The device was called a porrón, and during George Orwell’s Civil War sojourn here he refused to drink from it, as it reminded him of a bed bottle. Yet the old man instructed us on its wonders: Of Catalan origin, the porrón had been co-opted long ago by the rest of the country for communal drinking, the perfect reliquary for the most holy of Spanish libations, wine. Carlos nodded his head while I sat there smiling like an organ-grinder’s monkey, my soon-to-be-familiar pose in this place. According to the unwritten rules of the land, it was an egregious violation of etiquette to suck on the spout with your mouth. Rather, you held the porrón aloft and sent the wine arcing down your open gullet. It was an art form, really. One of the old men—he wore a black beret and a sweater despite the heat—showed us how. He thrust the porrón skyward as he simultaneously tilted it. The wine came tumbling even as he spoke, and just before it reached his mouth, he paused, drew back his lips, and snatched the ruby goodness out of the air. When the porrón came to me, I made the fatal mistake of all first-timers: I tilted it tentatively, which created a lack of downward pressure, and a limp rivulet flowed through the glass nozzle, missing my lower lip but leaving a jagged red line down the front of my shirt, as if I’d been shot. When everyone laughed, I knew that this was actually happening, that we had indeed arrived.
We chatted amiably for a while—about the weather (mucho calor) and the caves in the hill (muy antiguas)—and then, since it wasn’t exactly every day that a couple of stray americanos appeared around here in the kiln of August, we told them that we’d come to eat the cheese of a man named Ambrosio. At the name, a few nodded their heads in recognition and a few shook their heads with what seemed to be disappointment. The sweatered old man pointed to the next cave over. “There,” he said, “is the bodega of Ambrosio.”
THE ENTRANCE WAS A weathered oaken door, thick, cross-hatched, and centuries-old. Standing now ten paces from our new friends, I hesitated before knocking. Though I’d had months to imagine this meeting, it crossed my mind that it would have been nice to have prepared an opening statement of some sort. Which is when the door suddenly swung open before us.
“Venga,” said a booming voice. Come this way. This was the man on the phone, the cheesemaker himself: the Ambrosio!b A bulky form filled the frame, head slightly stooped to fit the opening, then he moved back to make way for us. Through the door to the bodega was a narrow entryway with worn stone steps leading down into a murk from which gusts of refreshing, cool cave air emanated; to the right were a few more worn steps climbing to a small room. We followed the man’s broad back as our eyes adjusted from bright sunlight. Inside it was dark, with a fireplace full of ashes and a tangle of dried grapevines. In the streamlets of light filtering through the shutters, a long, wood-plank table materialized, at which another man of about seventy-five was sitting on a bench. “My father,” said Ambrosio, grinning. Another porrón appeared on the table, and before we sat he offered it to me, which I accepted, expertly drizzling red wine once more on my shirt. Then he produced a plate of chorizo.
Though I hadn’t a clue what he said at first, his voice echoed in that cramped room like shock waves. I’d expected him to be much older, his father’s age maybe, had envisioned him in his own black beret, maybe even with a cane, small and humped and slightly deaf, but no, here he was, resolving before my eyes into a strapping specimen of ample, Falstaffian belly, in his mid-forties, with a full head of thick, parted hair and mournful eyes. He possessed a broad face, close-set eyes, and a prominent nose, the full effect of which left the impression of a surprising handsomeness. He was dressed in dusty work boots, and the cuffs of his pants were dirty, too. But he also sported an elegant collared shirt with thin navy pinstripes and a pocket embroidered with his monogram, AM.
The cheesemaker sat heavily on a chair at the head of the table, offering us the bench across from his father. Lined along the shelves were empty sardine tins, a bottle full of cloudy liquor bobbing with waterlogged cherries, a tin of Colombian coffee. A pack of Camels lay on the table, and Ambrosio drew a cigarette and lit it. He inquired about our travels. He lifted the porrón, his head wreathed by smoke, placed the cigarette in an ashtray, and sucked the equivalent of a glass of wine from the air while I told him the tale of how I’d first learned of his cheese during the days of my deli proofreading, how I’d gone on to become a journalist, and when I realized that I’d be in Spain on assignment, I’d decided to see if I could find him and his cheese. I instinctively pulled a tape recorder from my pocket as if showing my credentials and asked if I could record our conversation.
