Carlos, the switched city-raised twin, called La Paz “nothing and nothing and nothing,” but not in a negative sense. He meant that the small town was simply far from the center of things, “another reality.” This may explain why William, the switched country-raised twin, insisted that we see the home and town where he grew up.
They lived somewhere between the tiny towns of Vereda El Recreo and Vereda Colon, another world in our eyes. No one had computers, and the town had no paved roads or grocery stores. The twins’ house had no running water, or any plumbing at all, and stood surrounded by trees, plants, and other wildlife. The house now belonged to Chelmo, one of the older La Paz brothers, because their parents had moved a three-hour walk away to La Guayabita, an area closer to stores and neighbors. The journey to Chelmo’s farm is one that people in the area make without hesitation because they know no other options. Even small children scoot up the uneven hills and wade through muddy puddles without fear of falling. Crowded buses and fast cars disturb people from La Paz when they venture into Bogotá or the nearest big city, Bucaramanga, while city kids in Bogotá clamor to sit in the front seat to watch their world pass by. And city kids, used to buses, cars, and taxis, complain about having to walk more than half a mile.
Despite its isolation the areas around La Paz have a rich and complex culture. Residents celebrate the annual Festival for the Virgen del Carmen, the patron saint of all vehicles, curious because most people in the surrounding areas do not have cars since there are no roads, although some drive motorbikes. They also hold various religious services and political demonstrations for peace, but the festivals and other events are hours away and happen only occasionally.
Getting There
Traveling from Bogotá to the twins’ childhood home in La Paz is challenging. Under normal conditions it means a five-hour ride by highway to Vélez, followed by a one-hour drive to La Paz through rough woods and over large rocks and muddy streams in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, then a one-hour hike through the same treacherous terrain to the house. Horseback is an option for the final leg of the trip, but most people who live there just walk. Residents say the walk takes fifteen to thirty minutes, but while we walked, they kept greatly underestimating the time remaining, perhaps to reassure first-time visitors to the area like us. This is understandable because the people in La Paz are used to getting around on foot. In contrast, city folk tend to overestimate distances and arrival times, probably because they include walking speed and traffic in their calculations.1
Being There
We were headed to a barbeque at William and Wilber’s childhood home hosted by their parents, Ana Delina and Carmelo. The four twins had different feelings about this Sunday afternoon affair. The biological brothers Jorge and William, ever the extroverts and social butterflies, anticipated it eagerly, seeing it as an opportunity to bask in the attention of the one hundred or so friends and family members whom William had insisted on inviting. Among them would be the La Paz brothers’ former teacher, who had made the one-hour walk to school with them each day; their friend Edgar Pardo, who owned the Bogotá butcher shop where they worked; and the town’s former mayor, Ermes Amado, who had political connections that appealed to William. The more private, pragmatic, and self-described mature identical twin pair, Carlos and Wilber, disliked the attention-seeking tendencies of the other two, believing that the switch and its aftermath were serious life-changing events, not the stuff of show business or political ambitions. They grudgingly allowed themselves to be dragged along, but worried that the crowd of guests would turn the four twins into local entertainment. That each twin would have the same reaction as his recently reunited double is not surprising, because genes have a significant influence on how we process information.2
Many people around La Paz would have been unaware of the twins’ story on Séptimo Día because they didn’t have TVs, but news of the switch had spread quickly among area residents by cell phone or during visits. Everyone was excited to see the mirror images of the two boys they had known since childhood and felt honored to be visited by university faculty from the United States. In this respect the people of La Paz and Bogotá were no different, obsessed as they were with the twins’ story and eager for more details. After the first televised segment aired, Séptimo Día had received a flood of calls from doctors, psychologists, sociologists, and general viewers, literally forcing the station to produce a follow-up.
Given the attention the story had attracted in Bogotá the reluctant twins, Carlos and Wilber, anticipated that the guests, intrigued by the switch, would have them repeat the sequence of strange events several times. People might not listen closely to how the confusion and its resolution unfolded, but everyone would stare unabashedly at the twins’ faces, bodies, and gestures in search of similarities and differences. Wilber and Carlos were just not into stardom, celebrating their newfound behavioral and physical likenesses privately and quietly, scoffing at their brothers’ occasional attempts to sport matching clothes, shoes, and goatees. Most important, Carlos would have little precious time to get to know his biological parents and siblings in a calm, intimate setting, which both he and Wilber felt was essential if those relationships were to move forward.
What some people later interpreted as frostiness toward his La Paz parents and siblings, even rejection, was a disoriented young man who was trying to wrap his head around a life that truly had been his destiny if not for a careless mistake made years earlier. The alternative world that Carlos saw for the first time was far removed from the one in which he was living. Bogotá allowed him to fulfill his dreams of getting an education; he became a financial analyst and earned a good income. He enjoyed clubbing with friends, attending rock concerts, and watching football games. None of this would have been possible if he had returned to La Paz where he was born. He somehow sensed that he would have been a different person, but at the time he would not acknowledge this and even denied it. His life in Bogotá was also a poignant reminder of the mother he had loved so completely, buried all too soon, and mourned so deeply. With time, Carlos became reconciled to his situation and established new family ties on his own terms, but crowds were not part of that, and until he was able to assimilate his past and present circumstances, people misunderstood what he said and did.
