Now we shook, his rough hand enveloping my computer-soft one, and parted ways outside his bodega: us to our car and him to his house. We watched as he slumped past the dark mouths of caves burrowed into the hill—including the one where we’d first met with the porrón—then he went twisting down among the cubist jumble of stone houses, finally dematerializing through the narrow, unlit streets that by dawn would hum with tractors on their way to the fields. There he went, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras. Or: Ambrosio of the Mill and Field. Bearing the halo of his agrarian virtue.
Carlos and I collapsed into the car. I found myself reeling, but oddly exhilarated, too. I turned the ignition, the engine gurgled to life, and then we were drifting toward somewhere that was nowhere, into the nothingness below us, held by the nothingness above.
ON THE RIDE I prodded Carlos for first impressions.
“I was really surprised by him,” said Carlos. “He’s a big man. He has beautiful eyes. Very nice, very warm. He was almost crying at certain points while telling the story of his cheese. As if he’d lost a child.”
We swooped down the hill, along the same winding road we’d earlier climbed, descending to the coterro’s floor with the windows open, cooler air gushing now. I crouched over the wheel in an alert stupor, trying to register everything that appeared in the headlights—stones in the road, stray grapevines, pellets of sheep shit—when suddenly came a silent, yellow explosion, like flashbulbs firing. Sunflowers! We were immersed in a sea of them. Perhaps it was the hour, or the giddy sense of freedom I felt after having sat for so long cooped inside a cave, but the car guided itself to the side of the road, and before Carlos had time to question I shot out and waded into them with palms open, as if expecting low fives.
A light wind rustled the flowers, and I zigzagged about ten rows deep, until I was more or less hidden. My feet sank into the loose, granular dirt that filled my sandals, itchy and still warm. The flowers wafted a mild, leafy smell, the sky cathedraled overhead. I could see the car from where I stood, its headlights in a sodium pool on the road, and Carlos blearily struggling to release himself from the seat belt. They were amazing creatures, these sunflowers, unthreatening, listing toward me as if to get a look.
I could hear the hum of stars, and I could locate the sound of myself thinking.* How long had it been since I’d had the clarity, or peace, to hear the gears engage or the rustle of watery thoughts flowing toward some deeper pool? And, standing there,† I had, well—call it what you will—a fibrillation of insight, or a crumb-sized 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? There was a problem: If I belonged right here, then I didn’t belong back there, with my wife and son, in the noise of the New World.
The impulse out in the sunflowers‡ that early morning was to stay absolutely still for a moment, sucking in fresh air, immersed and drawn under by a deep and powerful silence. Looming before me was the mesa known as Mon Virgo, looking every bit as much a landing pad for extraterrestrials as it was Ambrosio’s heaven of bodily evacuation. It called up Ambrosio’s earlier phrase, when he’d described the way they gently and soulfully offed their chickens here, but really had been describing their underlying ethos of life.
“Divinity, not machines,” he’d said.
It could have been the cheesemaker’s slow-food manifesto, silk-screened on a thousand farmers’ market T-shirts, his utopian ideal writ large, inked on the sandaled-shaggy-man’s placard in Times Square.
Divinity, not machines.
Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity. I was thinking about how Ambrosio had said he spoke to animals, as if they were close friends, confiding in them. What so moved me about this notion? Not just that I wanted to talk to animals like that—though I did—but more: I wanted to live in a realm where I could talk to animals, where all the generations of my family had once resided, where I might take daily strength in them, and where I’d live a life antlered by meaning and mysticism. Instead, I’d grown up in suburbia, with our nearest family relations six hours by car, and a scattered sense of my own heritage. Standing among sunflowers, I suddenly felt an urge to reverse the ships, play history in rewind, spur an inverse diaspora so that I might return to the ur-village, become a cobbler or farmer, working shoulder to shoulder with my brethren.
