In the novel “A good marriage”, Stephen King tells the story of a twenty-year marriage in which everything is going well until she discovers that he is not who she had imagined. “We don’t know who we slept with,” the writer warned.
Finding out about your partner’s DNA analysis has the thrill of a mystery novel: “Who is she?” In my case, it is also fun to imagine how their genes could differ from mine, whose analysis showed that they are predominantly Iberian (66%), with a large percentage of Celtic genes (10%), accompanied by others from southern Europe ( Italy and Greece, 6%), a significant percentage of Central European Jews (5%), and a smaller percentage (1%) of North Africans. The different countries and probable origins confused me at first, but then we came up with a theory: Spain and its history suffice to reasonably explain my origin.
We know about my partner that his father is from Córdoba and that his mother is from Salamanca, that his complexion is white, his eyes so big and his hair so black that it seems to have escaped from a painting by Julio Romero de Torres. Does the fact that her father is Andalusian predict that her percentage of North African genes will be significantly higher than mine? It is known that the frequency of these genes in Spaniards is around 10%, but that it can reach 20%. And what will happen to the Celtic genes? Will these show up in your genome? Before doing the analysis, we speculated that there would not be a Celtic percentage and that North African genes would have a strong impact on the total pool.
Would Ashkenazi genes have representation in their genome? We think not. The presence of non-Sephardic genes had been the big surprise hidden in my DNA, but why would it have to happen again?
In the end, he paid the 80 euros, submitted the analysis and we set out to look through the lens of his DNA into a remote and unknown past. The first result confirmed the bets: 84.3% Iberian and 0% Celtic. There was also no scare with another of the percentages: 3.5% Italian. To Caesar what belongs to Caesar: Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius were Roman emperors and were Andalusian, and Seneca Cordovan.
And the “Arab” genes? Downside surprise, the percentage is 2.9%; below average. Once again it was confirmed that, despite the centuries that the Arabs were in Spain, the mixture of races was not very important, and that the genetic repercussion in the Spaniards is much less than the scientific-cultural one. So that mysterious face and sorrowful soul had no Arab roots. Julio Romero de Torres painted the truth, but the lyrics of the paso doble and its stereotypes are questioned by DNA.
Everything was on the normal path, and it was disappointing that the Ashkenazi genes (2.7%) appeared in a minimal percentage in their genome. But since they had been found in mine, they were now greeted with a “me, too”, rather than a “weird…”.
The unexpected came from the North and the South. From the North, because 5.2% of its genes come from Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The Vikings came from those lands. We knew about the legendary pirates of the sea that they had arrived in Asturias one summer, and that the first town in Spain they invaded was probably Gijón. We also knew the legend that perhaps Cudillero had been “founded” by the Nordics… After Ramiro I rejected the invasion and returned them to the sea, the invading ships headed south, took Cádiz and went up the Guadalquivir to Seville , where they remained for some time, causing great destruction to conquer it and creating the opportunity for the existence of Scandinavian genes in Andalusia. Was Astrid called the one with the flowery gate, the one with the happy guitar, the one with the Spanish carnation? Will the genome put the folklore of races in its place?
The surprise was greater with the presence of genes (1.4%) originating in Nigeria: an unexpected trip to sub-Saharan Africa. The literature on African slaves in Spain exists, but the volume of information grows enormously when the search focuses on Portugal. There, in some of its cities, slaves from Africa, including from the Nigerian coast, could make up 1 to 2% of the population. In addition, interracial marriage was not prohibited, nor was it uncommon (a tolerant legislation and a culture that would be maintained in Brazil). Can the origins of my wife’s mother in the province of Salamanca, which at one time was even part of Lusitania and in whose villages Portuguese is still spoken, explain the appearance of genetic markers from Nigeria in her genome?
How many different suns have tanned your skin? How many gods did her ancestors worship? We spend part of our lives looking anxiously into the past, wondering about what might have been and was not, “plodding along, like ships sailing against the current, constantly regressing into the past,” as Fitzgerald concluded. This is how adolescence and youth disappear from us, and thus, if strength, fantasy and illusion persist, we will use part of old age. And yet, the study of the genome, this internal journey, this very strong introspection provides us with new information about our identity. That information, beyond the misrepresented breeze that blew in a hazy yesterday, is closer to the truth. The genetic search, perhaps more real than the other and perhaps just as necessary, with its disturbing intrusion into a shining and dark past at the same time, encourages us to imagine what we were looking for when under different suns we lived the lives of the others who populate our selves. .
Who do I sleep with?, who is she? I wake up and look in the dark at the lunar pallor of the oval of her face. Sleepless and fascinated, I think that, by my side, in the perfumed gloom of the bedroom, rests a deep and wonderful enigma. Iberian, Italian, Arab, Viking sailors and African slaves mixed in the genomic blender of time to form a woman whom I will never fully know and who, fleeing or not from the feeling of a couplet, continues to make my dreams come true more and more. interesting.