Ambrosio listened to me intently, replacing the porrón before him on the table, and then spoke, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation we’d been having. Or delivering a familiar speech that came as a non sequitur. “The problem with the world,” he said, “is that no one knows how to shit anymore.”
Had we misheard? He’d used a form of the word cagar: to shit. There wasn’t a flicker of a smile.
“This is very important,” he said, wagging a finger. “It’s the most important thing. To shit well, you have to eat well. I was born here in 1955, and as a child, I lived an old kind of life. Not like people living in Madrid or Tokyo or New York. It was a way of life that meant you raised chickens from the egg, you had a good relationship with your dog, you held your animals and prepared the animals for your table by giving them your love. It was the end of an era when everything was natural. There were no mad cows, there was no such thing as preservatives here. We ate in an ancient way.”
He stressed that he still tried to eat in an ancient way, and “the act” was nothing to be afraid of. When the feeling struck, especially in the fields, it was natural to unbuckle and squat, and to do so with friends was, well, edifying, equalizing, true. He painted a picture of what it meant to cagar on a place he called Mon Virgo. His father sat nodding his head, but it was unclear whether this was, in fact, the delirium of fatigue, because soon he let himself droop on the table and fell to light snoring.
“You start by eating good beans and a good lettuce salad with olive oil and tender lamb chop or fresh rabbit,” Ambrosio explained. “Everything is accompanied by a good piece of wheat bread and a good wine and good friends and, at the end, a sip of brandy. Oh how happy you are—and your body’s happy! And it begins to digest. You ask, Now? And your body says, In a half hour. And so, eventually, your intestines tell you: This is the moment! You can’t lie, it’s an honest moment. If you go to a meeting or work on the computer or drive your car, you’re going to miss one of the best events of your life. You’re surrounded by the wonderful aromas of the earth—the sage and chamomile—and you can see the village and your home and your entire life down here below Mon Virgo. In this moment you could say to your friends, ‘Look where we are! Look at how incredible this is! Look how happy!’ It’s as if you’re seeing God in this moment.”
Carlos translated with a Gettysburg Address kind of seriousness, while I subtly raised my eyebrows, as if to say: Are you kidding me?
But Ambrosio was dead serious. He rose from the table and drew back the shutter that opened to the east, revealing yet another little old man, who stood there blinking and startled in his beret. Had he been eavesdropping? “Tomás,” Ambrosio bellowed, as if expecting him. “He’s a cheesemaker, too!” he said. He returned to the table, uncorked another bottle of wine, filled the porrón, and offered it to Tomás, who grabbed hold and downed a quarter of its contents.
Ambrosio pointed in the direction of a celestial mass, a mesa that rose out of the burnt earth a few miles from Guzmán. “That’s Mon Virgo,” he said. He allowed that, over the years, he and his friends had dug holes all through the fields—while out hunting, walking, harvesting—and that Mon Virgo really was the five-star. “It’s the most perfect place on earth to take a shit,” he said.
I wondered for a moment just who Ambrosio thought I might be, what he saw in me. I mean, he now knew from the skimpiest of banter that I was an American journalist, and h
e knew, too, that I’d come, like others in another time, for his cheese. But did he see me as yet another person from the modern world in need of this sideways proselytizing, this one-way lecturing? In his telling room that day, I was left wondering: What man tries to convert you by sharing the details of his private bodily matters?
Ambrosio asked Tomás in, but Tomás seemed content to stand beside the window and listen in. Ambrosio left the shutter open, returned to the table. He popped disks of chorizo into his mouth, then took more wine from the porrón and passed it along for us to dribble on our shirts yet again. Watching us do so, he took pity, found two small glasses and set them before us, filling them. “I can tell you exactly when the end came,” he said. “It was a day in the seventies when my friends and I were here at the bodega having a meal, and we had a can that read ‘York Ham.’ And, of course, we were all very curious.c Was it ham made in Yorkshire? Or New York? The can didn’t say. So we opened it. And there was something in there, something dead, a color between white and pink. It looked like a tongue. No one was willing to try it, until finally my friend did and nearly got sick. I was next. It was my first industrial product,” Ambrosio said, “and there was nothing positive about it.”
