plan.

  In founding her string of missions Teresa turned out to be a good politician, which may be half the battle to becoming a saint. She was by turns very practical and very mystical. When her body was writhing, even levitating, it was said, during her rapturous encounters with God, she was always careful, afterward, to minimize the experiences. She would publicly doubt her ecstasies, worried that Satan might have tricked her while she was entranced. For it was a trap to fall too easily into love with God; besides, the Inquisition might challenge it. During Teresa’s most celebrated rapture, rendered later in painting and sculpture, a cherub or seraph plunges a red-hot spear into her heart over and over—the sweetest pain, as she describes it, penetrating to her entrails and leaving her fired with love for God. Over the top as this may be, Teresa had a brisk, clinical way with words, as if she were reporting an event quite separate from herself. If a mystic is a person who develops a private ro
ute to the divine and wishes to draw a map that people can follow, she must have an unusually rational mind.

  The comparison that’s being drawn here between Teresa and Shonnie Medina will not stand heavy scrutiny, admittedly. Pure believer cloistered in her mountain valley, superstitious converso, creature of her windowless Kingdom Hall, Shonnie left no record of her spiritual development. She was not a nun, nor did her devotion lead her to imitate Christ. The arrow that pierced her chest came not from God but from Lady Death’s bow, and was aimed not at her soul but at its analog, DNA. For DNA is science’s answer to the soul, is it not? Liberal theologians have toyed with the notion that DNA is the missing link between the body and the soul, which have been held separate in Christian thought since Teresa’s time. DNA both inhabits the flesh and informs the spirit. By the same token you could say that the goal of Teresa’s ardent, analytical writing was to construct a phenotype of the soul.

  The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe that the soul is independent or can be cut loose from the body, or can be parsed in any way. Soul, they think, is just another term for life or organism. Man does not have a soul—he is a soul. This squares with the concept of soul in the Hebrew Bible, the body and its animating spirit as one. Set the soul aside then. It is through the suffering of two imperfect bodies, Teresa’s and Shonnie’s, that the most fruitful comparisons may be drawn.

  Shortly after deciding to become a nun, the young Teresa fell gravely ill and was bedridden and paralyzed for nearly three years. The learned doctors couldn’t help, nor could a folk-medicine practitioner whom her family consulted. Regaining her strength, Teresa was bothered for the rest of her life by nonspecific symptoms, an array of pains and nauseas and noises in the head. These seemed to synchronize with her accomplishments, so that, as one of her biographers remarks, “[T]he busier she became, the more her infirmities got in her way.”