* * *
Jorge did most of the talking during the trip to our first stop in Vélez, a pattern that persisted even after we arrived at his brother’s home turf in La Paz. Several times the driver pressed William for directions, but he seemed uncertain, even though he had made this trip many times. Some might suspect that the country boy felt overshadowed by the city boy, who generally took command when they were together, but there was genuine trust between these two and they were fine with it. Of course, maybe the early hour prevented William from responding to the driver’s constant call for directions—William nodded off several times, as did his twin, who fell asleep with his head in William’s lap.
This degree of physical comfort between identical twins, even those who have been raised apart, may seem surprising, but I have seen this kind of physical closeness before. In 2010, I met a twenty-year-old Asian American identical twin who had reunited with her South Korean sister for the first time, in Seoul, before boarding a train to Busan to visit their birth family. The American twin realized only later that the two had fallen asleep while leaning against each other and holding hands. She said she usually is standoffish about physical contact with others, but dozing off with her identical twin sister felt peaceful and familiar. And this was how it was for the Colombian twins—when Jorge’s head dropped into his brother’s lap, it was natural and effortless, comfortable and familiar. Their physical ease with each other may explain why the members of both identical reared-apart twin pairs share a bed when sleeping at each other’s homes, as do many identical twins raised together, even as adults, because it just feels right.
During their moments of wakefulness as we drove toward Vélez, I heard about William’s political ambitions to be elected to the city council and eventually become mayor of La Paz. He felt closely tied to the people of his town and wanted to improve their lives in any way he could. Amado, the former mayor, was his close friend and stoked the young man’s desire to be in public service. William was already bringing computers to the schoolchildren of his town through a program set up in the city, and he would eventually help with road construction that permitted easier access to the area. At the time he also thought a lot about getting a law degree, a credential that would boost his standing as a professional and give him greater understanding of the legal processes behind the projects he hoped to put in place.
Jorge is a strong advocate of his identical twin’s political goals and dreams but has none of his own, preferring to focus on his engineering career. But he has the makings of a politician: an outgoing personality, good public-speaking ability, considerable self-confidence, and readiness to provide assistance when it is needed. The twins’ similarities in this respect are not unusual because genes influence political participation, leadership skills, and helping behaviors.3 Both twins expressed the same tendencies, tailoring their behaviors to the circumstances of their particular environment.
I learned more about Jorge and William as we approached Vélez to visit the hospital where Carlos and Wilber were born. They have the same bump in the same spot on the bridge of their nose, and until they met, they were certain it had come from an early injury. These surprise revelations are the rare perks of being a reunited identical twin. The “Jim twins,” Jim Lewis and Jim Springer, the premier pair of the Minnesota study, were raised in different Ohio cities and met each other for the first time when they were thirty-nine. Both their adoptive families had been told that their child’s twin had died, but when one mother, Lucille Lewis, went to court to sign some adoption papers, the clerk blurted out that the other twin had also been named Jim. When her son turned five, she told him what she had learned, but he wasn’t psychologically ready to find his brother until he was nearly forty. Aside from their same names, nail-biting habits, light-blue Chevrolets, and interest in woodworking, both twins suffered from severe headaches, which they attributed to stressful events. But that was only partly true because their symptoms began when the twins were teenagers, and they described the pain in the same way, as a great blow to the neck. We now know that headaches have a partial genetic basis, making them likely in people susceptible to stress.4
On the way to Vélez I also learned that Jorge and William share some dietary preferences, such as a fondness for chicken, but they will eat only the drumstick. Maybe it is the flavor, the ease of holding it, or the shape that is similarly appealing to the twins, but they were too tired to explain this preference. While they slept, I took a closer look at their ears, confirming my first impression that both twins had ears that stand out from their heads at the same sharp angle. But no identical twins are exactly alike: Jorge wears eyeglasses and William does not. As I explained, some eye problems such as near-sightedness are partly genetic in origin but may also be linked to premature delivery and/or extensive schoolwork.5 Both twins were born somewhat early, but one stayed in school and the other left school at age eleven to work on his family’s farm, lifestyle differences that could explain their vision differences. Even so, the behavioral and physical matches outnumbered the misses, no doubt why these twins were quick to call each other brother while sticking to a first-name basis with their accidental ones.
