Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier Read Free Book Online

nocturnal appetites. The girls of Zacadecas are like points on the werewolf's clock. Esmeralda, who at seventeen is the eldest, is barely ten o'clock. You can see patches of dark downy hair at the edges of her chin and cheeks and around the ear area, almost as though she were standing in the shadows beneath the brutal sun of summer. It's enough to mark her as a member of her rare tribe, but not enough to inhibit her verve or keep her from dating a handsome selection of boys.
Maria, the toddler, stands at the eleven o'clock mark. Her cheeks, her chin, and the top of her forehead are streaked with dark, fine, slightly wavy hair, which will darken and thicken with age. She looks as though

     

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she has bangs growing up from her eyebrows toward the scalp. Her eyes are dark and bright and full of joy. She has not yet learned to feel shame.
Rosa, fifteen years old, nearly qualifies as the werewolf at midnight. Much of her face the cheeks, chin, forehead, nose is covered by hair; there is far more hair than skin to be seen. She is in fact hairier than a chimpanzee or a gorilla, both of which lack hair around the cheeks, nose, and eyes. Luis Figuera, of the University of Guadalajara, who is studying hypertrichosis, told me that when he first met Rosa he was startled by her appearance, but that after talking with her for a while he stopped noticing it. Eventually, he felt confident enough to ask her if he could touch her face, and she agreed. "It was like stroking the head of a baby," he said. "It was like petting a cat." Rosa's facial hair is thicker than that of any other female in her family. It is almost as dense as that of some of her male relatives, in whom the congenital condition finds its fullest expression. Two of the men earn their living in circus sideshows, where they are displayed as "dog men" or ''people of the forest." Others shave their entire face, twice a day. Neither Rosa nor her older sister shaves; they are afraid that shaving will make the hair grow back coarser and darker. Instead, Rosa keeps herself largely hidden from the world. When she's not in school or at the marketplace, she stays indoors. She prefers to keep the shutters closed. She is gentle and shy and doesn't expect to have much of a social or love life.
People commonly dream about being caught naked in public, and they wake up embarrassed. I imagine Rosa dreaming of losing her hair, every last dark muffling lock on her body. In her dreams she is neither ashamed nor afraid, but instead feels free, able to float above the flesh of earth and fate, her upturned face as smooth as a stone.
The spectrum of hair growth seen on the girls of Zacadecas illustrates an outstanding feature of female heritage. My father thought the male had the edge in variation, the chromosomal complexity. To the contrary. It is the woman who is the greater mosaic, a patchwork of her past. Every person has two copies of each of the twenty-three chromosomes, one from mother, one from father. For twenty-two sets of those chromosomes, both versions operate. They make us who we are, an idiosyncratic porridge of our parents his Roman nose, her rotten teeth, the worst and best of their mediocrities and charms.
For us women, something different from the rest of our genetic

     

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legacy happens to our sex chromosomes. The two X chromosomes come together in the formation of the embryo, and as with all the chromosomes, copies of each are apportioned to each cell of the growing baby. But then, during our embryonic unfolding, each cell makes its own decision: do we want Mom, or do we prefer Father? Will we keep the maternal X chromosome active, or the paternal? Once the decision is made and usually it is made randomly the cell shuts down the other X, snaps it off chemically. It is a dramatic event, the shutting down of thousands and thousands of genes aligned along the entire length of a chromosome. It is like one of the great New York City blackouts, when