Interestingly, a couple of centuries later, during the Civil War of the 1930s, as Franco’s Nationalists did battle against the Republicans, the Black Legend was invoked again—as a narrative tool used to blackball the pro-Franco Castilians as having been born of conniving and bloodthirsty stock. However, this time, the Nationalists caught on to the effect of a good story, especially a tawdry one, firing back with their own bit of narrative rehab known to Spanish historians as the White Legend, which lauded the virtues of the Inquisition, reglorified the honor and courage that brought the Spanish to the New World, and in the process fanned the ferocious brand of regional pride that continues to this day.
† Only about a half-century behind the times, however.
‡ Hail, locusts, lack of rain—these were the main culprits in the Duero region, named for the river just south of Guzmán. From the time of the earliest records, in the late medieval period, fully a quarter of the harvests were significantly affected by granizo, or hail, alone. The severity of storms and droughts, plagues and unforeseen events such as frost, flood, and fire, could also be seen in church records detailing rogativas, the religious processions tied to agricultural life that were brought to Spain by the Romans. One can picture these medieval moments as they are related for us: thousands bearing statues of the Virgin marching into the fields, kneeling and beating the dusty earth while frantically calling out to God for rain. In fact the rituals remain, though they’re limited now to holidays and fiestas: In Guzmán a statue of the Virgin Mary is taken from the hermitage and processed through town while the villagers sing and dance, conjuring the same mania of faith their forebears displayed in calling on their Creator for a bountiful harvest.
§ And, as with their wine, the families argued in a good-natured way about whose cheese tasted best. In fact, in addition to the cleanliness of one’s home, the quality of one’s homemade food was a Castilian bragging right. In the past, it had been even more than that. For instance, when the Molinos family had owned huge tracts of land and commanded a small army of labor, up to sixty people during the harvest, they were responsible for feeding their hired hands with a steady supply of wine and cheese. Often the delectability of that fare became a deciding factor in the quality of your workforce: that is, everyone wanted to work for good food, and if your food was really good, you had your pick of the best workers.
‖ In Guzmán, however, homemade rockets were often fired into hovering clouds with the hope of disrupting an approaching rain.
a For her family, church also could be counted as an occupational hazard: Her other grandfather was thrown thirty feet to the ground while in the act of ringing the bells one day before Mass. He survived the fall.
b If any supernatural trait could be assigned to members of the Molinos family (or if Ambrosio assigned it to them), it may well have been this: Their senses of both taste and smell were acute. Once, on a trip to Argentina to visit his brother Angel, Ambrosio walked into an old silo, one unused for decades, and, inhaling, proceeded to give a history of everything that had been stored there over the course of a century, to the dumbfounded amazement of the owner: wheat, garbanzos, cheese.… As for that faraway look on Ambrosio’s face when he was sipping a good wine, I came to realize that it was less theater than a secondary gaze down through the portal of time, at the end of which was another visage, his own, in the rapture of that first time drinking and tasting beautiful wine. And so the Ambrosio of the Present sat, wine in hand, considering the Ambrosio of the Past, trying to find affinities between two moments connected by taste, as if memory were the conduit between sucks of wine.
c The first human encounter with cheese may have occurred between 8000 and 3000 B.C. with the domestication of sheep, when an Arab trader, carrying milk in a pouch made from calf’s stomach, tarried through the hot day, slept through the night, and, when craving a drink the next morning, discovered that by some mysterious chemical reaction his milk had transformed into cheese curds, which he ate, and found salty and delicious. Later, the Romans made hard, molded cheese to feed their legionnaires, called formaticum, a word that gave birth to offshoots in other languages: fromage, fromaggio, formatge, fourmaj, and furmo. The original Latin for cheese, caseus, in turn, gave rise to the Spanish queso and the English cheese.
d Sheep’s milk, being slightly sweeter than cow’s milk, lends its cheeses a nuttiness, as well as a burnt caramel undertone. Often sheep’s milk cheeses smell of lanolin or wet wool.