* * *
At 6:00 a.m. we approached our first scheduled stop, the Hospital Regional de Vélez, the public facility where Carlos and Wilber had been born. The conversation turned to the circumstances of their birth and delivery, with William certain that the switch had happened soon after Carlos had arrived in Bogotá, given the chaotic conditions in the preemie nursery. Jorge recalled his mother’s saying how much he and Carlos looked alike as babies, as some premature babies do, and he showed me a photograph to prove it. The photo showed the twins when they were extremely young infants, and they did look somewhat the same, although not all premature babies do; it depends partly at what point in the pregnancy they are delivered. Babies born at thirty-five weeks, like Jorge and William, look like small full-term infants, whereas babies born at twenty-eight weeks, like Carlos and Wilber, are small and skinny with translucent skin.6 Photos taken during their first weeks and months show that Jorge and Carlos, the accidental Bogotá brothers, quickly diverged in size, coloring, and facial appearance. And before she delivered, Luz had been told to expect identical twins, so perhaps she was unconsciously trying to match her perceptions to her doctor’s diagnosis.
Hospital Regional de Vélez
The tiny hospital, dedicated to providing quality health care to local residents, looked like a collection of different-sized shoeboxes placed alongside one another. The building and its surroundings were a bit eerie, not just because it was still somewhat dark, but because this was where the twins’ strange saga began. We entered through a door marked URGENCIAS (Emergencies), and hospital staff escorted us through white, dimly lit corridors to the Unidad Neonatal (Neonatal Unit).
As we peered through the glass partition, we saw an empty space with only an incubator and two baby cradles placed side by side, perhaps where Carlos and Wilber had spent their first few hours together. This was also Carlos’s first visit to the place of his birth and William’s first visit to the hospital where, until six months before, he believed he’d been born. Séptimo Día had shown this unit in one of the televised segments, but seeing it in person was an emotional experience that many of us, most of all the two switched twins, were not prepared for. It was one of those “should have been, could have been” moments—if only the baby had not been so sick, or if only the family and hospital staff had paid closer attention to the appearance of the newborn who left and the one who returned. Imagining the events that took place in that nursery twenty-six years earlier was painful, but hard to resist.
In one rare moment the two switched twins stood together just beyond the entrance to the nursery, and I observed them closely. Seeing William and Carlos so close to one another was unusual because an obvious uneasiness lingered between them at that time, born of their uncommon connection. Their ambivalence was grounded in the knowledge that, while neither could be blamed for the switch, each embodied a life and a lifestyle that belonged to the other one, and their presence was a forceful reminder of that. William hungered for the opportunities that Carlos had had instead, and Carlos could not contain his impatience with William for not climbing the professional ladder. They eventually would resolve this tension, but it colored their relationship in the early months.
More what-if questions probably raced through everyone’s mind: What if the small hospital had been better equipped to handle tiny babies? What if the twins’ grandmother had stayed with the baby in Bogotá? What if the twins’ aunt Edelmira, who had brought William back to La Paz, had had more discerning eyes? Their aunt answered a lot of questions over breakfast at a family-run restaurant in the center of La Paz, called El Campesino (The Country Man). It is a popular place, with long wooden tables and benches, perhaps because the surrounding area has few restaurants. The server brought us a typical Colombian morning meal of caldo de costilla (beef broth) and bread, and we ate dinner there later before heading back to Bogotá.
Aunt Edelmira
“The baby had a digestive problem, which is why his grandmother brought him to Bogotá,” Edelmira told us. “He couldn’t defecate or urinate. His mother never saw him until he came home, because she was recovering from a caesarean-section delivery.… When I brought him back to La Paz, he was well wrapped and I was told not to unwrap him until we arrived and his mother could feed him.”
These recollections of visiting her newborn nephew in the hospital in Bogotá only add to the mystery of how one twin was switched for another. Edelmira claims to have seen the same baby, in the same crib, every day for the seven days he stayed there. When she first saw him, she had the presence of mind to ask the nurse if this was “Ana Delina’s baby,” and the nurse said it was and that the infant had a problem urinating. Upon hearing those words, she was satisfied that this newborn was truly her nephew. “I fixed my eyes on him, only it was the wrong baby.”
In those days newborns at the Hospital Materno Infantil were identified with a handwritten tape placed around their wrist. One day Edelmira noticed that the baby’s wristband was missing. After she called attention to this important detail, a nurse told her that the infant had probably “moved around,” causing it to fall off. When Edelmira returned the next day, she saw that the baby’s wristband had been reattached; when she checked it, she saw that it matched the one she had seen two days before. There was no cause for concern, but when she was ready to take the baby home, a problem arose. Because the last name on her identification card didn’t match the last name of the baby, the hospital refused to release him. It took the persuasive powers of a nearby relative to convince the staff that Edelmira was the baby’s aunt and that his parents had asked her to bring him home. “I received medication and instructions from the doctor for how to care for him, but maybe they were the wrong instructions because now he was anemic and it seemed strange,” Edelmira said. “By the time I got the baby, the doctor didn’t notice that there had been a switch.” No one did, and to this day no one knows what really happened, and it is likely that no one ever will. Even if the nurse in charge were found, her memory of the premature babies she cared for twenty-six years before would be dim, like the recollections of the nurse who was interviewed for the TV program.