Those, as far as I could tell, were my brethren: farmers on my mother’s English-Irish-Scots side, tradespeople on my father’s Italian side. Certainly every family possesses its creation myth, and one of mine revolved around my grandfather, Gaetano of Sicily, who, upon entering the waters of lower Manhattan aboard the Giuseppi Verdi in 1920—and passing through Ellis Island—became Thomas of America, an Italian immigrant, an opera-loving barber (and barber’s son), a peaceable man who liked nothing more than to make wine.
The story went that during World War I he’d been captured by Central Powers troops and hauled to a prison camp in Romania, where he was left to molder and starve. Until he hatched an escape plan, one that resulted in the killing of a guard, the traversing of icy ravines, the loss of a companion along the way. He traveled this enemy landscape until he came upon railroad tracks, following them to trains. He hid by day and rode the trains by night, holding himself underneath the cars until he snuck back into Italy on foot.
I’ve often imagined my grandfather beneath those trains, and questions spark to mind: Is this physically possible? And assuming it is, what sustains and gives him the strength to undertake such a harrowing journey? The answer, I imagine, is the village of his origin, Tortorici, where everything that matters most to him resides. Can he taste the ripe peaches of home, the sweet water? Can he picture his own father, in the barbershop, waiting for him now? News from the front has been bleak. There are already four dead Paternitis from the village, but his son Gaetano has not yet been listed among them. The father, Antonino, stands there, his astral face reflecting in the mirrors, and he, the son, who is beneath the train, imagines reaching up to kiss his father good morning—buona mattina, papa—then readying the hot towels and combs, sharpening the scissors and straight razors, and finally taking his place beside the old man, waiting for the day’s first customer.
That’s how I imagine it, at least: the village on the mountain, the narrow streets, the barbershop—all of it giving him more strength than he has. That’s how he rides home half alive, and how he feels the first mists of lower Manhattan from the deck of the Giuseppe Verdi, borne by that one dream of home. After him, the rest of us are scatterlings.
So perhaps I envied a man like Ambrosio, whose strength seemed to derive from the pulse of the earth in this place, from being an Old Castilian who accepted the violence and vicissitudes of nature. And yet he’d found the key to his universe in the multitudes contained by a piece of cheese, by its absolute grandeur.
In my mild delirium, I eventually found it hard to think, or easier not to; I just allowed myself to register the feeling of existing there among the sunflowers. And the longer I stood, and the deeper I settled into that loose dirt, the more I became part of it, resolved to it.§
With the approach of dawn a few hours off, the air turned a little sweet, carrying with it a trace of chamomile. My limbs, so tired and sore from so much sitting, felt light and loose; my whole body lifted. What I felt then was an all-consuming peace, or perhaps that lack of bodily awareness. It was, I suppose, a feeling of oneness, though I would label it the cessation of an anxiety caused by the speed and decibels of every day. I breathed in one last time to remember it by.
By now Carlos had trudged out into the field, where we exchanged delirious words. “A different planet, huh?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Carlos. “Incredible.”
And then I took a picture of him, and he took one of me crouched among the sunflowers, as if they were celebrities we’d met at a ba
rbecue, photos being proof that we’d met them.
When we left that petaled forest to go back to the car, and then subsequently left the country to go back home, I already had it in mind to return. I already had it in mind that the cheese was now part of my legacy, too—and my young family’s. After I’d followed it here, Ambrosio had conveyed me into his telling room and, summoning ghosts, told me a story of a terrible betrayal, one so cruel and monstrous that it fired not only my own sense of empathy and justice, but invoked every betrayal visited upon every other human who ever lived.‖
At the same time, Ambrosio had given me a brief glimpse of a different, compelling sort of life, a life in which there seemed to be more time for family and conversation, for stories and food, a life I was desperate to lead now as an antidote to my own. It was okay to squander a day, a week, a year, sitting in that telling room, summoning ghosts, because no one saw it as squandering.
No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.
* Says Marcus Aurelius: “Tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind.”
† To get the full impression, one must imagine the singer Peter Gabriel, in earlier guise, with his band of sweater-wearing hippie-nerds, Genesis, during the experimental, prog-rock days of the seventies, taking the stage as Flower Man—floppy petals framing his pale, painted face. Said one of Gabriel’s unsuspecting and most laconic bandmates the first time he caught sight of the singer in costume, creeping onstage with his flute: “Oh, bloody hell.”
