The cheese was named after its village—Guzmán. At the very least, before recycling the scrap, I wanted to know where that village was. It was a weekday in midwinter (How do I remember this? A pattern of kaleidoscopic ice on the window, and a naïve thought: Spain must be really warm), and I went to the atlas, but the town didn’t appear on what seemed to be a pretty detailed map of the country. So I went directly out and bought a Michelin map (this being the unimaginable days before Google Earth), drove home, and then flipped it open, watching it accordion over half of my office floor, a scroll dotted with unknown places, places where, at this very moment, old men were probably taking their café with brandy. I spent a long time hovering over it, squinting at village after village, like a jeweler in search of clarity. Where was Guzmán? I started at Madrid, and with my finger I wipered my way north, up through the kingdom of Castile, touching on nearly every town, letting the names play through my mind—La Horra (The Free One), Iglesiarrubia (Blond Church), Fria (Cold), Zarza (Bramble), Pinafuente (Pine Fountain), Pozal de Gallinas (Bucket of Hens)—until, finally, to the west of Aranda de Duero, there it was: Guzmán, a tiny bubble floating in all that emptiness. Besides cheese, I couldn’t begin to imagine what one might find there.
Contrary to what the retroactive translations above would lead you to believe, the sum total of my Spanish education came from old sitcom episodes of Chico and the Man. Having verified the existence of Guzmán, I found myself calling my friend Carlos, a high-school Spanish teacher who lived down the street. Carlos had been born of Colombian parents, and grown up bilingual. When he arrived, I gave him the whole backstory—the deli, the cheese, the dream I had of eating it. I showed him the map. I was unshaven, hadn’t been sleeping much, enslaved to Baby. Unfazed, he suggested we call the international operator and ask for any listed number for Guzmán, which we did.
There seemed to be only one, for the bar. So Carlos punched out a dozen digits or so. While it rang, he cleared his throat. And then someone answered. Carlos’s eyebrows shot up, and he introduced himself by saying, Hello, good afternoon, he was calling from America and was hoping to speak to the man who made the famous cheese, Páramo de Guzmán. I could hear a woman’s voice in response from across the room, exploding, lacking all romance, jamming short, staccato paragraphs down his ear canal. Carlos listened closely, murmuring “Sí, sí,” then her voice broke off altogether, even as he offered a halfhearted goodbye. The entirety of their conversation had lasted about twenty seconds.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She hung up,” said Carlos.
“But did she seem friendly?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What did she say about the cheese?”
“She said it’s not made there anymore. Or she said, ‘The man doesn’t make it anymore.’ And then she hung up.”
“The man? Did she say anything else?”
Taking in my disappointment, Carlos said, “Sorry, man.”
Another little death. I felt as I’d once felt at fifth-grade catechism when, out of the blue and even as I stood there dreamily at recess staring at clouds, Joe Ursone indiscriminately roundhoused me. One minute I was swaying in awe before the possibility of the universe, channeling universal love, religious zealot that I momentarily was, and the next I was in a slo-mo crumple, clenched over with that sudden, prickly radiation of pain from my jaw, eyes welling with tears, swearing revenge.*
Ari’s words echoed: “Rich, dense, intense … sublime … discovered it by chance in London … made with love.” What was so crazy about believing in purity—and then going to find it?
A STORY IS TIME itself, boxed and compressed. It is the briefest entertainment and simulacrum of real life, which is big and messy and requires a strange kind of endurance. The story is stylized for that flash of laughter and pain, thwarted desire and odd consummation, while life waterfalls with it—all of it—every day: prodigious, cloying, in decay. And when the story is finally over—even if the protagonist survives a spray of gunfire and goes on living—it’s over. Meanwhile, life carries on, river-swift.
As, of course, did mine.
I made plans to see the iconoclastic Spanish chef for my magazine story, but it was the cheese I couldn’t let go of. It rang now in my head as a question: Man makes world-famous delicacy from ancient family recipe, then just stops. Why? It didn’t seem like the end of a story, but the beginning of one. I rang Carlos.
“Do you think we could call the woman at the bar again?”