William’s belief that the twin exchange happened early is probably correct because Edelmira had supposedly memorized the baby’s face and wristband data early on. But because premature newborns sometimes look alike, perhaps Edelmira didn’t notice the switch, or maybe the right wristband was always on the wrong baby. Aside from a lawsuit pending against the hospital, none of this matters now because the clock cannot be rewound. Everyone accepts that, but knowing what happened could replace futile speculation with some peace of mind.
Vélez to La Paz
When we left the restaurant, we found a lot of activity outside. It was late Sunday morning and most people were off from work, so some had come to sit outside and enjoy the warm weather and a cup of coffee or bowl of caldo de costilla with friends. Two men in worn jeans, cowboy hats, and high boots were lounging on a bench, and a woman in a bright blue dress, dangling earrings, long necklace, and tightly pulled-back hair was walking by. We could only smile and wave at one another because we didn’t speak a common language. Everyone looked older than their years.
William and Wilber’s relatives had put together a caravan of several four-wheel-drive vehicles to take us to meet some of the brothers’ other family members. They insisted that we put on knee-high rubber boots for the walk from La Paz to their home because the path was muddy and we needed protection. I pointed to the ankle-high designer boots I was wearing, but they were adamant that I exchange them for a pair of tall black rubber ones with no heel or insole support to accommodate the aftermath of a stress fracture in my right foot and the slight weakness in my right knee. But sometimes you have to go with the flow, and this was one of those times. It was vital to experience La Paz and its surroundings as William and Wilber had.
The drive from Vélez to La Paz took an hour, and it was rough going as we crossed rocky creeks and traversed steep hills and narrow slopes. The shock absorbers in the car had died long before. Suddenly we came to an area with several homes, buildings, a school, and a few motorbikes on uneven, untended land littered with small stones. The one-story homes, some painted bright green, others a dull tan, were low to the ground and had metal roofs, so they looked more like rustic cabins than permanent residences. The families living there, including many of William and Wilber’s relatives, came out to greet us and offer cold drinks. The school, a single-story building with a weathered recreational area, was visible in the distance and looked a lot like the one the brothers had attended.
A young man in the group closely resembled the reared-apart twins Jorge and William, so much so that he could have been their cousin or even their brother. But the relatives we were meeting were biologically related to Wilber, not William, and we eventually learned that this young man was a family friend with no genetic tie. Nearly 80 percent of Colombia’s forty-five million people are of mixed race, the result of Spanish colonialization and slavery; its population is 58 percent mestizos (mix of native American Indians and Spanish Europeans), 20 percent pure European descendants, 14 percent black mixed with white Europeans, 4 percent Afro-Colombians, 3 percent Zambos (Africans mixed with Amerindians), and 1 percent indigenous people.7 Finding look-alikes in countries with great ethnic diversity may not be surprising in isolated areas like La Paz, because the same families have lived there for years with little settlement of new people. Because the same genes have been around for a while, and because multiple marriages between families take place, some look-alike children could result. In fact, one of Ana Delina’s brothers had married one of her husband’s sisters, turning the children of the two couples into double first cousins who share on average 25 percent of their genes, twice as many as ordinary first cousins.
Of course, the doppelgänger we encountered was not related to William or to Jorge, reminding me that some traits in unrelated people can match if those traits are affected by different genes, which are known as genocopies. The presence of such traits in nonkin individuals is tantamount to reaching the same destination by taking a different route. For example, elliptocytosis, a blood disorder associated with abnormally shaped red blood cells and anemia, has two underlying causes, one that is linked to the Rh blood group and one that is not. Down syndrome, a condition marked by short stature, intellectual difficulties, and developmental delays, can be caused by the inheritance of an extra twenty-first chromosome that fails to separate from the others as the egg or sperm matures, or it can result from the inheritance of a translocation from a parent whose twenty-first chromosome has another chromosome attached.8 Researchers have identified some clinical differences between the two types.9 Different gene combinations giving rise to the same facial contour, ear shape, and skin tone could explain why the young man from La Paz looked so much like William and Jorge. Their similarity was especially remarkable given the circumstances: physical resemblance was responsible for realigning the right twin pairs.
This encounter also made me grateful that we had run DNA tests on all four brothers before we got there, because I know that not all look-alikes are reared-apart identical twins. I will never forget the disappointment Susan experienced after learning that a girl seemingly identical to Susan’s adopted Chinese daughter was not her twin.10 Since then I have worked with other look-alike pairs impatient to celebrate their newfound identical twinship, but I have encouraged them to keep the champagne on ice until the DNA laboratory says they have reason to pop the cork.
