Ambrosio pointed out a stone pile across the way in Roa. “My factory,” he called it. He pointed to Mon Virgo, “the shitting spot.” “Beautiful,” he said. As alive as he’d been in my memory over the past three months, I’d forgotten how physically encompassing he was, how locked into his orbit one instantly became.
He wore one of those dress shirts again, unwrinkled with his initials on the pocket, his ample girth spilling over his beltline. After a stop in the downstairs kitchen where he searched out a stick of morcilla (blood sausage), he said he had something he wanted to show us, so we bundled ourselves up—he in a field jacket and big muddy boots—and trudged the sloping land to his barn, his broad back nearly blotting the sky, us tailing behind him like kids from the city in clean knickers, the ground crunching beneath our shoes.
The village receded, shuttered and nearly silent. Two dogs barked, almost yodeling at each other. Across the fallow fields nothing moved but a flock of birds that startled from their pecking near a glade of trees. Ambrosio didn’t walk so much as stalk with such purpose that, when he approached the door to the barn, the padlock seemed to undo itself. “Follow,” he said.
The barn was not your red New England variety, but rather a long industrial storehouse made of corrugated metal. Dark, empty, and cold inside, it was three-quarters the size of a football field, with clumped sod on the floor and wooden pens portioned out on either side of an aisle running down the middle of the vast room. A diffused light filtered through dirty windows; the musty smell of dried animal poo wafted thickly. This was where the sheep had been kept. Ambrosio looked on the empty cavern as he might have surveyed the vacated rooms of a house where he’d once lived.
“We loved these sheep,” he said. “They were very special sheep, Churra sheep.”‖ From the end of May to September, when the land was in bloom, they ate the dry grass and herbs, the chamomile and sage, which created more protein in their milk as well as the perfect balance of fats and oils, and this, he said, was all fermented into the cheese. “You need to imagine this barn full of living, breathing sheep, and in the morning when I arrived, I said good morning to the sheep and they said good morning to me.”
Ambrosio assumed a glum countenance. “Of course, they were sold,” he said, then, for the first time that morning, he fell silent. It was Sasha, the hunting dog, who roused him again, appearing at his side, licking his hand, which made him smile. He crouched down, scratching her ears. “How are you, dear?” he said. He held her snout in his hand, making eye contact, listening to her whine. “She wants to hunt rabbit,” he said. “Come this way.”
Ambrosio navigated a patch of detritus—old planks with rusted nails at weird angles and shatters of broken glass—and rounded a corner to a small tack room. In the darkness it was hard to make out much until three metal forms appeared, glowing like spaceships from an old movie. Ambrosio smiled. It was here where he made the family’s wine—1,200 bottles to carry them through a yeara—and he wanted to check his latest batch, which was nearly ready. “The grapes were very good this year,” he said. “We may have our best wine yet.” A long-stemmed glass appeared in one of his hands, and with the other he removed the lid from one tank and dipped the goblet in. He held it up to the light, admiring the wine’s color, which was actually many colors: There were carmine and amethyst and plum, worlds within worlds. Ambrosio poked his nose into the glass, inhaled, then took a long sip. He licked his lips, pressed them together, contemplating, then nodded … yes. He swirled the goblet, watching as clear glycerin gripped the sides and slipped down as liquid plane settled upon plane, then repeated the whole thing, ending with a long, loud, gurgly sip.
“¡Puta madre, está bueno!” he said. “Here, some lunch.” He filled a glass and pushed it toward me. I drank—and then again Ambrosio refilled our glasses.
“When you put something alive in your mouth,” he said, “it makes you more alive. The people who produce wine are mostly pedantic and stupid,” he continued, jabbing the air with his glass, sloshing the dregs. “They don’t make wine; wine makes itself, God makes wine. They may keep things clean and in good order, but the grapes make the wine. Whenever I serve my wine, not only is it cold, but there’s an aroma that invades the whole table. You have to listen for what the wine itself says, not the people who make it. And worse are the people who buy the expensive stuff. They don’t know shit! They couldn’t care less about the aroma and finer nuances of drinking wine. They don’t hear a thing the wine is saying.”
