The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  In Guzmán, where everyone was so welcoming, I didn’t feel like a dope for taking the unironic view, or stopping to say hello to the old women who swept out their houses each morning, and then pantomiming the rest. I stood in the middle of a sunflower field at midnight, and it wasn’t weird at all. I could hear the hum of stars under that huge Castilian sky, and located the sound of myself thinking. How long had it been since I’d had that kind of clarity or peace? Standing there, I had—call it what you will—a fibrillation of insight, or a crumb-size epiphany.

  The intervening voice was simple, almost corny, for it felt so good: Belong to this. But to what—a sunflower patch? Or the silence of the Old World? And did I already belong, or was I supposed to belong, aspire to belong, change my life to belong?

  Guzmán: The old people here walked so slowly, they seemed to move backward. Besides a handful who worked in the fields, it was hard to tell if anyone had jobs, or deadlines. There was only spotty cell coverage, so eventually I turned off my phone altogether. Besides a bar, there were no stores to speak of (except one bakery run out of Marcos and Elena’s house), so money, at least in the town itself, was mostly useless. In conversation, the people constantly invoked the past, and so it was mashed up in and intertwined with the present.

  Even the way they said goodbye here—“Ta l’o,” which was percussively short for hasta luego, and translated as “until later” or “see you later”—suggested timelessness, for it meant the following, all at once: hello . . . so long . . . howareyouagain? . . . untilwepass . . . wearepassingagain . . . oh, hello! . . . goodbye! . . . again? . . . again! . . . and round we go!

  At first you might have thought everyone here had short-term memory loss, but it was a rat-a-tat adaptation that captured the circularity of life in a small village and a reminder that, though very much alone and seemingly shipwrecked in the world, these sun-scorched orphans of Castile could at least depend upon seeing one another one more time.

  V.

  On the wall of my office back home, I pinned a photograph of Ambrosio. Though I’d taken it myself, it looked as if it could have been from a hundred years ago. During our first visit, he led me down 13 steps beneath the earth, to a close, tight space, clean and dry and well ventilated, with PVC pipe running to the surface for air. The floor and walls were stone, and several electric bulbs hung from the ceiling. Along one wall was makeshift wooden shelving where his world-famous Páramo de Guzmán was once kept. Now the planks sat empty. Back in the left corner was a cubby with more rickety shelves where the family stored its homemade wine in unlabeled green bottles. Even as Ambrosio talked on and on, he ducked into the corner, rummaged a little, and returned with an old wooden box. A handgun perhaps, to kill his old friend? Bilbo’s ring? He unclasped its hook, reached in, and lifted out something wrapped in chamois—one white tin emblazoned with the black script and gold medal of the original Páramo de Guzmán, all that remained of Ambrosio’s grand cheese experiment, of the greatest thing he’d created in his life.

  I asked if he’d let me take a picture. He pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the cave and sat, holding the tin in one hand and the oversize key to the bodega in the other. He gazed directly into the camera, conveying measures of pride and sadness, nonchalance and seriousness. In explaining the cave’s former function as a storehouse, Ambrosio had conjured “the Old Castilian,” the mythic figure in this land who planted and scythed wheat by hand, who endured hailstorms that, in a blink, might viciously erase a year’s work in the vineyards. The Old Castilian was guided by a chivalrous code long past, never buckling under the failures heaped upon him by nature or relenting in the face of the enemy. He carried those heavy casks of wine up to the caves on his shoulders, singing a jota, where they were counted by the man in the telling room.

  Meanwhile, there I sat in my attic, tallying—words on the page, hours until deadline, measly amounts in the college fund. I sat attached to my machines, typing to keep my editors at bay, forfeiting time, staring at the photograph of Ambrosio, day after day. How to explain what it made me feel? It went beyond yearning now. Was it discontentment, the creep of some low-level depression? It was 2002. The world was at war, and I pitched a book proposal about Ambrosio Molinos and his cheese—about betrayal and revenge and happiness—so I’d have a reason to go back to the village. When it sold, I did.

  Instead of taking my kids to Disney World, I brought them to Guzmán. For my “job.” Instead of meeting my mom in some bucket-list destination a mother has spent a life dreaming of, I made her come to Guzmán, too. Thankfully, my wife loved the place as much as I did. We had another baby, and in the summer of 2003, we rented a house there. Our little girl took her first steps in Guzmán, and uttered her first words, agua and hola. Our son, walking through the streets one day in the Yankees batting helmet he never took off, was surrounded by sheep heading out to graze on the páramo, and the look on his face in that sheep cloud—two parts astonishment, one part Daaaaad?—is one a father never forgets.

  In the telling room, I heard the legends, about the great Castilian knight El Cid, and the Spanish Civil War, about the local scandals and triumphs and a man who actually flew over the village one night, called to flight by the bones of his grandfather. There was Fernando, neatly dressed in chinos and polo shirt, who stood beneath the tree across the street from the church and never uttered a word. There was Crees, the stonemason, who had vowed that if by the age of 40 he wasn’t a millionaire, he’d only do the minimum work required to feed himself, spending his days sculpturing naked women from stone in his studio in the fields.