La Paz to Vereda: Hiking or Horseback
We had two options for getting to the brothers’ childhood home: hike or ride a horse. Their mother, pregnant with twins, had made that difficult journey twenty-six years earlier on foot until she reached a place where cars could pass. Everyone said that the walk was easy, but it turned out to be dangerous and daunting to an outsider even though some sections had been cleared the day before by the twins’ relatives using machetes. William had also arranged for increased security to ease any concerns we might have had.
We saw no obvious markings along much of the route, so we followed William and Wilber and their friends, who had made this journey many times. The group had to contend with sharp hills and a rusted iron fence but came across no real signs of habitation. The locals kept assuring us we were “almost there,” although a considerable distance remained. At one juncture we faced the choice of negotiating a rock-strewn, fast-moving stream or traversing an aging suspension bridge with lots of missing rungs, and ropes that hung about twenty feet above the stream. I took the bridge. Although Carlos had never done this, I followed him closely, carefully placing my feet exactly where his had been. The young children who lived there moved swiftly across the bridge and the terrain, coming from behind and beating us across. Jorge said that if his young son, Santi, were there, in “two minutes he would tell me to pick him up.” His view—that the children of La Paz grow up suffering and must fight harder for more things than city kids—is a bit of wisdom that took Carlos longer to understand. But Jorge was not the switched twin, so he could appraise the situation dispassionately.
I had brought along a shiny purple suitcase with gifts and supplies for the day. I soon found that while this tote is easy to wheel through airport terminals and along city streets, it was a burden along the uncharted route we were taking. William, the strongest of the bunch, slung it over his head for a while, then handed it to Carlos and insisted that he carry it. This act may have been William’s way of drawing his switched counterpart into this other world, exposing Carlos to the challenges of country life that are not so easily overcome. Carlos complied, but he resisted the events of the day in other ways by wearing shorts, not slacks, and sneakers, not boots, and later exchanged his muddied sneakers for flip-flops. He sometimes stood apart when people were taking pictures or making family introductions.
* * *
After we had walked a full hour in the hot sun, we suddenly came upon a house and a lot of people. We found no gate and no entrance—we were just there. Outside, a wooden picnic table stood laden with what looked like vegetables, and we could see a barbeque pit constructed of large sticks where the pieces of one of Carmelo’s freshly slaughtered cows, sprinkled with salt and other seasonings, were grilling about a hundred yards away. Meat in rural Colombia, like the carne a la llanera we were served, is often tough because of overcooking to destroy the bacteria on animals that are killed for food. The only bathroom was the privacy of the surrounding bushes and trees.
People looked around, eager to catch sight of the twins, two of whom they would be meeting for the first time. Some neighbors gazed at the rest of us curiously but also respectfully, knowing we had come from the United States to meet the twins and their families. The former mayor arrived and as a politician was eager to engage my help in promoting tourism in the area at some future time. A pair of five-year-old identical twin boys stood next to each other in the crowd, and I felt happy for them, knowing that they had each other to play with in this outlying area. With no other houses in sight and no reasonable roads, playdates and soccer moms simply don’t exist. That kids had to walk the same distances as adults if they wanted to see their friends was just a normal part of life.
The vegetables I had spotted were actually two kinds of potatoes that Ana had prepared and placed on plantain leaves spread across the wooden table for guests to help themselves. (Plantain leaves save on tableware and covering.) Beer and a delicious homemade alcoholic drink called guarapo de caña, made from sugarcane juice, were available, but we had only two hours to eat, drink, and chat because returning to La Paz before dark was important. Still, we had time to talk to the La Paz parents in one of the three open spaces at the front of the house. Carmelo said little, crying silently as he followed his wife’s words.
Ana wore a purple V-neck sweater, light-colored slacks, and black tennis shoes, the only sensible attire in this remote area, although dark-colored pants would be more practical for hiding any stains from soil. She had on the long earrings and beaded bracelet typical of Colombian women, and like many of them she kept her hair long and pulled back, accentuating her thin face. Aging women in the United States tend to cut their long hair short in the belief that it makes them look younger, but ages and dates are not an obsession in rural Colombia the way they are in the United States. Ana rarely smiled when she spoke, probably because the baby switch was still a tender topic. Carlos’s reserve and the deaths of her two sons, no doubt brought to mind that day, might have contributed to her generally serious demeanor.
Ana wept as she retold and relived the events leading to her knowledge of the switch and its aftermath. She spoke of William’s beauty, kindness, and sweetness, a son so different from his presumed twin brother in appearance and behavior, and acknowledged that he had lived a harsh life. Because she and Carmelo never had enough money to send him to school, he had joined the military to experience the world beyond La Paz. Devastated that William would never meet his biological parents, and that Carlos had never known his real father, Ana found pleasure in knowing that Carlos had grown up well and felt grateful to Luz for raising him. But it hurt her that her newfound biological son did not say hello to her “as his mother.”