We lingered in the tack room until we were feeling mighty and powerful. Then Ambrosio led us out of the storehouse, tromping along a footpath that transected a fallow field below the town, circumventing the village itself. He pointed up to the mesa, Mon Virgo, by way of reminder. Again we were off somewhere, boots squishing in the mud. We passed a cluster of trees bowed by the wind and, nearby, a fenced garden with raised beds that were fruitless mounds now, with an open cistern full of dark water. “It’s my secret spot,” he said. “If we need the perfect ripe tomato or green pepper or head of lettuce, I come here. When the wheat is up and the leaves are on the trees, the garden is invisible. I could write a book just about my relationship to this spot.”
We walked on, crossing the road, climbing a short hill to an old granary. The doors were huge slabs of metal, and out front sat a big granite sculpture, a phallic slab chiseled into the face of a woman. Ambrosio went to a stone wall that snaked around the granary, counted off seven rocks, then removed the eighth, grabbing a hidden key. “This place belongs to my friend Cristian,” Ambrosio said. “He’s an artist, my age.”
He fumbled with the padlock until it fell open, then he muscled the doors and we were inside another lightless room with a strong scent of fermenting straw and clay. Ambrosio climbed a short set of stairs and threw open the shutters, illuminating everything. What appeared were a dozen sculptures in various states of completion, each one a naked woman. There were pale shoulder blades and voluptuous breasts, long arms and soft netherworlds. Bundled and cold, we’d intruded on some equatorial expression of desire locked behind metal doors in this opaque village. Ambrosio nodded. “Incredible, isn’t it?”
Indeed—especially in a village of old people, a profound tradition of conservative Catholicism, and an abiding prevalence of Franquistas, or Franco supporters, still up on two feet. Incredible it was for its honesty and audacity, its rustic realization, its bald transgression among the devout. Incredible it was for the secret it kept right under their noses, all these naked women cavorting in a warehouse garden.
“This is what your friend does?” I asked.
“No, in the village he’s a stonemason,” said Ambrosio, surveying the bodies, light gathering to hips and breasts, the long plane of a neck. “There are geezers here who would die of cardiac arrest if they saw this.”
“But why women, as opposed to anything else?”
“Because his wife left him,” he said. “And there are no women left for him here.”
We stood for a while among the unsheathed damsels. Clearly, there was something in each expression of stone that moved Ambrosio—or held him enthralled. Here was a woman with her arms unselfconsciously overhead; here was one gazing down upon her smooth thigh. For him, the half-finished damsels seemed to convey desire, but not of the erotic sort. Rather it was artistic desire, the impulse that drove his friend to hammer rock into objects of beauty. Ambrosio’s voice rose, heavy and ragged, evoking the cheese again like an old lover.
“Cristian makes the thing he longs for,” he said, “and I long for the thing I made.”
BETWEEN 2000 AND THE END OF 2002, I returned a handful of times to Guzmán, in each season of the year, and each brief visit felt like stepping into a gilded text, zooming from the liquid-crystal speed and madness of America—the sudden decimation of two skyscrapers, then two wars abroad—to this moon-dusted Castilian world hovering out of time, a peaceful place that seemed ennobled with integrity. I had a need to believe in this place, and each visit dr
ew me more emphatically into Ambrosio’s circle: at the bodega with his brother Angel and often his father, the older Ambrosio, and a rolling cast of friends. On excursions to meet more friends. At Ambrosio’s house, where an invitation to join his nuclear family for comida turned into an open chair for me at the table. At these meals his wife, Asun, appeared from the kitchen with a cornucopia—salads drenched in olive oil, deviled eggs, tasty chorizo, a potato soup, a good piece of meat or fish, a bottle or two (or three) of homemade wine, brandy, some flan—while Ambrosio sat expectantly, rubbing his prodigious belly, joined by whichever of the now almost-adult Molinos childrenb happened to rotate through that day.
