The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

by Paterniti, Michael

  Something about money, was it? Or the lack of it? Even as buyers called in orders from near and far, and even as enthusiastic fans sometimes came to the factory directly, drove right up from Madrid to try it, Páramo de Guzmán was running up unsustainable debts.

  On the spot, Ambrosio began his own inquiry, which led him to review the documents, proffered by Julián, that he’d signed without reading. What he found there was nearly impossible to comprehend, a contract bearing his signature, giving controlling ownership of the company not to the Molinos family, whose cheese it was, but rather to two investors, friends of Julián’s, who had been conscripted when the company had left Guzmán and moved to the new factory. He checked the contract with his scribbled name there, squeezed his eyes shut, and when he reopened them it was plain to see: The company didn’t belong to him anymore—and hadn’t for some time.

  He went to see Julián in his office, then, needing to hear the truth from his own lips. When Ambrosio burst through the door—waving the papers, booming, “What is the meaning of this?”—Julián looked terrified. Cowering, he fumbled his way through an unsatisfactory denial—huh-huh-huh-huh, cough and clear, huh-huh-huh-huh.… “It was the only way to afford it,” Julián spluttered. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the basic questions, just kept making that drowning sound. When Ambrosio later replayed it in his mind, that sound became, for him, the emptiness at the center of the universe.

  So began the humming in his head, a spinning so fast that the blood inside his body centrifuged to the walls, leaving a funnel of hollowness. But what was to be done? There was no script when gravity let go. He immediately went to the warehouse. He thought of the long days he’d worked to happy exhaustion since signing away the cheese, all the times he’d driven the high road from Guzmán to Roa in that holy light, suffering under the delusion that everything was right with the world. He thought about all those days he’d engaged his family—his parents, his wife and brothers—in conversation about the cheese, how it had organized everything. And how meaningless those most meaningful encounters of a life now seemed!

  When he returned to the warehouse, he gathered his workers and addressed them: He, Ambrosio Molinos, the founder of Páramo de Guzmán, the giver of cheese, was here to announce—how to say this?—he’d been bamboozled by certain dissolute connivers, purveyors of greed, chop-shop entrepreneurs from a Spain he no longer recognized. There’d been a contract, controlling interests, ownership guarantees. He didn’t understand it himself, he told them, but the company was no longer his. Effective immediately, he was leaving. When he went to go, nearly all of the cheesemakers went with him.

  Only one—José—stayed behind.

  Then Ambrosio was driving away, hands numb on the wheel, until he came to his home. He passed through the door, unlaced his boots, slouched back down the gray hallway to his bedroom, let his body sit, then recline. He lay in bed, unable to move. Telling his wife and parents was going to be the hardest part, and their pain, which they wouldn’t be able to conceal, would soon exacerbate his own.

  At first he did what came naturally. He flailed to build a story, to order these events as they were happening, based on the facts as they presented themselves: I’m a farmer, he thought, and Julián’s rich and educated. I’ve become an authentic person and he’s become a superficial one. But Julián was his twin, as trusted as his brother Angel. While there’d been so much left to accomplish with the cheese, there’d been so many days of friendship left to share, too.

  “The human mind is a very complicated thing,” Ambrosio would later say. “Jealousy is born in the small details. Maybe it started when Julián and I were walking down a street and an old friend came up and shook my hand first. Maybe I danced with a girl he liked. Each man is his own world, and maybe this jealousy grew into the idea that one day he was going to get me. And then he waited for that day.”

  But what Ambrosio’s mind kept revolving back to was his signature on the page. The unwitting scrawl of his own name obliterated his dreams and intentions. It undermined his legacy and inheritance. It had robbed him of the most beautiful thing he’d ever made. No, he’d never read the document, just signed it—like all the rest that Julián had put into his hands. Because Julián had put it there in front of him. Because if Julián couldn’t be trusted, no one could.