That afternoon we experienced a wonderful moment when the reunited twins Jorge and William stood before the guests to thank them for coming and to introduce us more formally. As expected Jorge did more of the talking, even though La Paz was where his twin had grown up, but William added freely to the conversation when he sensed it was called for. The crowd was quiet and attentive, but their eyes darted from one twin to the other, constantly comparing and contrasting, finding it incredible to see a double of the boy and young man they had known and watched for twenty-six years. I delivered a short speech with the assistance of one of the interpreters; I thanked everyone for their hospitality and for the opportunity to visit the La Paz brothers’ home. People cast plenty of stares in my direction, probably because the people in this small town were not used to having visitors from abroad. Some newspaper photographers were also running around, setting up cameras and placing the twins in various poses. It was a pretty big deal.
A Day in the Life
Views of the green hills and tall trees were quite beautiful from certain locations around the house. But this was also territory over which guerillas, the left-wing rebels whose terrorist organization had waged battle with the Colombian government since 1957, had roamed during the brothers’ childhood. The guerillas stole chickens, cattle, and crops from the people who lived there, rather than demand cash, because the guerillas knew that farm families were poor. But the guerillas sometimes abducted children and turned them into combatants. Approximately two hundred guerillas had combed the area where the family lived, but, as Wilber explained, “When you’re a little kid you don’t understand what’s happening so you’re not afraid.” But he had plenty to fear as a sixteen-year-old when the guerillas took him and a friend and forced the pair to walk with them for about ten minutes. Upon reaching a huge hole the guerillas asked the boys their names, but Wilber was too terrified to answer, so his friend answered for them as Wilber thought about another of his friends who had been taken and held for eight days. Then the guerrillas told the boys to wait and they disappeared. “They came back twenty minutes later and told us to leave,” Wilber recalled. “I thought we were going to be killed.” His parents said little about what had happened because this was part of daily life in La Paz. The guerillas and the Colombian government reached a peace agreement in 2016.
Some harsh elements in the La Paz brothers’ home life were related to the strict manner in which the children were raised. The family usually gathered for dinner, but Carmelo never spoke and the children had to stay silent. “When we eat, we eat” is what he said, according to Wilber. And Carmelo occasionally struck his children, three smacks with a belt or a branch when they didn’t do their chores or misbehaved in some way. William and Wilber angered their father with their constant fighting, but as Carmelo got older, his sons got faster, so when he reached for his belt, they ran away and stayed hidden for several hours. Still, Carmelo had the final say when it came to what they could and could not do, and they were often afraid to ask for his permission. Ana sometimes intervened, counseling them to be good in order to get their father’s approval.
Their childhood days were highly regimented, beginning with awakening at 5:45 a.m. and bathing in a tank filled with water drawn from a well. Homes didn’t have plumbing, but the family had the great outdoors. “There was no privacy,” William recalled. “But we were mostly men, so my mother took a bath after we left for school.” The schoolhouse was a long walk each way, over the same rough terrain we had covered. When the children got home, they had chores to do, followed by dinner from about 5:00 to 6:00. “Working in the fields means that you eat early,” William said. They had a little free time for play after dinner, but few distractions before going to bed at 7:30 p.m.
Their childhood was difficult; while the family had enough to eat, the kids often walked barefoot because there was no money for shoes. Working on the farm was required, and everyone did it because they knew no other way of life—William recalled that the hardships became apparent only when he looked back.
* * *
As 3:00 p.m. approached, it was time to begin the long walk back to La Paz, which seemed slightly less intimidating now that we had done it once. But it was hotter now, and the hard-packed dirt had melted into mud in lots of places. Although a family friend guided us skillfully, I lost my balance halfway down and sat squarely in a soupy puddle that darkened my clothes and stained my handbag forever. Next came the same dizzying one-hour ride to La Paz in the four-wheel-drive vehicles and a quick stop at the restaurant. There we were all offered dinner and a sampling of the luscious Colombian treat of bocadillo con queso, cheese topped with sweet guava paste. These treats were arranged for by Yesika’s sister Alexandra, who surprised us by making the long trip to La Paz to drive a few of us back to Bogotá.
Despite everything we had done that day, or perhaps because of everything we had experienced, we felt a lingering excitement and elation brought on by an extraordinary day that had revealed a way of life far removed from the familiar. We became aware in a deeply personal way of the ramifications of restricted opportunities for personal growth and development and understood them more clearly than is possible from reading most professional or popular articles on the topic. Poverty took on a whole new meaning—most people think that being poor means lacking money and the goods and services it buys, but poverty can also mean merely a lack of conveniences. The people of La Paz did not have paved roads, running water, or modern bathrooms, but they were not poor in the conventional sense because they raised their meat and vegetables, and they had no need to pay water or electric bills.
The visit also underlined the universal importance of family ties—that a mother can love a son she never knew; that a son could not immediately feel affection for family members despite the biological ties between them; and that another son could mourn a mother he would never know. These were important takeaways that would add layers of understanding to everything we learned about the twins.