Carlos hesitated. “You think that’s a good idea?”
A few minutes later we were in my attic office, Carlos dialing the number. This time a man answered. If he was a bit gruff, at least he didn’t hang up. Our cheesemaker wasn’t there, he said, but since we’d called during a quiet moment, he was willing to give us a number. He acted as if he was doing us a favor, one that might have been a violation of local etiquette. Carlos asked why the cheese was no longer made in the village. “Una historia difícil”—a difficult story—said the man with a sigh that signaled the totality of what he had to say about it.
Now we had a number. Carlos dialed again. A woman answered. Carlos explained that we were from the United States, and that we were looking for a man who kept cheese in a cave, a cheese called Páramo de Guzmán. The woman listened. Then, after a long hesitation, she said we’d called the wrong number. “The cheese wasn’t made by her husband …” Carlos began translating, even as she was finishing her sentence: “… anymore.”
Had she just said anymore? She’d said anymore! The cheese wasn’t made by her husband anymore.
Carlos asked if there was a good time to call back, to talk to her husband. She said he was traveling. She seemed so uncertain. Carlos asked for his name, and that much she allowed.
“My husband is Ambrosio,” she said.
Ambrosio. The name beamed up, bounced off a satellite, and fell to our ears. Ambrosio, the Maker of the Divine Cheese.
Over the ensuing weeks, whenever I could get Carlos over, we called that same number. Mostly the phone just rang. But then one night a man answered. He spoke in such a forceful baritone that Carlos, not expecting a voice at all, literally had his head snap back.
“A ver,” Ambrosio said, as if to say: Yes, you have my attention, now what do you want? The words were almost a growl, the grinding of tectonic plates.
What did I want?
I stammered for a moment. I wanted to say, Hola, my name is Miguel Ricardo, and as a grad student in Ann Arbor, a place in the middle west of our great country of Indians and Cowboys and Pilgrims, I’d come upon his queso at a tienda named Zingerman’s Deli. Because I’d been a man of meager means and had not actually consumed his cheese, its story was as important to me as the thing itself. I had struggled for years to find myself as a writer, and had, until that time, failed miserably—but then the story of his cheese had struck some deeper chord. Perhaps what I’d seen in his cheese was the reflection of an artist who’d taken the rocky, eccentric path, and my slowly drowning self had been buoyed.
Carlos was waiting for me to speak, and finally said, “What do you want?”
“Tell him I’d like to meet him,” I said. “I plan to be in Spain this summer when the baby’s a little older.”
He conveyed this to Ambrosio, who was nothing if not decisive, whose voice could be heard making a basoonlike proclamation. On that April day, he said he could meet us on the third Sunday of August in the village.
“Where in the village?” asked Carlos.
“You’ll find me,” said Ambrosio. And then the line clicked dead.
SO, ON TO SPAIN it was, to visit the Catalan chef—and this Ambrosio. Because the trip coincided with Carlos’s summer vacation from teaching, and because I beseeched him until he relented, he became my Sancho Panza. We then convinced our wives to come along, tantalizing them with visions of the Mediterranean coast and a stay in the beach town of Roses, a couple of hours north of Barcelona, near the Catalan chef’
s Michelin-three-star restaurant.
The chef was a short man named Ferran, with frantic hair and quick, thin lips. He was a voyager in the kitchen, exploring faraway planets. The food was like nothing I’d seen, or eaten: white spoons filled with green jelly and topped with what seemed to be caviar; mesospheric formations in yellow and pink; a plate that, by my best estimation, was covered with orange worms.
The chef said things like: “There’s more emotion, more feeling, in a piece of ruby-red grapefruit with a little sprinkle of salt on it than in a big piece of fish.” Or: “The important thing is the miniskirt, not what color it is.” In the kitchen he worked hand in hand with chemists and biologists, inventors and engineers; his cooking utensils were doctor’s syringes, forceps, hammers, blowtorches, and fine sewing needles.