  GRIEF IS AN IRRATIONAL force. Under its sway, we are given to wild leaps of mind. The cord of life is broken and so goes one’s grip on sanity as we begin to revolve. “Round and round,” writes C. S. Lewis of his own grief after the death of his wife. “Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

  “But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”

  Ambrosio claimed that the loss of his cheese was like “a death in the family”—and afterward, he took the downward spiral. He became listless, drank too much. Where he’d once been a strong 260 pounds, he became bloated and physically weak. He withdrew from his family, filled with shame, then fury. He’d staked not only his name on the cheese, but his entire patrimonio, or inheritance, on it. And he now stood to lose that, too, as creditors kept turning up at the door, demanding payment. They came for everything he owned. He entered the years of what he called his “crazy nightmare brain.” He couldn’t find work, let alone the desire to do work, especially when recent evidence suggested that it all came to naught. When people asked why not make another cheese, he couldn’t explain how impossible, how inconceivable, such a thing would be. He’d given everything to this cheese—and now he was broken, if not broke and in debt. At night he went to the top of Mon Virgo and, fueled by wine, bellowed and raged on his heath.

  Here was a man who once had a story for every day of the week, every person passed on the road, every field and landmark. He loved the toothless misfits and defenseless children. He could sit and listen all day to the stories of old men. Soon he found himself telling only one story, obsessively—how he’d been set up by his best friend, betrayed, stripped of the family cheese. In this tale he was always the chivalric defender of the past’s honor. But the story had no ending. He needed an ending. On Mon Virgo, he sat at the edge of the precipice, smoking and drinking.

  What was the ending?

  The wind lashed, and he could always hear it, that drowning sound. The factory was just over there, down to the south, in the bundle of darkness at the edge of Roa, tucked in against the ramparts of the village. His lost kingdom, there in the dark. He smashed his empty wine bottles on the rocks. Huh-huh-huh. Cursed Julián. Huh-huh-huh. And as the drowning sound reached its pitch, he had an inspiration: He would hold the head down, push it down, until the drowning noise stopped. Until there was complete silence.‡

  This thought gave Ambrosio a new sense of purpose, and in its way organized his descent—just as the cheese had organized his ascent. Suddenly, the world held so many inspiring options. He would burn Julián in the fields, hang him from a tree in the vineyard. He would take his powerful hands and wrap them around the man’s Adam’s apple, crushing ligament and muscle, popping spine bone and windpipe. Huh-huh … arghhh. He would shoot him. Catch him unaware, put the bullet clean between his eyes, drop him in front of the factory or in the driveway of his house or in a bar before his friends. He knew Julián’s every move. It was an unfair advantage, like following the tracks of a paralyzed body pulling its sickly way through the dust, following the arroyo of his deceit.

  Now Ambrosio would think, I want to kill him but I don’t want to. I can’t do it, but I might have to. And then: I will.

  He began to study military manuals at home, by the desk lamp where he’d once studied ways to optimize the taste of his cheese. He feverishly researched the end of his story. It took a long time—hundreds of pages—but then he came upon the perfect resolution. It would involve telling cuentos, and then some prolonged suffering. (“Torture” seemed the wrong word; perhaps “justice” was better.) He would cast himself as Scheherazade in an upside-down version of Tales from the Thousand and One Ni
ghts. In the trunk of his car he placed a rope, a candle, and a cutting knife. He planned to justice Julián.

  And then he waited.

  SOON IT SEEMED EVERYONE in the Duero Valley not only knew Ambrosio’s tale of woe, but whispered of what he might do to Julián. In fact, there were those who lived by the old code, too, who wondered how they might “assist” in the matter, but Ambrosio waved them off as a point of pride. This was his alone to resolve.