‡ A practical word about sunflowers that goes beyond their place in van Gogh paintings: In Castile, among arable hectares for crops ranging from sugar beets to rye and lavender, sunflowers rank third after barley and wheat. As prices for sunflower oil continued to rise in the world markets—tripling in the five-year period between 1999 and 2004 (and from there doubling again by May 2008)—and given Castile’s perfectly sunny climate for growing the flower, which requires at least six hours of light a day but thrives with additional rays, more and more land at that time was dedicated to the crop. So—around Guzmán, you’d find sunflowers in the barcos, on little diamonds of land scrunched between other crops, in languorous fields. While the bull had once been the great symbol of Castile—and still theoretically was—the sunflower conveyed its own reflection of tempered optimism, a heartiness willing to take its place in the unrelenting natural order of things here and, for its own brief moment, to thrive.
§ “You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!” screams Allen Ginsberg in “Sunflower Sutra.” “We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, / we’re golden sunflowers inside.…”
‖ And this includes people, or even proto-people, on Earth-like planets in distant, as-yet undiscovered galaxies. I felt Ambrosio’s injury so deeply, in fact, that a review of the transcript of that original conversation finds me uttering to Carlos, with Barney Fife–like authority, “We’re going to find this Julián, and we’re going to ask him some questions.”
7
THE VILLAGE
“… a moment of pure, gustatory pleasure …”
UPON MY RETURN HOME, I PINNED A PHOTOGRAPH TO THE WALL by my desk in the attic and then carried on again, living in clips, in the interstices, on the go, on the run, on the flyover, in rental cars, on takeout, during commercial breaks, between appointments and dirty diapers and ringing phones, adrenaline begetting adrenaline, packing bags and passport, on hold because of bad weather, de-icing, taking off, gathering speed on the cloverleaf, missing connections, missing my wife and son, checking in and out, mentally filibustering until the deadline had passed and it was time to pull an all-nighter to get something done.
Why was one always behind? And how did one get ahead?
Of course, the photograph was of Ambrosio, though it could have been from a hundred years ago. During our visit, he’d led me down the thirteen steps beneath the telling room, and I recalled Ari’s line from that old Zingerman’s newsletter, “The cheese is taken and aged in a cave,” one that stuck because it seemed most folkloric of all. I’d had visions of a gaping maw surrounded by boulders, wafting forth fragrant cheese—or perhaps cathedrals of cobwebs, bats hanging upside down from stalactites, albino salamanders, the echoing drip-drop of an underground pool. Instead, it was a close, tight space, maybe thirty by fifteen feet, clean, 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. After that oppressive summer heat it had been surprisingly cool down there, too, “air-conditioned by nature,” as Ambrosio had it.
Along one wall was makeshift wooden shelving where the cheese had once been 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. 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 experiment. One tin.
I asked if he’d let me take a picture. He pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the empty cave and sat, holding the tin in one hand and the oversized key to the bodega in the other. Framed by the rock walls, he gazed directly into the camera, conveying measures of pride and mournfulness, nonchalance and seriousness. But there was no doubt: Here was a human being concentrated in the moment, with an elemental kind of weight and grace.
In explaining the cave’s former function as a storehouse, Ambrosio had conjured the Old Castilian again, the one who had planted and scythed wheat by hand, who had made the casks for carrying wine out of the hardened bodies of gutted goats. The goat-casks were, then, carried up to the caves on the shoulders of field hands, to the song of jotas, where a man sat in el contador, counting everything brought from the fields. In that day, the field hands had worked for the lord—the man named Guzmán who had lived in the palace and, one imagined, received the tallies of the day.
Meanwhile, there I sat in my attic, tallying—words on the page, hours until deadline, the age I would be made a grandfather if, optimistically, Leo had a child of his own at the age of thirty.† I sat attached to my machines, typing to keep my editors at bay, staring at the photograph of Ambrosio, day after day.