Back home during this time, we’d had another baby, a girl named May, sweet and insistent, a beautiful force to be reckoned with. Now it was double the diapers, double the wake-ups (make it triple, because this kid never slept), double the joy and worry. Equal partners in every way, Sara and I found our roles briefly adjusted. During these, her childbearing years, I also bore more responsibility for supporting our family. After a first book came talk of another, something important for important times, having to do with our country’s all-consuming obsession with revenge and war. I went to Manhattan for meetings to write a book about John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, who’d been captured on Thanksgiving of 2001 at the age of twenty, fighting in northern Afghanistan. He’d been roundly condemned in the American press: for his conversion to Islam at sixteen, for his unchaperoned wanderings through Yemen and Pakistan, for the traitorous militancy that led him straight into the middle of a prison uprising at Qala-i-Jangi, one in which an American CIA officer had been killed. Even the president, George Bush, had weighed in, calling the bearded and robed young Californian “some misguided Marin County hot-tubber.” Lindh became a symbol of treachery and betrayal, but I saw in his story something more complicated: the mirror reflection of an America I couldn’t quite recognize. I conceived the book as an update of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, remembering its prescient lines, written in the mid-nineteenth century: “This uncivilized little nation possesses arms, and it alone knows how to use them.” Or: “If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies.”
I left the city with an offer for a book contract, but the truth was my heart wasn’t in it. The project promised to leave me in a war zone while my children grew up, and I kept thinking about Guzmán and Ambrosio’s cheese. Would it have been absurd, in the middle of all this war and mayhem, to pitch that as a book? In this new world full of evildoers, could anyone see that a story like Ambrosio’s, which at its heart was about truth and purity, might be more important than ever? I wasn’t willing to test the waters at first, for fear of looking like a dope, but quietly—I’d say sheepishly—I returned to Guzmán to see what else I might find there, to gather yarn, as the journalist says, when the journalist doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.
If I wasn’t an everyday face in the village with its population of eighty, it occurred to me that my appearances were like a repeating cameo in a real-life sitcom in which I, the americano, stumbled and bumbled my way through customs and chitchat, providing comic relief by asking stupid questions about sheep or tractors, or, on one particular evening, why the leading brand of whisky in Spain was called Whisky DYC, trying to explain what the phrase “whiskey dick” meant in America, an explanation that was misinterpreted as a heartfelt admission of my own erectile dysfunction.c Once, while bravely consuming a stew of unknown origin, I reflexively horked up a swine hoof, or something. Another time, outdoors, I drank from the porrón in a high wind and ended up looking like a fire hydrant drizzled upon by beet juice. Oh, I was a riot to these farmers, a metrosexual punchline, a tadpole among bullfrogs.