  Though it had been a relief to distract his mind with a murder plot, it wasn’t lost on Ambrosio that he was contemplating a transgression from which there’d be no recovery. Yet what would have been considered illogical under most circumstances made a crystalline sort of sense now. The faster he spiraled, the more urgent it became. No one could console him, not Asun, not Angel, not his mother or father. He drove by his factory every day—“to take his poison a little at a time,” as he put it.§ But in certain moments, his delusions led him to believe the factory was still his. He stewed and boiled while living in his parallel mind, the one in which he could be found driving to work at the factory again, now harping the cheese, and now taste-testing another batch before it was tinned and set loose in the world. He called out to Orencio, greeted Fidel. But when he came to the factory entrance, he never slowed or braked. He drove on, powered by his fury.

  With debts to pay, he found work driving a truck—or rather, his brother Angel bought a truck for him to drive—and on long hauls through Europe, at border crossings or waiting to deliver a load of melons, or crates of juice, or olive oil, he foraged through the past to try to find the clues and incongruities that might have led to the betrayal. Search as he might, there was so little to be found. That’s what felt most disturbing: either he’d completely missed the signs, or there hadn’t been any. Which moment was it that had turned Julián? It was true that in recent years Julián had seemed more distracted and rarely visited the bodega anymore. Ambrosio’s wife had pointed that out, and Ambrosio had said, No, he has some family issues. It’s not personal.

  Wasn’t that how the closest friendships worked? Three days, three months, three years—you came and went, eclipsed and effaced, taking care of the stuff of your life with the full trust that your majo amigo would always come around again, on a Sunday afternoon, for some wine and chuletas up at the bodega.

  In the months after his departure, he heard rumors about the company: They were skimping on quality, buying inferior milk. The company was sold—and sold again. The reputation of the cheese waned. For anyone who asked why, he had an answer, the same one he’d given all those years ago to those enthralled by his cheese: In order to make a magical cheese, you have to pour in your love and goodness. The cheese is an obligation, a referendum on you as a person, your purity and rectitude. What they were doing now was production-line stuff, making soulless cheese from soulless milk. Taste buds never lied: Scallywags and “putas,” as Ambrosio put it—businessmen and robots, too—made horrible cheese.

  The desecration was complete.

  It was one thing to steal the cheese, and another to ruin it, though of course they were one and the same. For Ambrosio the question remained: To kill or not to kill? “If you listen, nature tells you everything,” he was fond of saying. So it was only fitting that when Christmas Eve arrived and the whole family had gathered in Guzmán, nature spoke.

  Angel was there, Roberto, Ambrosio Senior. They were sitting around the table, and Angel said, “Why don’t we go check on the cheese?”

  He was not speaking of a midnight run to the factory but to the family bodega where Ambrosio had stored a couple tins of the original cheese, from the very beginning, all that was left. The mere mention of it struck fear in Ambrosio, for the tins had taken on great importance—like icons.

  “Let’s just leave it to God,” he said, but then his father rose abruptly and put on his coat. And then everyone put on their coats, and briskly followed the old man out into the cold night, under the stars-upon-stars you see there, the bold Spanish sky that started Columbus to the New World. In silence they walked down through the shuttered town and up to the bodega, where they unlocked the door, descended the thirteen steps into the cave, and lit candles. Someone uncorked a magnum—the Grand Reserve 1989 from the Pedrosa vineyard, given as a gift by Ambrosio’s friend Manuel.‖

  There they sat in a circle, passing the porrón. Ambrosio unclasped the wooden box that held the tins of cheese and unwrapped one from a purple chamois cloth. His hands trembled as he put the can opener to it. Could it ever live up? And why ask it to? If it was a cheese of memories, then best to remember it alive in its heyday. He dawdled and stalled, cutting the lid as slowly as possible while talking about the price of grain … the prospects for spring … the drivers he’d met while traversing Europe.

  “¡Puta madre!” his father burst out. “Let’s go, open the damn thing! Before I die.”

  Ambrosio was thinking, Shit. Okay. There are no guarantees. It will be what it is.

  When he slid back the serrated metal top and candlelight fell on the cheese, he spied a white frosting of calcium over its surface. He pushed gently on it with his finger. It gave—and gave back.