  Was this a Gabriel García Márquez novel? Anything seemed possible in Guzmán, even that I’d get to eat that last tin of the real Páramo de Guzmán. Every visit became stranger, deeper, more real—until I imagined I belonged. When I asked the mayor in the village—a woman with her own stories—if it seemed weird that I kept coming back, she said, “No, we’re honored.”

  Honored? At home, in a mêlée of diapers and tantrums, sweetness, then tossed-over dinners, no one ever said they were especially honored by my presence.

  So who were these good people anyway? And how was it that I’d come to need them more than they would ever need me?

  VI.

  Every year we arrive at this, the season of Facebook travel trills and vacation photos. However envious, I will never say no to viewing my friends’ vacation photos, primarily because one of our tacit promises when we travel is that we’ll bring back a good story—of our heightened state of living and the exaggerated adventures that befell us—and hope to let others live vicariously through it.

  In Guzmán, I wanted the story to last. I wanted to freeze my life inside of it—and that of my family—for as long as possible. No matter what the speed of our American days, no matter how quickly we grew and aged, we’d always have that out-of-time Castilian village on its hill.

  As delusional as this false everlastingness was, it gave me unreasonable comfort for some reason. And I had help in prolonging things, from Ambrosio himself. After telling his story of the cheese, he became less interested in talking about the various complicated aspects of it. “Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good day by going over that again?” he asked.

  Exactly! There was time to revisit the legend of Páramo de Guzmán some other day. But first, I was happy to follow him out to the fields where he irrigated the crops. Or to help him harvest the grapes. Or to cruise from bar to bar, and town to town, meeting his friends. Here was Pinto, who made the best rabo estofado, or oxtail stew, from his mother’s old recipe—and the Cristóbal brothers, who served the best roast suckling lamb. Here was Luís, who created antique keys patterned after ones he’d dug out of ruins—of nickel and brass and gold plate, some jointed or with fantastically ornate handles—though they opened no doors, for the doors they might have opened were all gone, lost to history.

  If Ambrosio’s story was a Slow Food tale gone awry, then what I was doing was Slow Reporting, Slow Thinking,
Slow Storytelling, Slow Living. I was doing, I believed, what we all want to do, which is find a way to capture things before they dissolve, to not lose our lives to the relentless pace that keeps us from knowing who we are and what we want.

  Not everyone was so charmed by my embrace of the Slow.

  I missed the contracted deadline for my book—and then, having been granted a two-year extension, I missed that one, too. Soon, I found myself like Pluto, downgraded from planet to icy rock, orbiting erratically, elliptically. I tried everyone’s patience, even that of my wife, who never once doubted the necessity of Guzmán—as a place and an idea—in our lives. But now we’d had our third child, and the book advance had evaporated long ago. And she had a career, too.

  At my lowest, I was full of self-chastisements: Why did you ever believe any good might come from chasing a piece of cheese? I couldn’t quite square my incomplete attempts to bring Guzmán vividly to life on the page with my attempts at reimagining my own life.

  I have another friend who begins his annual vacation in Kiawah with a flurry of text messages—a close-up of the sweating gin and tonic on the porch railing, a sunrise beach stretching to some infinity—including triumphal, goading lines like, “Still snowing in Maine?” or “You hit that deadline?” But then, after the first few days, something else begins to happen. The photos are no longer of, say, the perfectly grilled sea bass, or some other marker of his escape, but of his kids. His messages grow forlorn: “Three more days . . . might as well pack up now.” “What am I doing with my life?” And always, from the airport before flying home: “I’m dying.” It’s a joke, of course, but the truth, too—and it’s what I was feeling after my protracted time in Guzmán.

  I fell into inertia and frustration. I was struck by a Slow Epiphany that the real hindrance to writing this book was that all books, like life, eventually have an end. There’s a last sentence, concluding with the report of a bullet-hole period. And then we float into white space.

  Somehow the one thing I hadn’t considered was that when this story was fully told, then the trip would be over—and I would render myself locked out.

  VII.

  Which is sort of what happened. Though not entirely. The story got told, and Guzmán gave me more in that regard—stories to tell—than any place I’ve ever gone or, I imagine, will ever go. I continued to wish I could find any excuse to go there, to sit with Ambrosio in the telling room one more time. But it was harder to justify now. My kids were getting bigger. Life here was intervening. We went as a family one last time.

  The Guzmán of all these years later was now a place where there were modern streetlights (gack!), a refurbished palacio with actual hotel rooms (but who would come?), a seasonal influx of foreign field hands (mostly Romanians and Moroccans) packed into a couple of houses, eating out of a place that had once been a bar. The bar itself had moved three times, for even a tiny village needed its bar, even if it had nothing else. Ambrosio’s beloved father had died—and was buried in the cemetery, where he’d been laid to rest with his head to the south and feet to the north (as opposed to everyone else, who was buried east to west) so that he could keep his eye on the telling room and all the wine drunk there.