In one of my waking moments on the ride back to Bogotá, I remembered that on the way back to La Paz we had retraced the route Ana had taken twenty-six years earlier when her twins were about to be born. That led me to thinking more deeply about an issue that had been in the background of all our interactions with the twins and their families: how mothers know who their babies are. Most mothers insist that you “just know,” but the basis of mother-infant recognition is far more complex.
Who’s My Baby?
Amazingly, most new mothers can pick out their own newborn from a group of three to five other infants.11 This is an adaptive behavior because it doesn’t make good evolutionary sense to care for someone else’s baby at the expense of your own.
A mothers’ accurate identification of her baby is based on various cues, including the infant’s smell, the texture of the baby’s skin, the quality of the child’s cries, and the general appearance of the infant’s facial features. Most mothers who spend just half an hour with their infant can tell their child from other infants, based solely on the odor of the babies’ breath. However, the amount of time that mothers spend with their newborn doesn’t seem to make a difference, because mothers who stay with their newborns for longer periods of time are not more accurate than those who stay with them for shorter periods. Of course, not all mothers are correct in their judgments, perhaps because of their own sensitivity to smell or the intensity of their baby’s odor.12
The story changes when it comes to identifying a newborn based on odors lingering on the baby’s clothing. When babies are one day old, mothers are not especially good at telling their own child from someone else’s when sniffing a cotton vest worn by the baby for twenty-four hours. But by the tenth day after delivery most new moms are quite adept at this task, and mothers who cradled their babies on their breast for about a half hour after birth are better than mothers who handled them for less than five minutes. Early exposure to the baby made a difference.13
Another curious observation is that mothers of young children are better than nonmothers at detecting the odors of four-day-old infants. One explanation is that mothers experience more complex mental and emotional processes than do nonmothers, although this happens only when the mothers are exposed to the odors of infants, not to the odors of adults. Even more exciting is that researchers have found long-term changes in the part of the brain that processes information as women transition into motherhood.14 It seems likely that these changes are a unique biological part of becoming a mother, making moms exquisitely sensitive to the condition and needs of their child.
Some adoptive mothers have described their child’s body odor as strange or alien, but recognizable because of their shared time.15 Perhaps the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an infant’s odor affects the mother’s recognition of, and/or bonding with, their baby, but this has yet to be investigated. Switched twins and their mothers are ideal candidates for a test of this idea because they are biologically connected to one baby but not to the other and don’t know it. However, at present researchers have documented only nine switched-twin pairs, too few to obtain a definitive answer. Moreover, the critical window for conducting such a study, which would be at or soon after birth, would have passed by the time the switch was discovered.
The significance for the mother-infant bond of mothers’ early exposure to an infant’s odors is of great interest, but remains unclear. The nature and extent of Luz’s and Ana’s early physical contact with their twins is unknown, because of their newborns’ premature status and the eventual baby switch. Luz may have cradled William just after delivery but only briefly until he was taken to the nursery, and Ana never enjoyed immediate physical contact with Carlos because both mother and baby were in poor health. We know that William was his mother’s favorite child, although he was not her biological son. But he was, and is, the only one of his siblings who makes an extra effort on her behalf. And there was always less affinity between Carlos and Luz than she had with her biological children, although she loved Carlos dearly. Maybe his smell, his temperament, or his appearance were at odds with those of his siblings and, therefore, he seemed unfamiliar to his mother early on in subtle, nonconscious ways. Of course, in some cases a new mother’s predisposition for infant care conceivably could override the unpleasantness or lack of familiarity of her baby’s odor or other features, or could affect the evolving mother-infant relationship in ways too elusive to detect. Women who love newborns may gain great pleasure from giving infant care and seeing their baby smile, and some adoptive families request special needs children for exactly these reasons, knowing that some developmental milestones may be delayed.
Although smell is important, humans rely most heavily on visual cues when it comes to identifying family, friends, and foe. Thus it is not surprising that new mothers can distinguish their own babies from others in a photograph array. However, first-time mothers, especially those who have spent little time with their infants, are much less accurate than second- and third-time mothers, who are quite successful. Anxiety, fatigue, less affectionate feelings toward their infants, and/or reduced opportunities to learn which facial traits best distinguish their child from others may separate the new mothers from the experienced ones. But once new mothers spend seven hours with their babies, sometimes less, they are just as good as the veterans.16
New mothers can also recognize their infants by sound, evidenced by the finding that after forty-eight hours of shared time all new and experienced mothers know their baby’s distinctive cries. And when it comes to touch, most mothers who spend at least one hour with their newborn can pick out their own baby from others just by stroking the child’s skin, which tells us that the texture, temperature, and familiarity of the infant’s skin are the main cues.17
These observations are especially significant in the cases of the Colombian brothers. Neither mother had spent much time with her twins following delivery, so both were unfamiliar with their babies’ smell, appearance, sound, and feel. Ana, recovering from a hernia, never set eyes on Carlos, had little contact with Wilber, and didn’t see William until he came to La Paz when he was one week old. Luz had limited hospital time with Jorge and Carlos and even less with William. Thus, it is likely that both new mothers would not have done as well as other new moms in identifying their babies.