  With the tip of his pocketknife, he stabbed one of the two wedges and removed it from the olive oil. He cleaned the wedge with a paper napkin and smelled the knife, then cut away the rind and went inside and realized that it was dry and hard and very good, almost flaking. He parceled pieces out to his father and brothers, who couldn’t believe it either. For so hard a cheese, it melted so readily, releasing the chamomiles and herbs of the páramo. And as strong as the wine was, the cheese, in full bloom, was stronger. That amazed Ambrosio.

  Later, in the months and years to come, they would talk about this night as a kind of miracle. It was yet another story they told, the cheese in all its power and glory, coming back from exile, coming back, despite Julián’s betrayal, from the dead.

  Ambrosio had been waiting for a sign. Gazing upon his cheese again, he felt flooded with wonder. How could it be? He saw it as young and vibrant, and he said to the cheese, Damn, what tolerance you have! What stamina! And the cheese said, I’m here for you.

  When it came time for the last morsel and Ambrosio took the piece from the plate before him, when he held the cheese up in the flicker of candlelight like a wafer, he listened for its voice again, for the wisdom of ages to speak.

  To kill or not to kill?

  Get that son of a bitch, said the cheese.

  * Wrote Richard Ford of nineteenth-century Spanish bread and cheese: “The Spanish loaf has not that mysterious sympathy with butter and cheese as it has in our verdurous Old England, probably because in these torrid regions pasture is rare, butter bad, and cheese worse, albeit they suited the iron digestion of Sancho, who knew of nothing better: none, however, who have ever tasted Stilton or Parmesan will join in his eulogies of Castilian queso, the poorness of which will be estimated by the distinguished consideration in which a round cannonball Dutch cheese is held throughout the Peninsula. The traveler, nevertheless, should take one of them, for bad here is the best …”

  † The Slow Food Movement, led by Italian gourmand and food writer Carlo Petrini, sprang from two incidents: the 1986 deaths of nineteen people from cheap wine cut with methanol in Petrini’s home region of Piedmont, coupled with protests against the building of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a Parisian theater in 1989, Petrini codified the movement’s manifesto, along with “delegates” from fifteen other countries, calling for the protection of the old ways of agriculture and cuisine that, according to Petrini and his compadres, were under attack by the multinational food companies. The tenets of the movement were in part identical to those that Ambrosio and other small producers had been espousing for years: the preservation and promotion of local products and their lore, the creation of an “ark” of heirloom seeds, the celebration and privileging of local cuisine, all to stave off, as Petrini’s manifesto put it, “the universal madness of the Fast Life
.”

  In its place, the movement advocated the conviviality of past customs. So read the manifesto: “Against those, and there are many of them, who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of a sufficient portion of assured sensual pleasure, to be practiced in slow and prolonged enjoyment.” To have joined Ambrosio at the bodega for a Sunday meal would have been the living proof of such tenets—and his cheese, then, as much as any editorial that could be written, became his manifesto.

  ‡ To wound an Old Castilian was to invoke a kind of biblical wrath. Even in the recent past, when the reach of the Spanish legal system fell short of the countryside, the formation of makeshift citizen tribunals known as “Seven-Man Justice” was meant to keep matters from turning violent. But when the verdict didn’t satisfy the aggrieved party, a primal drama was often quick to unfold. The danger was real: In Castile, the distance between the seed of thought and the deed itself was a very short gunpowder line indeed.

  § His mother, on the other hand, would never drive by the factory, for if she did, she was stricken with acute stomach pains.

  ‖ The significance of that wine, on this night, wasn’t lost on the assembled, for at that very moment the pope, John Paul II, was celebrating Midnight Mass at the Vatican with the same Grand Reserve. It had been a point of pride for Spaniards everywhere that the Holy See had chosen this Castilian wine over Oremos, the Polish one he usually drank on Christmas Eve—the first time a Spanish wine had been picked for the occasion. It was an extremely strong wine that erased all taste, until you became the wine itself. Though he’d had the bottle for years, Ambrosio had promised himself that he wouldn’t open it until the pope celebrated Mass with a chaliceful.