e Writes Clifton Fadiman: “A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.”
f In a famous quip attributed to Charles de Gaulle, the former president of France said of his nation, “One can’t impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.”
g Bought in a little village near Santander, Ambrosio’s rennet was the kind often used in artisanal cheeses, pure and organic, harvested from the inner mucosa of the fourth stomach chamber of suckling calves, dried, cleaned, cut into small pieces, and soaked in wine before being deployed in the coagulation process, which turned the milk into a moist gel.
h Some of these dated back to the horror of the Civil War, when friends and acquaintances in the village found each other on opposite sides of the fray, a fact that led to one of Guzmán’s most unsettling and closely guarded secrets, a story that would take me years to uncover and try to sort out.
i Rhetorical question, but the kingdom of Castile dates to the ninth century. Modern-day Spain is said to have begun its germination on the day—October 19, 1469—when the nineteen-year-old Isabella of Castile, clad in ermine and white brocade, married her eighteen-year-old first cousin, Fernando of Aragón, in the castle at Valladolid. Soon began the thirty-five-year reign of Los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Monarchs. After presiding over a string of military victories, a minor cultural renaissance, and Colombus’s expedition to the New World, the monarchs adroitly, if tenuously, unified the lands that comprise Spain today.
j And what he can’t foresee in that moment of innocence is how much of himself he is about to lose by having succeeded. Flash forward to the end: After three additional voyages, after dotting the Caribbean and mainland with temporary Spanish settlements, after subduing his enemies (in part by committing savage acts of enslavement and cruelty against the native people and hanging some of his own crew members), he is arrested, manacled, and conveyed in chains back to Spain, where he is imprisoned. No longer the boy dreamer but a broken and arthritic fifty-three-year-old man, eyes blotted by chronic conjunctivitis, he seethes with a feeling that he has been badly betrayed, and in a letter to a friend at court that details his accomplishments in the name of the crown—including laying claim to a landmass equal to that of Africa—asks him to consider “how I at the end of my days have been despoiled of my honor and my property without cause, wherein is neither justice nor mercy.”
k In a time before artisanal cheeses, this one benefited from what the renowned British cheesemonger Patricia Michelson later told me were the hallmarks of great small-batch cheeses: “The cheesemaker goes twenty feet rather than twenty miles for his milk,” she said. “The milk gets made into cheese quickly after milking because it retains its best qualities. Cheeses made on the farm with their own milk, and milking parlor, and cheesemaking area close by can be done in two hours. Then put away for aging. That’s what makes the perfect artisanal cheese.”
l The two met at twenty-one when Ambrosio saw her on the street in Aranda and shouted, “Hey, morena, we’re going to get married, so you need to be my girlfriend.” The next time he saw her, he offered her half of a wild boar he’d just killed. Nevertheless, they’d married in 1978 and had a daughter, Asunción (known as Asunita, or little Asun), in 1979, and then two sons: Josué in 1982 and Enrique, or Kiké (pronounced key-KAY), in 1985. Asun, the wife and mother, was quick to laugh, with a gentle spirit and intelligent brown eyes. She was also the heart and soul of the family,
a great cook, a calm presence, and yet full of paradox: strong and soft, wary and brave, nurturing and isolated, supportive and at times, by necessity, gently critical of her husband, the dreamer. Ambrosio’s stories, his constant irreverence, and the force of his creativity—all of these things kept her close. And the beauty of village life deepened for her over time, though she often admitted to missing the bustle of Aranda. To counter Ambrosio’s bohemian flair, she became the practical sorter of bills, the left brain to her husband’s right, the protector of his more vulnerable soul.
m The páramo in this case being the highland plain above the village where the sheep often grazed, also known in local parlance as arriba. At an elevation of approximately three thousand feet and with somewhat murky boundaries, that table of land was divided into numerous zones according to the closest village, so the páramo of Páramo de Guzmán might also have been known as the Páramo de Villaescusa or the Páramo de Tórtoles, and so on.
n At one of those shops, an American gourmand and deli owner named Ari was cut a piece, and, letting it melt on his tongue, declared: “This is really an outstanding piece of cheese … rich, dense, intense.” He took it back to Michigan, where a slightly fuzzy, idealistic part-time employee didn’t just hear the clarion call, he proofread it.