I sat there letting the words wash over me, having a slight out-of-body experience in that hand-dug burrow. I ate some version of that crap all the time! There’d hardly been an Easter from my childhood that hadn’t starred a red-boiled rugby ball of pig from God knows where. And now that he mentioned it, even slathered with mustard, that porcine spectacle had been disgusting. “Pigs need to eat beautiful acorns,” Ambrosio said, and then he talked about the importance of slowing down to eat well. He talked about how the impersonal machinery of modernity had destroyed the values and sensitivities, the tenderness and powerful connection that came from living close to the earth. The more he talked, the more I realized that perhaps I hadn’t ever known what I really yearned for, what he made me yearn for. He was webbed to the here and now, sunk into it, while I seemed to spend a great deal of time racing through airports, a processed cream-cheese bagel in hand, trying to reach the future. Now I sat noticing everything, infused with mindfulness: the pallor of light, the still life of the smooth-glass porrón on the wood-grooved table, the oversized man sitting in his shadow, occasionally revealed at angles or by the rumble or raggedness in his voice or the various ways he simply lit a cigarette between big fingers (now with show, now as an afterthought, now with the slinky, fumbling desperation of an addict).
Outside, the light oozed over the fields. At the table, with glass in hand, I found myself gulping wine enthusiastically, like everyone else there. I’d come to think of red wine as something that required age and oaky gravitas, polished wood paneling and shelves of first-edition hardbacks, the perfect pour for cold winter evenings, but this was the perfect pour for now—cool and effervescent. Ambrosio allowed that the family harvested their own grapes each fall and made their own wine, a wine free of middlemen, a new wine newly sipped. Nothing had been lost in the translation. There was no need to let it breathe, either: it was already breathing. And it was delicious.
He rose one last time and disappeared down the stairs for a while, then returned with three more bottles, setting them with a satisfying thud on the table, the fine film of limestone dust on each calling to mind that dark entrance we’d seen when we’d first entered, the one leading down into the earth. Was it possible that, along with a cache of wine bottles, the cheese sat waiting thirty feet below us in the naturally air-conditioned chambers of Roman ingenuity?
I waited for a lull—which only took place when Ambrosio drank, it seemed—and opened my mouth to speak. “Can he tell us the story of his cheese?” I asked Carlos to ask Ambrosio.
After Carlos’s translation, there seemed to be a second of shocked silence—had I violated some unwritten protocol?—and then came a palpable exhalation from Tomás, who instantly disappeared from the window with a “Venga” and the flourish of a wave. Ambrosio’s father cleared his throat, grimaced as he stood up, then walked stiffly with his cane to the door. Ambrosio watched them go, his expression unreadable.
There was silence and some uncomfortable shifting (mine). With the three of us alone in the telling room, Carlos and I watched his face transform with the difficulty of what he would say next. He wiped the back of his hand across pursed lips and looked up with those sad eyes. For such a handsome man, his face somehow contained in its lines and loosening flesh both a life of hard-lived mirth and strange tragedy.
In the vortex of this silence, I imagined the strain of a song. The story itself spoke, calling out for a teller and a hero. It craved a dramatic ending, even if the truth needed tweaking or the lead needed revising. It had us, these strangers from across the ocean, listening intently. At last Ambrosio’s words breached the surface, unsure at first and then gaining the strength of a slow-breaking roller. The story burst forth then, over the next eight hours—through the evening and into early morning, with a pause only for dinner.
By the time it was over, I, too, wanted revenge.
* Truth is, I plotted for years how I was going to jump Joe Ursone when he least expected it. I would get him in an alley somewhere, with a crowbar to the knees. I would attain a black belt in jujitsu without him knowing, feign fear in his presence, fake-cower, then rearrange his face. I would be, like, all whassup?, then knee him in the groin. Actually, not really having a stomach for violence, I wished for an older brother who could just do it for me, but as luck had it, mine were all younger, my revenge nothing more than a phantasm of revenge, these imagined acts committed repeatedly in my mind.