  Part of coming to the end, then, was allowing it. And coming to an admission: Where the village of Guzmán had been disintegrating on its rise of land that surveyed the meseta, I had hearked upon it, Quixote-like, and saw a lush paradise on its witness hill. Where its inhabitants were all dying their own slow deaths—lung cancer from smoking, failed livers from drinking, bodies beaten by farm labor, psyches weighted with sin and grudges—I’d seen a compelling tableau: kindly old men wearing black berets, women cane-clomping with dignity, all concealing light-filled truths within their secret hearts. If someone coughed up half a lung, graphically cursed the Creator, and spit out some foamy substance at the side of the road, I conceived of it as a sentimental gesture full of hidden meaning. In this world I’d found dusty-booted Ambrosio and fallen in love with the ideal for which he—and his cheese—stood.

  I was happy to believe in it, for this is what travel is, too: a kind of childlike wonder—and the sort of woozy love that doesn’t contemplate loss—that, when pushed further, becomes life again. There you are, with all your familiar dreams and conflicts, the constant skirmishes between frustration and transcendence, your best and worst selves. However far you go, there you are, with your same fear of mortality, and this deep desire to hold on to your kids forever.

  Anyway, I’d like to imagine that Guzmán was in us, that it was no longer only a physical place. Our children remained fondest of stories told out loud. So, our telling rooms were the car, the kitchen, the dinner table. They were the moments after turning out the lights, when we lay next to each other in bed, in whatever combination of parent and child, in tangles of arms and legs, and poured out the last tales of the day in a hush meant to coax sleep but that often provoked the admonition “One more—please?”

  At least this was how it felt on the best days, that we could build this little fortress against the crummy things of the world. And I could tell myself that more than a decade spent chasing a piece of cheese had been for a good reason, too. That I’d brought back a new ethos, or an ancient one, and tried to make it work a little in our lives. I still could be seen running through airports with a processed-cream-cheese bagel in my hand, but on weekends, it gave me great pleasure to turn off my phone for a while, to be unreachable. At those times, on a soccer sideline, I was randomly struck by the idea that life was loss, there was no escaping it, and so the best I might do, though never with the same flourish as Ambrosio, was to try to plant myself in the here and now.

  It was November when we came into the village just before twilight, the sun sinking beneath the ceiling of clouds to light the land, the thin green murk of day giving way to a brilliant golden glow. We drove to the palacio, where we were staying, and when we parked, the children went sprinting off in the direction of the fields, eager to explore and play soccer. My wife and I unloaded the bags and then went ambling along the road down to meet them, one we’d traveled many times that first summer long ago.

  There was no one around for this particular homecoming. Not a soul. And perhaps this was most fitting of all. The houses were shuttered, and not a single window was lighted from within. The air was cool and clean. The village was all ours, until we came to the track that led to the Molinos barn.

  As we approached, a huge figure loomed over our youngest, talking rapid-fire in that gravelly baritone. Our boy was looking up at him, head cocked, laughing, uncertain what to make of the giant he’d just met in the twilight of a Castilian village thousands of miles from home.

  Ambrosio did what he always does, then, afflicted as he is by that great Castilian generosity: he let us in again. He showed the kids his barn, let them drive the huge tractor. He ferried us up to the telling room, and then out in the fields, to his house there, for a late dinner. Driving us back to the palacio, at midnight, he veered to the edge of that serpentine road as it climbed to the village, and then he was out in a vineyard, waving for us to follow. He stood there under a bright moon, with his finger to his lip. “Shhhhh, listen,” he said. “If you listen, the silence has a lot to say.”

  The kids were rapt as my wife and I tried to translate, but sinking together into that earth, I had a feeling I’d had at least a hundred times here. It was that feeling of being a child again, of watching the UFO, of being told the story that would never die. The kids stood clustered around Ambrosio, as he pointed up the hill to Guzmán.

  “I think there’s something a little bit magical about this place,” he said, then drew in a deep breath, and we let it be.

  STEPHANIE PEARSON

  Love in the Time of Coca

  FROM Outside

  WE’RE FLYING IN A CESSNA 180 over jungle so dense that it looks like broccoli. Every so often, the canopy breaks to reveal an emerald patch, which marks the remains of a coca farm. Many of them in this 33,0
00-square-mile region southeast of Bogotá, called Meta, were wiped out 10 years ago during Plan Colombia, a controversial U.S.-backed antinarcotic operation that included aerial eradication of thousands of acres. The fumigation killed the local campesinos’ legitimate crops as well.

  Out the window to our right is a flat-topped 8,000-foot mountain. A waterfall flows from top to bottom in such a voluminous cascade that we can see the rising mist from the plane. Like the peak, the waterfall has no name, although it’s at the center of 2,430-square-mile Serranía de La Macarena, which became Colombia’s first national reserve in 1948.

  “All this used to be controlled by guerrillas,” Hernan Acevedo, our 42-year-old guide and copilot, tells us through his headset. “So this is pretty much virgin territory.”

  It’s also restricted airspace. Because there are still military operations against guerrillas and drug traffickers here, Acevedo had to get air force clearance. Our Cessna has a sticker on the tail that reads “National Police of Colombia Department of Antinarcotics.” It’s an essential decal for any pilot to certify that he isn’t trafficking drugs.