5
THE BETRAYAL
“ ‘He stole my soul,’ Ambrosio said.”
THE GIANT—WHICH IS WHAT AMBROSIO WAS IN THAT HOT, cramped space—cleared his throat, fidgeted, looked down at his hands, and then met my gaze. He seemed to choke for a moment on a small skeleton, then swallowed hard.
“I don’t know why this little cheese conquered so many,” he said softly. “But if you asked me the secret, I’d say it was because we made it in our home, the old way, the way it had been made for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the United States you don’t know what it’s like to have old flavors, flavors from the past, from centuries before. But we live with them every day here. My children know these flavors. I don’t consider myself in the middle of this conflict between old and new—I’m clearly on the side of the old. I feel that there are two ways to create nourishment in food, and in the future, there’s only going to be one.” His big forefinger waggled. “My mission is to make sure we don’t forget the old way.”
Ambrosio was rolling again, inspired by the digression,* or, as he put it, “mi grandísima filosofía de la vida.” Anything, it seemed, to keep from having to tell the next part of the story about his cheese. But there we sat, Carlos and I, rapt as two unmoving cannonballs.
“Consider the chicken,” he said. “Today we have industrialized animals. A chicken needs to be cheap to be competitive in the marketplace. So the industrial chicken has a life that lasts forty-two days between its hatching and its sacrifice. They flood the chicken with twenty-three hours of light a day so that the chicken constantly feeds, and then they give it one hour of rest. They do this for six weeks, then the chickens are put on a conveyor belt and either gassed or have their heads chopped off and are immediately dumped in scalding water, after which the dead body is sent to market.
“On the other hand, the traditional chicken used to take one and a half years from hatching to sacrifice. You would see the chicken every day and speak to her, and you would share with her certain aspects of your own life. The chicken was your friend; she understood you. You loved each other. She knew she was going to have a happy life and tried to give you her best while you gave her yours. She knew her destiny, that eventually she would make a gift of her life to feed your family. But you honored each other. The chicken lived at home with you, and you ate her at home. It was divinity, not machines.”
He kept on easily in this vein for quite some time, until the heat relented a few degrees and the slightest of nighttime breezes pushed through the shutter, swishing so lazily it hardly guttered the flame he’d lit. This certainly wasn’t normal conversation, I knew that—or certainly not normal American conversation, from the country that blithely consumed nine billion chickens a year, most of them factory made and McNuggetized.† The more he spoke the more I appreciated the relative humanity of his vision. His grand philosophy wasn’t just idealistic, it was achievable, actionable, with intimations of beauty and epiphany. He was in dialogue with an inaccessible world I’d never had the occasion to live in, let alone lose touch with. Yet it was one we all felt some instinctual connection to, wasn’t it? As Ambrosio’s thin lips kept moving, as he boasted that he could spot a wild hare from two hundred meters, smell bad weather in the air before its arrival, discern mushrooms where there didn’t seem to be any, I felt buoyed, inspired, reinvigorated. He explained that this life in the fields was all part of being “an Old Castilian,” something that couldn’t be taught or learned, but was genetically transferred through generations. “Either this cycle of history admits you or it doesn’t,” he said. “Our cheese was an emblem of this.”
