GUZMÁN’S BAR WAS AS unprepossessing as the village itself, shadowy at midday and bare-walled but for a calendar and a few noticias, a colorful ad for a bullfight, a knitting bee to meet at town hall. There were a number of plain wooden tables with uncomfortable chairs starred about, a couple of shelves behind the bar with an unimpressive if potent display of liquor. The top shelf here would have been bottom shelf elsewhere, and the bottom shelf was swill. The room was a sarcophagus hung with heavy drapes of secondhand smoke. The floor was a site of archaeological interest: nubbed-out cigarettes and errant napkins, scrips of scribbled notes and receipts, tapas toothpicks and bottle caps, a potpourri of expended things.
The village had only this one bar at the time, and it was the hub of social life, of all the feuds and compacts that played out among Guzmán’s diminishing citizens. It wasn’t so strange that good friends, over a period of a lifetime, might never see the insides of each other’s homes, but would meet every day at the table by the window to play a game of cards. And no matter what the hour, if the bar doors were open, there was always some sort of commotion inside.
Pinto, the bartender, was both impresario and dictator. In his forties, he lived alone in his family’s ancestral casa. If you stood on the bluff behind it, the back of the house appeared as if it had been torn open by a hungry giant. Apparently Pinto felt no need to address the destruction, nor the open display of homewares and undergarments strewn about within. Neglect was his primary coat of arms, his wrecked modus operandi. It wasn’t exactly the trait one expects for someone in a service industry.
In the normal world, a bartender stands behind the bar and serves his customers their drinks. But Pinto saw it like this: He was John Wayne, if John Wayne had been a short, untucked, punchless man with patchy black hair. And if John Wayne had been wonderful in the kitchen.h Yet Pinto had no problem making the leap. The bar was his stage set. He answered to no man there. And when he wasn’t in his own bar, he was either sleeping or trolling other bars as a paying customer in Roa, where there seemed to be an overabundance of watering holes.
Ambrosio said that perhaps Pinto was happiest when walking into a bar in Roa: He’d push through the door slowly, squinting, sit deliberately, light his cigarillo, eye the other hombres, order his poison, and take that first satisfying slurp. After a couple more sucks, emitting plumes of smoke as if on fire, he would get up abruptly, leaving his glass half full, and search out the next stop, his evenings an endless composition of entrances that only he believed held high drama. And while no one understood the fetish exactly, part of its meaning was easier to intuit: Trapped in the Guzmán bar, he was a stationary pourer of libations, while on his off nights he could forever be the shadowy, multifarious man who blew in and out on a dangerous breeze, sipping whisky before pollinating another dark place with his cowboy mysteriousness.
In the Guzmán bar, the rules were simple: If Pinto felt like serving drinks, he would. If not, he might come around the counter and take a seat at one of the tables, cigarillo drooping from his mouth, a washrag slung over his shoulder. He’d prop his feet on the table and watch television turned up to an intolerable volume, drowning out conversation, leaving his irritated regulars to fend for themselves and newcomers to scratch their heads. Was this one of those hidden camera shows?
More than once I heard Ambrosio call him a culo de gallina, or “the asshole of a chicken,” which only induced Pinto to throw up a hand in rebuke. Whatever. Meanwhile, he harbored little love for me, the americano, primarily because my Spanish was mostly limited to ordering beer. “Una caña,” I might say, and Pinto’s reaction was always the same: a smirk that said, “You can’t be serious.” Half the time, Pinto would ignore me in order to make me ask again. And then when he did fill a smallish glass and delivered the cold beer, he always muttered something, but in a slurry rasp I never understood: Was he reaching out or insulting me?