Ambrosio, of course, was my caballero gold card. When I was with him, circles opened, drinks arrived, mysteries were solved.d Thanks to him, I was fast-tracked past the Naugahyde ropes that hung in the bar’s entrance to keep out blackflies and granted immediate entrance to the back room, the inner chamber, the VIP bodega where men—some of them toothless, limping, or scarred—related the events of the day, swapped secret recipes,e reviewed age-old legends. In fact, Ambrosio thought more of these men, or cared more for them, because of their seeming defenselessness against society—and their deterioration—than of those who possessed the ability to push him forward in the world, those able-bodied men in the day’s haberdashery with big plans for profit. Whenever it came time to describe one of his posse in conversation, he favored the word majo, which for him translated as a great guy, a mensch, a beautiful human, an hombre muy simpático, but despite appearances also suggested a being of some higher spiritual evolution, a fellow traditionalist, a hidden angel among the earthbound. Everything these men did, and made, was worthy of hyperbole, of myth. His friend Manuel of the Pérez Pascuas owned the famous local vineyard that had supplied the FIRST SPANISH WINE EVER CONSUMED BY THE POPE FOR NEW YEAR’S EVE MASS. His friend Luis made exquisite ANCIENT KEYS for NO REASON but as a tribute to the EXQUISITE ARCANE BEAUTY OF THE PAST.f His friend Javier of the Cristóbals owned the BEST RESTAURANT in Roa and grilled the BEST ROAST LAMB IN THE UNIVERSE that EVERYONE AGREED was OF SUCH EXCEPTIONAL TENDERNESS AND TASTE that it FELL FROM THE BONE.g
One February morning when we woke to the village buried in drifts of storybook snow, the roofs all white mushroom fluff, some of Ambrosio’s friends gathered at a peña, one of many social clubs that I hadn’t known existed. They lurked behind Guzmán’s corrugated metal sheets, in empty garages, in little apartments with pool tables and kitchens, all of which were thrown open during September’s fiesta, when the peña members would emerge wearing the bright colors of their club and compete—by singing songs, banging drums, blowing horns, lighting fireworks—at making the loudest commotion around themselves. Though the roads were apparently impassable that day, this peña contained maybe a dozen men, some from neighboring towns, all playing hooky in the storm. Ambrosio entered with sausage, someone sleight-of-handed a couple dozen eggs, porrones were filled with red wine, and before long Ambrosio had the gas stove going, making a breakfast plate for everyone while regaling the crowd with joke after joke. The laughter came in waves that broke upon themselves, belly laughs, uproarious spasms of joy. It was a roast of sorts—and he went around the room to the great pleasure of the crowd, deconstructing each one of us. In fact, Ambrosio was honoring us with his insults. Who farted the loudest. Whose manhood was permanently compromised by too much wine—or had never worked in the first place. When it came time for me, Ambrosio began by introducing certain unnamed men, famous gauzy figures of legendary ilk, who could take the porrón and, rather than aiming the wine into their open mouth, could stream it off their forehead, let it run the bridge of their nose, and shift their mandible in such a way as to catch the waterfall driblet as it passed over the septum cliff. Then Ambrosio said, “Hombre, you’d go thirsty waiting for the wine to travel Michael’s nose.”
Of course, I picked up only bits until the full translation came, but could intuit a little from watching the crowd, which seemed to move in slow motion, eyes lighting, toothless mouths opening, guffawing, then nervous glances cast to assess my reaction. And there I sat with my dim smile of incomprehension, set as usual on time delay. But oh, what pleasure it gave when I did understand! Oh, this was rich! This was really good! If I was receiving correctly, what Ambrosio said was that my nose was so big, so epic, so monumental, that wine flowing from the headwater of the bridge of my nose would take forever to empty into the gulf below it. Mine was a Mississippi, a Zambezi, a Yangtze River nose.
I suspect it took a nose of some caliber to recognize a nose of such caliber, but what made the moment particularly satisfying was that it went against all notions of Spanish hospitality to insult a guest; thus, with a touch of pride, I realized that I was no longer a guest. I now sat at the majo round table, not one of them, but then not an entirely special
case either. Gauging my character by Ambrosio’s tacit recommendation, these men were willing to allow me to be here, to laugh at me and let me laugh with them—and at them, too. Perhaps it shouldn’t have felt momentous, but for me it meant brief admission to a new sort of brotherhood, a brotherhood of forgotten brothers.
I knew that in Ambrosio’s presence I was living a fantasy, one in which I’d been freed of all responsibility—no logistics, no late-night wake-ups, no old, incontinent dog to clean up after, no bills or recycling or flat tires. I glommed on to him in the same manner as a barnacle takes to the hull of a boat, as a matter of survival, of one small organism attaching to the force of a larger one. My ardor was portioned in equal parts, for him and then the stories he told: Somehow, of all the millions of villages of the world, from tundra to tropics, from Kirkenes to Ushuaia, I’d found Guzmán and its native son, Ambrosio Molinos, the great storyteller, who held the real secrets of the world as well as the key to its happiness.
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 11