He allowed that, in the beginning, when the cheese was young and newly found, life had been “idyllic” and “full of great happiness.” All of his expectations had been met the day his father had slipped the queso in his mouth and momentarily become a boy again. But add time, and the plot thickens.‡
Ambrosio absently fiddled with a knife that he’d pried from the table where it had been stuck, the blade about six inches long and pewter colored. In the overlay of darkness, he held open his empty hand, his white palm flashing in a gesture I took to be resignation—What can I say?—and began to recite from Páramo de Guzmán’s book of Genesis. He recounted in detail all the things he’d done to bring the cheese to fruition—milking the sheep, hauling the canisters, stirring and harping the boiling curds and whey (and such a hard cheese as his required a lot of stirring and harping to break down the protein globules). The amount of cheese at first—the number of wheels—had been just enough for an inner circle of relatives and friends. But it was true, the cheese had been too wonderful. Like its maker, it demanded an audience.
“We put so much into the cheese,” said Ambrosio, “but it gave so much more.”
The decision to sell and market the cheese, an idea that seemed to marry so many good things (a sublime product, a sustainable way of life, a dream realized), was, in retrospect, perhaps the biggest mistake of Ambrosio’s life.§ Once it had been made, there was no turning back. “The real trouble,” he said, “started with the new factory.”
For the new factory, he needed Julián most of all. “Julián’s role was to advise me on financial matters and to handle all the contracts,” said Ambrosio, “and being a businessman, he had relationships that, of course, I didn’t.” At the very least, Ambrosio realized that growing the cheese operation would require something of a quantum leap. And that leap required another infusion of cash. Friend that he was, Julián promised Ambrosio that he’d find the right investors, ones who understood and appreciated Ambrosio’s philosophy, who would respect and love the cheese, too—and keep its best interests in mind. And apparently that’s just what Julián did.
“The factory in Roa was housed in a very old building, maybe four hundred years old, with a perfect cellar for aging the cheese,” Ambrosio said. “Julián brought in the investors and we signed the contracts to form a conglomerate. We invested in state-of-the-art equipment, like stainless-steel industrial vats for the milk. We hired more cheesemakers.” Watching it all unfold, as the orders continued to pour in, Ambrosio said that he felt the “cleansing obligation of work.”
A typical day at the factory might have found Ambrosio arriving early to meet with his cheesemakers, standing out by the front gate to receive canisters of milk, driving to the fields to check up on the shepherds. There he was, overseeing the boiling and harping, helping to press and cut the cheese, molding it and carrying it to the dark, cool basement. He tested new batches of “the product,” acting as final quality control. He helped load the cheese into boxes, onto pallets, into trucks. He met with potential buyers, and in this act of public relations he truly excelled, because he was com
pletely himself, the Castilian man of the earth.
There was the doing side of things, the making side, the enacting of the grand philosophy, and then there were the intricacies of the profit-and-loss sheet, of price points and wage rigidity, the nitty-gritty business of selling the cheese in a way that left the company profitable. How many times had he been thankful to have Julián there, and never more so than in the new factory? It was a blessing to worry only about making the best cheese in the world. And a blessing to be surrounded by family and friends: his wife, Asun, who now worked on the books; his aunt, who was the secretary. His drinking buddies, the shepherds of Guzmán, still brought the milk. He couldn’t have dreamed it better.
In Ambrosio’s telling, the story of the cheese sounded more and more like a fable, not just because he communicated with animals and food products—and not because the tableau of little elves working by candlelight to manufacture the charmed family treasure was roughly true—but because it was the kind of fable in which everything, especially the hero, is bigger than life and thus takes on the quality of legend. Ambrosio described being at the factory one day during renovations when a cellar beam groaned and cracked, and the ceiling began to rain down. One worker was hit by a beam; another barely escaped the cave-in with his life. Without thinking, Ambrosio threw himself at the emergency, dragging a water hose in order to make the concrete needed to stabilize the beam, which he held in place over his head for an hour while others rushed to reinforce the ceiling. “It wasn’t an act of courage,” he said. “I just had to.”
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 8