The answer seemed obvious—and yet even despite Pinto, the bar came alive each evening. The air was hot and close and stale, but that garrulous Castilian conviviality glamorized everything. It was here I met Carlos the farmer. In a town of prodigious talkers, Carlos perhaps ranked as the most voluble. And like Ambrosio—both men’s formal education ended at high school—his recall of Spanish history was encyclopedic. Carlos lived in a cluttered house just yards from the front door of the church, and he kept hawks in his attic. He was a sun-stroked ball of energy who kick-started most of his long explications with “Nahhhh, hombre …” and then was off, flannel-mouthed (in the garbled, not glib, sense of the word … never the glib in Guzmán), reciting the precise ecology of the declivity south of town known as the Barco de Siete Palomas (Valley of the Seven Doves). Or how the Romans built fish shelters every thirty miles on their sheep highways, in order to transport seafood inland from the shore. Or how the seventeenth-century monarch Queen Isabella II once took as a lover the son of an Italian pastry chef, which only compounded her obesity.i
Carlos’s opposites were the stoic ones: Abel, the most decent metalworker; Manuel, a wall-eyed man lost in the mist of his haunted discombobulation; and Fernando, the man-child with his neatly combed hair, polo shirt, and khakis, who never spoke at all, appeared to be entirely mute, and was often seen standing beneath a tree across from the church.
And there were the shepherd brothers—Danielito, Teo, and Victor, all related to Cristian the sculptor. By day they led their flocks up through town and out into the fields, a fan of pelleted sheep shit in their wake. During the broiling afternoons, though nothing moved but a shimmery haze over the barcos, the crackling voice of their transistor radio carried all the way back to the village, bouncing through its corridors and alleys. In the bar the three of them sat close together, all with long hair, wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, buying and receiving drinks, talking a blue streak because there’s something no one ever tells you about shepherds: They love the social game.
Then, of course, came the old men—including Ambrosio’s father, Ambrosio Senior—who after years under the weight of the sun hid for a good part of the hot day, napping, then eventually herded toward the bar. In nice weather they occupied a bench just across from the front door or retired inside to the tables by the windows, shuffling the cards to play mus or julepe.
One could happily squander the hours in Guzmán’s bar, as I did, albeit with much of the action transpiring over my head. While sometimes frustrating, it was pleasant in its way, too, the not-knowing-exactly. I was the slow child, neglected and needing special care, and it suited me. In the throes of giving everything to family and work, of always needing to know, I found it an unexpected pleasure to exist in this alternate reality. And it was a gift whenever I found a Guzmán resident with whom I could speak English, including Ambrosio’s brother Roberto and his German wife, Mika.
Roberto and Mika were the village’s movie-star couple, installed in a fastidiously maintained wood-timbered house that had once belonged to Ambrosio. They spent the working week in Madrid, where they ran an advertising production company specializing in Roberto’s aerial photography, and then they would weekend in the village, where Mika, a former model born in Hamburg, was a dervish, gardening and cooking, boiling and pickling, jarring and canning. She might never be “one of them,” but that gave her a certain freedom: She was a Tabasco dash of truth serum in that place, and her opinions were all-inclusive—and sometimes withering. About Pinto’s carelessness and his half-wrecked house, she said bluntly, “He’s going to die living like that.” About Ambrosio, with whom she seemed to share a fractious relationship, she said she’d clawed decades of his cigarette butts from the backyard of the house after they bought it from him. “It was a sty,” she said. But they had made it beautiful. It felt like their job here: to improve whatever they touched.
On those occasions when they stopped by the bar, one almost expected the paparazzi to come stumbling behind them. But even they were incapable of putting on airs, mixing easily with everyone. The camaraderie was real and warm, de
spite any grudges that lay beneath the surface. Considering one of the central paradoxes of the Castilian character—the remarkable acceptance, the stubborn resistance—they still saw themselves as one here. You could travel mile after empty mile seeing nobody, nothing—just the rugged Meseta—and then happen upon an ancient village of a hundred homes, all conjoined and crowded together, enjambed and encircling a church, a castle, each village with its Franco-era frontón, linked, for better or worse, in prayer, in drink, in song.
I remember one of my first exhilarating nights in Pinto’s bar, which was followed by many exactly like it. Sometime around one in the morning of a summer eve, Ambrosio produced a charango, an Andean stringed instrument in the mandolin family, and along with his brother Angel, who was suddenly wielding a guitar, broke out in song: old jotas, ballads about heartbreak, and patriotic anthems. Many of the men in the bar joined in; some stood to the side and listened; a few others kept right on with their conversations or card games. Pinto, in a desultory mood, took a seat at a far table beneath the television set, but perhaps the scene of old and young singing at the top of their lungs stirred something within him, for he didn’t turn the volume up.