Experiments are informative, but they do not mirror the real-life presentation by hospital staff of babies to their new mothers, who accept that baby as belonging to them. No one offers multiple babies for mothers to compare, so how does a mother know that a baby is truly hers?
A test comparing the DNA markers of a mother and her putative child can determine whether a woman is, or is not, the child’s mother. That is because half of a child’s DNA comes from its mother, so if the test finds no matches among the markers, the child must belong to someone else. Something similar happened in Switzerland in the 1940s, in the switched-at-birth twin case involving the French-speaking Joye family from Fribourg and the German-speaking Vatter family from Freiburg. DNA technology had not been developed then, so the testing consisted of comparisons of a series of blood types of parents and children, but the principle is the same. An Rh subgroup, originally called C, but now known as O, was especially informative in the case of the exchanged Joye twin from Switzerland. The nontwin child switched with one of the Joyes’ identical twin sons had blood type labeled cc, but since Madeleine Joye had type CC, she could not have been his mother. However, her CC type was compatible with the switched twin, who had group Cc, because Madeleine Joye could have passed on her C gene, and her husband, who was cc, could have transmitted his c gene. But matching does not prove that a man or woman is the actual parent because other people can have that same blood type. Of course, establishing maternity or paternity involves comparing more than one blood group or one DNA marker.18 The correct Joye twins were eventually identified by reciprocal skin grafts, as I explained earlier.
Fingerprinting of mother and baby upon delivery and discharge is a reliable and cost-effective practice for linking mothers and newborns, and some countries have actively promoted this practice. In contrast good impressions of footprints are harder to obtain, and, more important, infant growth precludes comparison of earlier and later images. Some hospitals have used more sophisticated methods for pairing mothers and newborns, such as radiofrequency identification devices. These consist of matching electronic tags that are inserted in bracelets worn by mother and baby and are used to monitor and record feedings, baths, and other activities. At the time of discharge hospital personnel compare the two tags to be certain that they match, but critics have argued that the bracelets are problematic because they can be removed.19 In the United States medical facilities have used a variety of procedures for ensuring that the right mother goes home with the right baby.
All this raises questions of vital importance: How accurately would mothers recognize their babies if they had no previous exposure to their own baby or to other babies? And how confident would they be in their judgments? If they answered without hesitation that a child was theirs, what would be the basis of that judgment? I suspect that most mothers would not question their relatedness to a child that a nurse delivered to her room because they have no precedent for maternity uncertainty. I also suspect that we will never know the answer to these questions because posing them to new mothers would create unnecessary worries and harmful doubts in their minds just as the mother-infant bond was about to begin.
Both Colombian mothers were recovering from caesarean surgery and had older children to care for at home. They had more to think about than the rare chance that one twin discharged to their care might belong to someone else. Like most mothers, it never crossed their mind.
Fathers have more to worry about than mothers when it comes to knowing who their child is. Because of the key features of human reproduction (concealed ovulation, internal fertilization, and continuous female sexual receptivity), men can never be completely confident that a son or daughter carried by their spouse or partner is truly theirs. This makes paternity uncertainty of great interest, not just to evolutionary psychologists (who study the cues men use to assess true parenthood), but also to attorneys (who manage lawsuits about child custody and support when parenthood is disputed) and fathers (who worry about their lack of resemblance to a particular child and a partner’s infidelity).
Paternity uncertainty is also of interest to clever entrepreneurs, such as the former health care marketer Jared Rosenthal. Rosenthal operates a thriving New York City mobile DNA testing lab. With the question WHO’S YOUR DADDY? painted in large letters across two trucks that he drives around the city, fathers questioning their relatedness to their children, as well as individuals searching for or doubting their relatedness to parents and siblings, come to him for testing. Rosenthal maintains contracts with ten thousand companies for drug tests, DNA tests, and background checks. He does the DNA testing from the privacy of his two trucks, as well as his two clinics, one in Brooklyn and the other in the Bronx.20 If Carmelo ever doubted his relatedness to William, he never said so. The man who was Carlos’s childhood father had abandoned his family and, as far as we know, never questioned his paternity of the three children he left behind. However, the greater tensions he experienced with Carlos than with the other two children, who were his biologically, could have had some roots in his sense of differences between him and his son, creating doubt about their connection.
Upshot
If Luz had been around when the switch was discovered, she might have mourned the reduced financial status that caused her to deliver her twins in one of Bogotá’s public hospitals, rather than the more desirable public clinic where she had delivered her daughter. Ana most certainly regretted the health issues that had forced her to deliver her twins in the community hospital in Vélez, especially because all but one of her other children had been delivered at home. But had she delivered her twins at home, one or both of her premature infants might not have survived.