A few seasons after discovering the “foams”—what he called “air”—that had made him an international superstar he more or less stopped serving them, frenetically moving on to the next discovery: asparagus ice cream, apple caviar, cotton-candy cuttlefish. “If you want new emotions, and really big emotions,” he said, “you need new techniques.”
He was a man obsessed, sleeping little, moving at the speed of our digitized world, headlong into a fantastical future. It was exhausting to try to keep up.
In our free time Carlos and I went back to our German-run hotel, which seemed more cathouse than auberge, with shiny pillows and ceiling mirrors and a shower stall through which you could watch a bather from the bed, all of which absolutely delighted our eight-month-old Leo. Constellated on the beach in front of the hotel was a whole galaxy of overripe, topless European bathers and lingam-hugging Speedos that made us feel acutely American. And yet the combination of sun, sea, wine, and fine food was a potent antidote to the life we’d just left behind—the frenzied now-now-now of deadlines and credit-card bills, a life led by reflex and stopgap.
On that Sunday—the third in August—Carlos and I flew to Madrid. The flight was a short one, and when I gazed up from my magazine, a radical landscape revealed itself below. Rather than the verdant, tropical, palm-laden one of Catalonia, here was Spain’s Meseta, which appeared like Mars, its red, lifeless dirt stretching the horizon. Here was a vast sea of nothingness floating on top of huge limestone plates, all the more spectacular for its stubborn refusal to reveal life. Along the surface of the crater, one imagined a desiccating heat, a hint of smoke, and the skeletal remains of a hundred spaghetti-Western film crews.
Madrid appeared finally, as a distant mirage out the window of the circling plane, a flash of glass and metal, a jumble of sandstones and lurid reds, and then we were on the ground. At the car rental desk we procured a shiny compact, and when we stepped from the airport’s terrarium we were met with a blast of heat so stiff and all-consuming it felt like, well, the burp of Hades after a green-chile relleno.†
O, Castile in August was a heat greater than that of tanning beds and Finnish saunas, equatorial sands and the orange, overfried skin of reckless eastern Europeans on vacation. It was so hot that the tires on automobiles actually melted while driving the road north, the road known as National Highway One, the main-trunk highway that ran up the gut of the country, through Burgos, the capital of the province, and onward to Basque country, to San Sebastian and the Atlantic Ocean. We had the windows up, air-conditioning cranked, and, still, it felt as if we manned a lunar module heading into the sun.
The Meseta is comprised of two tiers, bisected in part by the Sierra de Guadarrama, a barren, jagged escalation with all the charm and invitation of the Funeral Mountains rising from Death Valley. The British writer Richard Ford, whose 1846 masterpiece, A Handbook for Travelers in Spain, sounded a starting gun for English tourists, claimed the country was one huge mountain of “dreary and harsh character, yet not without a certain desolate sublimity.” (Madrid itself is Europe’s highest capital, if you don’t count Andorra la Vella—and really, who counts Andorra la Vella?)
Geologically speaking, we were traversing one of the world’s most intriguing hinterlands, the country littered with rock dating back to the Ediacaran. And grinding north up the Guadarrama, we drove toward the sky, it seemed, until we split the last, ear-popping puerto, or mountain pass, and saw there below us, like something from those Bible movies, the great expanse of the upper Meseta, the silted land glinting with flecks of red, gold, and green as we hovered momentarily between two worlds, ghosts rising from the páramo below in siroccos that swept from the northwest, the direction of all significant weather here. In that moment, it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising to have seen the entire flow of history illuminate that stage: megaraptors skittering after prey followed by savage packs of prehumans;‡ the Romans building their roads and the Visigoths plotting and conniving; and, after them, the marauding Moors and marauding conquistadores, pillaging in the name of Allah, God, or chivalry; and then the huge, undulating flocks of sheep, whose wool became the source of Spain’s wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, spurring grand imperialistic designs that brought galleons to the New World … and so on.