† Too much? Perhaps, but in the throes of story-making—an act that, by its nature, is hyperbolic, exculpatory, and biased even when tamped down and allegedly made objective—the storyteller can’t always be bound by the quality of simile, rather thrills to the music of “burp” and “relleno” a few words apart. Until his editor comes along. And then the storyteller adds a footnote like this one, to acknowledge his too-muchedness, to calm with self-consciousness, to create the smokescreen of restraint and perspicacity that really allows him to continue piling it on.
‡ In March of 2008, a human jaw, dated at 1.2 million years old, was found in a limestone cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca, near the city of Burgos, making it the oldest discovery of human bones in Europe. Contrary to expert theory holding that hominids, early precursors of human beings, entered Europe from the east, perhaps through the Caucasus region, the revelation suggested the possibility that they may have simultaneously entered Europe through the Iberian Peninsula from Africa. At the very least, it was proof that the Meseta had been the site of some of the continent’s earliest visitors.
§ Or more accurately, they were cooking the comida, the big sacramental midday meal. The sharing of food was so essential to this country that the Spaniards had long ago added two meals to the normal three a day in order to make five. There were the preliminary meals, desayuno (breakfast) and almuerzo (late-morning snack), the aforementioned comida in the early afternoon, and then the latter meals of the day, merienda (late-afternoon snack) and cena (dinner).
‖ Somehow the cramped, jagged openings retroactively explained the obsession of the rental car employee who’d led us to our vehicle at Barajas Airport and then circled it repeatedly with her clipboard in hand, jotting down all the scratches and dents, which were numerous. It was probably a cottage industry: The fine print I hadn’t read detailed hundreds of additional euros in penalties for sandpapering one’s car against the rough walls of villages like this one.
a I’d later find out that on a typical Sunday the priest traveled from village to village and Mass to Mass, returning for an 11:00 A.M. service in Guzmán, after which he retired to his home, or rather the home of a local widow, for his Sunday meal. Depending on whom you asked—his friends or enemies—the priest either rented a room in that house and was mothered respectfully, or, contrarily, was said to enjoy a more controversial hosp
itality. If the latter, a long precedent existed in Spanish history for priests participating in worldly pleasures, dating back to the thirteenth century, when concubinage was, according to one history book, “accepted practice among the supposedly celibate clergy.” As it was, the book claimed that “the sons of a priest could even inherit his property.”
b Am-bro-zee-oh. The tongue not so much tripping or tapping, but the mouth starting with intimations of ham, then making itself bigger, wider, in order to birth the bro, a reflexive smile on the third syllable—zee—then open again to appease the exclamation of that primordial oh!
c The Castilian takes his or her pig as seriously as his religion—and most Castilian kitchens harbor at least one rather large pig leg, often set on a stand, the pig’s elegant hoof held aloft, to offer an easier means of slicing from the plump shank. Here where vegetables are scarce—or, it seems, scarcely eaten—there are times when ham (gorgeous, fantastic ham!) is the starter, the vegetable, and the main dish, all in one. The names of the best pig farms are known in the same way that the French know certain vineyards, the Japanese grades of sushi. In shopwindows all over Spain hang hog legs, each with a little plastic receptacle, like a little white umbrella, there to catch leaking grease. At holidays these legs are given as gifts of the highest order and can cost up to $500 apiece. One of the most famous hams—Joselito brand, from near Salamanca—comes from pigs that scrounge through the mountains for acorns, truffles, and grass. And like the inevitability of red wine among friends, the offering of some porcine product is also one of the most basic acts of hospitality in Spain.
4
PÁRAMO DE GUZMÁN
“I shit in the milk of God.”
AFTER SPENDING HIS YOUTH IN CATHOLIC SCHOOLS, AMBROSIO had come to despise priests and organized religion almost as much as he did ham in a can and city life.* And yet he believed in a spirit, or Creator, to whom he spoke almost daily—and who sometimes spoke back to him. He listened to the howl of the wind and the groan of the earth, the bleat of sheep and the call of the wheat. If he was patient, the voices sometimes told him what to do next. So he’d waited years to make good on the offering he’d promised that voice from the ether—had it been Death itself?—in exchange for his father’s life.
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 5