The music went on—and on. Ambrosio relished that spotlight, singing in a full-timbred baritone. At some point, fatigue guided my feet to the door and then out into the cooling night air. Gazing back through the frame to the warm light within, I saw Ambrosio in profile—his strong, aquiline nose, his mournful eyes—towering over his compadres, reaching for the note, the intonation, the emotion that the moment most called for.
As I slipped out, the stars lit the streets. I found myself moving very slowly indeed, neck craned, drunk. O, wonder of humming stars! O, inscrutable revelation! The strains of music followed me to the edge of some blurry awe. And it had a scent I hadn’t anticipated.
By the heavenly light I stood, feet caked in the sheep shit of my enlightenment.
WINTER IN GUZMÁN IS the lonesome season, a gray sky hanging overhead like a slab of ice. The light covers everything in blue gossamer cocoons that turn black with night. The ghosts of the past rise up and howl in the wind, against which the residents bundle themselves. Even some of the place-names—for instance, the vineyard known as Matajudío, or Jew Killer—suggest horrible outcomes one might rather not know.
On this particular evening the bar was closed for some reason having to do with the inscrutable whims of Pinto, Ambrosio was away, and not a soul stirred. I found myself wandering Guzmán with Jeff at about 10 P.M., a burning smell in the frigid air. Cold and hungry, clip-clopping back uphill toward the car, we were surprised by four figures that appeared as hunched shadows lurching down from the palace. Were they Guzmán’s own horsemen of the apocalypse?
“Ta’ lo,” they said as they passed.
“Ta’ lo,” we said. They carried on down the road until we shouted back at them, “Hey, do you guys happen to know any open restaurants nearby?”
Someone started laughing. “Hombre,” said a voice inside a hood, “hasn’t anyone told you? This is the moon up here.”
Our respective parties started chatting. The two boys, who wore long hair, were Diego and Rodrigo; the two girls with short hair were Beatriz and Lara. They were home for the extended Christmas holiday, on their way to get some lamb for grilling. They knew a guy in a nearby village who might be willing to sell some. Then they were going to the bodega to eat and drink. Did we want to come?
Another gesture of Spanish hospitality, but it was no less striking: that openness and trust. We were strangers. We could have been anyone, and that was good enough. Soon we were all piled in a car zooming down the hill from Guzmán. The road wound and unwound. Twenty minutes later we pulled up in front of a house in a nearby village. More Naugahyde roping hung like a curtain before the door. Diego got out, drew back the roping, and knocked, waiting for a while, stamping his feet, exhaling smoky breath. He banged his fist on the door again. After a few minutes, a light turned on, the door opened, and we piled out of the car and followed Diego over the threshold.
The butcher had an acute case of bed head, his hair riding straight up. But he was quite chipper, which was a bit at odds again with the stereotyped image of the wary Castilian.j Now the man put on his apron and disappeared through a door. Aside from a couple of unused refrigeration units pushed up against the wall, it seemed as if we were standing in a living room.
“He has the best lamb around,” Diego assured us.
“Did we wake him?” I asked.
“Oh, he doesn’t mind,” Diego said.
When he appeared from a back room he came with two separate items wrapped in white butcher’s paper, but before sealing them, he opened them up to the teenagers for their approval. The four of them nodded their heads, some coins changed hands. The butcher led us to the door and opened it, exclaiming, “It’s colder than a whore’s tit out there.”
We nodded our agreement, then hustled back to Guzmán. It was one of those rare nights when the hive of bodegas on that hillside—maybe thirty in all—sat empty. At Diego’s bodega, we were greeted by a stuffed deer head hung on the wall and a clock that had long ago stopped ticking at 6:15. It was so cold you could see your breath. The boys went straight to work wrestling snarls of dried grapevines and stuffing them into the fireplace, which they called la chimenea, or “the chimney.” When they lit the branches, the room instantly filled with the scent of grapes—fruity, sweet, a hint of violets—carried by the clouds of rising smoke. The flames tore through the vines so quickly they gave little warmth, but the point wasn’t necessarily to make a lasting fire. Instead, the vines were tamped down, disintegrating into embers, which were grouped together to give off enough fleeting heat to grill the meat.