Into this drama we now descended, the road melting in black goo beneath the vicious eye of the sun. Roadblocks were set up on the highway because, as we’d find out later, Basque separatists had, in rapid succession, blown up a mayor, shot a police officer, and detonated a car bomb in the capital. Diverging from the national highway at Aranda de Duero, then heading west, the road went from four lanes to two—and finally from two to one-and-a-half, which is when we found ourselves lost. The village of Guzmán may as well not have existed at all. There were no signs for it. So we started asking directions—seven times in all. After a while we just left the windows down, allowing in all that sun and swelter as we rode a swerving incline through browned vineyards, barley fields, and sunflowers, hundreds upon thousands of them, heads tilted like so many furry satellite dishes to the mother source.
We turned right, then left, another right, and again. We looped back to the crossroad that looked like a facsimile of the other crossroad where we’d just been—stone buildings like all the others except for an awning and a sign that read BAR—then we looped out in the opposite direction, back into the fields again, until we were returned to another pile of identical pale stone.
Was this a joke?
Finally, three old men perched on a bench, each sporting a black beret, pointed us down a road that ran among acacia trees, then upward toward another jumble of pale-angled edifices. By the time we passed the first building of the village, we seemed to be driving out of town.
“Was that it?” Carlos asked, jerking his head around to catch one last look.
Our first visit to Guzmán was over in less than twenty seconds.
AFTER NEARLY RUNNING DOWN a sheep, a cat, and a cavorting hen and then reversing direction, I carefully guided the car back into the village, gliding down past the first barn and the second, past a large, newish home on the left (that of the baker, as I’d later find out) and then a hivelike cluster of older stone homes that signaled the heart of the village itself. Guzmán, improbable Pleistocene city on the hill! Or: just more imploding Castilian rock. The village was a warren of these homes, a collection of cul-de-sacs and tight alleys that broke off between houses, leading, one imagined, to more of the same, or perhaps some secret altar. The whole place seemed chipped and faded. Next to intact houses were half houses that seemed to have been cracked open like eggs. It was startling to see a crushed roof, broken beams, the early afternoon sun filtering down on an abandoned pair of leather shoes, strewn books, someone’s bloomers.
With our car windows down, Guzmán smelled salty, an almost sulfuric whiff with a slight bouquet of manure, but as we moved through the alleys, that scent was erased by one of simmering broths and stews. Somewhere inside all these locked-up fortresses, people were cooking.§
The road carried us into a square where to our right loomed the imposing north wall of the town’s palacio. Just ahead, the road wish-boned into two extremely tight
openings, sluices contained by stone walls with no more breadth, it seemed, than the exact width of our car.‖ Now we crawled—through a thin alley, which spilled into another little square, and there before us loomed the church, built in solid, unadorned Romanesque, an oversized rectangle, its bell tower rising at least six stories. Like every other structure in the village, it was bound shut. Even on a Sunday, in a country where they took their Catholicism with the same passion they reserved for bullfighting and football, there was no evidence that the church had ever been in use.a
We trawled on, the road doglegging left. The total distance from the first building to the last, from beginning to end through the cubist maze, might have been two hundred yards, past palacio and church to the sudden sight of the bar—the same bar we’d telephoned, now shuttered, too, its faded awning rolled up, a chain locked across a metal door. Ambrosio had said we’d find him, but here we were on the third Sunday in August, having burned an unconscionable amount of fossil fuel to arrive at an absolute ghost town.
The car drifted of its own accord, and something serendipitous occurred. A last sharp left appeared before we were ejected out of Guzmán and back into the fields, and I took it—or the car did, for it was now unclear who was steering whom—wiggling past one more derelict home, then switchbacking up a small hill, on a dirt track that lifted us over the red-tile rooftops, a little higher, until hobbit dwellings of some sort appeared before us, each with a thick wooden door. Before one of these sat a group of people, actual humans, drinking wine at a stone table. A group of tanned, lined faces, maybe six or seven of them. The palette of their clothing was the same as the earth itself—beiges, duns, and umbers—yet they seemed to have been expecting us. Before we’d even sat ourselves down at their invitation, an old man with a face of parchment thrust a strange object into my hands. It appeared to be a glass decanter with a spout, something from the bong genus, sloshing with red liquid. Were these guys, average age of seventy-five, doing exotic hits?
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 4