What was it I saw in him? Freedom? Guidance? A simple life? He was a link to the past in a digitized time when the past had become somewhat irrelevant. Ambrosio had defined this phenomenon by a phrase. He called it “the disability of memory,” which he felt was the blight of modern man—and which I took to be the blight of me.
But what did it mean?
“Everyone is rushing forward,” he said, “so I must go back.”
That’s what the photograph was trying to say to me, too: I must go back.
SO I DID. I bought tickets, spending money that probably should have been set aside for Baby’s college fund. The mere act of purchasing those tickets, though, made me feel good, autonomous. And because Carlos had classes to teach, I convinced another fluent friend, Jeff, to come along this time.‡
Thus began what would become the familiar act of return: the plane from Portland to Newark, the race to the gate (it was always a tight connection), the satisfactory push back—and then the overnight flight, the rental car, the drive up and over the Guadarrama, the buffeting wind, the Meseta stretched out below in its umber robes, the narrowing road beneath the wheel. I could feel my skin tighten in that cold, dry air. I became a drum, alive to the vibration.
I was going back three months after our first meeting, in November, to make sure Ambrosio Molinos had been, in fact, real. I packed my tape recorder and notepad, but why? For an eventual book or magazine story? Even as I first began to make my record of Ambrosio and Guzmán, I didn’t know. Or have a plan. Or care to hold myself
to the normal journalistic standard, for I wasn’t entirely playing a journalist here. I was playing myself for once.
On the Meseta, you can drive for miles without signs of civilization, wondering if you’ve landed on the most lonesome patch of flash-baked clay in the world, and then from a far hill comes the outline of a church tower, the silhouette of a castle, the clustered homes. Exiting the national highway at Aranda, I scoured the horizon for my phantom village until, with a sigh of relief, we finally came upon the perched lookout of Guzmán again, driving the last of the serpentine road as if climbing to the sky. No longer awash in its summer colors—the bright, brushed greens of grapevines against the orangy earth, the sunflowers in yellow bursts, the fiery wand of the sun—the village and its fields appeared in dull, vernal, nearly metallic bronzes, silvers, and grays, like a painting by Braque.
At the summit, as we looked back at the coterro, the land rolled away from the village, grapevines twining and tumbling to the foot of Ambrosio’s favorite mesa at Quintanamanvirgo. Across the fields to the southeast and rising on its own hill was the aforementioned metropolis of Roa (population 2,500). About twelve miles south, a couple of lonely settlements—Haza (pop. 28) and Fuentecén (pop. 249)—could be faintly seen at the edge of the Duero Valley, named for that same river that runs the length of Castile. Mimicking the lives here, the Duero’s waters meander and slice among the vineyards, picking up velocity in frothing gallons through a cut into Portugal, and eventually pour out into the Atlantic Ocean, carrying the silt of Iberia to the world beyond.§
Ambrosio was waiting for me on the steps of his parents’ house. If I’d had any misgivings about my perceptions of him, they were instantly erased by the boisterous way he approached our reacquaintance, crushing the space between us, growling hellos, clasping my hand, pulling me in, showing me around the house, reciting family history. The house was beautiful inside, rough-hewn handmade beams, wide stairwells of limestone slabs smoothed by the tread of generations. It had been recently renovated by Ambrosio’s brother Angel, who was still living in Argentina—and had transformed a house on its way to dereliction into one that might have graced the pages of This Old Castilian House, if such a magazine existed. The first floor consisted of a tight galley kitchen, an eating room with a long table, a TV room, and a few stairs leading down to a half-cellar, which had been fashioned into a rathskeller. The second and third floors held bedrooms, including the one in which Ambrosio himself had been born—and the fourth floor was a bright, open space with a sitting area, an enormous, formal dinner table surrounded by perhaps a dozen wooden chairs, and a second, more spacious kitchen. On the walls hung Angel’s hunting trophies—an oryx, a hartebeest, wild boar—and there was a picture of him in Africa posing with a lion he’d killed. The top shot, however, was the skybox view out the east-facing windows that opened onto the vast Meseta below.
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 10