Meanwhile, Rodrigo rubbed lamb fat on a grate while the girls took pinches of sea salt from a bowl, sprinkling it over each piece of meat. The chops were placed on the metal grate, and covered with another metal grate that hooked to the first. By this time the embers in the fireplace were glowing jewels of heat, giving off trails of grape smoke. Diego grabbed the grate along with Rodrigo, and they set it about an inch or two above the embers, balancing it on a stone at the back of the fireplace, the room redolent of grilling lamb.
Diego went down into the cave and returned with two bottles of wine, emptying one into the porrón. Another porrón was brought out and filled with water. Bread was placed on the table, there for the ripping. The chops on the fire were flipped. And though a search was made, no plates or silverware could be found, only a roll of white paper that was used to cover the table for meals. Each person was torn a piece as a plate. “We do everything with our hands here anyway,” said Rodrigo.
Waiting on the lamb chops, I’d had a random flash, as I often did on the road, of how much my wife would have loved all of this. In some ways, it often felt as if I was taking mental notes for her, so I could tell her the stories later as she often told me stories about her travels when on assignment. She was an excellent storyteller, whether describing some adventure in a Ghanian refugee camp or riding a mechanical bull in Las Vegas. More than anyone I knew, she, too, would have appreciated the exact steps by which our succulent midnight meal had taken shape, and the utter randomness of our cross-cultural intersection here in Diego’s family’s bodega in the dead of winter. Had she been here she would have jabbered unselfconsciously and laughed her throaty laugh. Even more, she would have reveled in what came next: a moment of pure, gustatory pleasure, the kind associated in our lives with campfire meals or forgotten barbecue stands. The meat, born and raised and sheltered on this land, melted in a grape aftertaste. The salt added a pinch of ocean to it. There may have been thirty or so small-sized chops, and among the six of us we pretty much devoured them instantly. The porrón traveled among the assembled. Only crumbs were left on the table.
After we’d eaten everyone sat in contented silence for a moment, and then Rodrigo lit a Fortuna cigarette—these teenagers chain-smoked like the adults they emulated—took a
sip of wine, and cleared his throat. Here they were, with these americano guests, in his family’s bodega—in their telling room—with aeons of stories hovering close, and Rodrigo seemed to feel the uncomfortable pressure of having to try to tell one. It was a lot to ask. There was an awkward silence, and then he spoke.
“This is the story of Uncle Eight,” he said slowly, with uncertainty, then blew a puff of smoke, which lingered like a scrim before his face. At least he had the gravitas of gestures. “They said Uncle Eight was … a little crazy,” he said. He rested his elbows on the table, stalling, sitting apart from the other three, who were suddenly transfixed, leaning into each other expectantly, without a trace of self-consciousness.
Rodrigo puzzled over what to say next. He started again. “Okay, Uncle Eight … who was crazy … he went to eat in a restaurant … and in that restaurant … he picked up the menu and studied it.” Another pause. “In that restaurant,” he said, “Uncle Eight, who was crazy, always did the same thing.… He ordered eight things.” He pushed himself back from the table, took a serious drag from his cigarette, and through squinted eyes regarded his audience, the five of us hanging on what might come next.
“No, that’s it,” he said, waving a hand before his face to clear the smoke. “He always ordered eight things off the menu.”
The other three blinked.
“That’s all,” he said.
Compared to the lush layers of history and hyperbolic spasms of story that came from Ambrosio’s mouth, it wasn’t much. But then the teenagers did something wonderful. They watched Rodrigo’s face when he smiled at them, and they smiled back at him. They were young, they would learn. But this one was pretty funny, too. The story of Crazy Uncle Eight. Like, eight things off the menu … yeah, it was a good one!
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 12