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

by Paterniti, Michael

  It didn’t seem to matter if these stories corresponded to exact truth, as the fictions we wrote for class weren’t expected to either. And by the time I was done with my own fictions, the truth was unrecognizable, not out of deviousness but because, under pressures barely accounted for, I was building the stories I needed to hear. Or making the truths I needed to believe.

  A BRIEF SURVEY OF Spanish history shows Pedro the Cruel, ruler of the kingdom of Castile from 1350 to 1369, to be the most vicious, repugnant slug ever to darken a medieval throne room, the most bloodthirsty snake to lay fangs on the royal apple, the most demonical scepter-wielding conniver ever to cry paranoid foul. Famous for having insurrectionists boiled, burned, and hanged, Pedro seemed to have had a flair for eliminating his imagined enemies. On one occasion, he had a powerful cousin killed (suckered in by the king’s false favor and trust, the cousin was left to defend himself with a small knife against the king’s knights as His Excellency looked on), then ordered the body thrown down onto the plaza. “Behold!” he shouted to the throngs below. “Here is the Lord of Vizcaya you acclaimed.” It’s also believed he had a hand in the death of his own wife, Blanche, whom he hated, and of his two younger half brothers, Juan and Pedro, both just teenagers, who were held in custody for most of the king’s reign.

  One might ask: What made Pedro so cruel? And how do we know all of this nearly seven hundred years later?

  The answer is the storyteller—in this case, Pedro López de Ayala, author of the medieval text Crónica de Pedro, which either exaggerates Pedro’s distemper or tells it like it is. But as one of Pedro’s trusted courtiers, López de Ayala lays claim to a tantalizing kind of authority, that of eyewitness. As the scholar Clara Estow points out in her wonderful book on the medieval king, López de Ayala, “the consummate dramatizer,” weaves a masterful tale, incorporating bits of dialogue—some borrowed from speeches and letters—to voice opinions he avoids as the “objective” storyteller, while manipulating “certain key episodes to exploit their dramatic potential and emotional impact.” And nowhere does the monarch seem to show his true colors more than in the story about his poor brother Fadrique.a

  May 1358—and Seville appears beyond the alcazar window, a city of orange blossoms and incense wafting on benevolent breezes, an oasis of abundance in comparison to the harsh Meseta. Here in the alcazar surrounded by waxy palms and fecund gardens, Pedro is far from the wife he despises, living with his lover, María. Like his father before him, Pedro adores this place over all other Spanish cities, most especially the seat of royal power in Valladolid.b

  But he can’t escape his own embered mind, obsessed now with what to do about Fadrique. Recently his brother has been caught with seven hundred troops on the Portuguese border, trying to foment revolution against Pedro. He repents and swears his loyalty. As a test of fealty, the king has asked Fadrique to reclaim a fortress at Jumilla, in Murcia, belonging to another of Fadrique’s former rebel allies. When the king receives word of Fadrique’s victory, he calls him home to Seville for what Fadrique assumes to be a hero’s welcome.

  Fadrique arrives at the castle and, separating from his men, pays his first respects to the king’s lover, María, but there’s something amiss in her expression, some uneasy signal she’s trying to convey. (Is it that she herself can’t stomach the king’s ruse?) Fadrique senses this, and looks to escape. But he’s apprehended in the courtyard by two reluctant guards, and brought to an antechamber of the king’s quarters, where from a nearby room the king orders his men to attack him, not even dignifying Fadrique with a face-to-face death sentence. The guards do their business and leave him for dead.

  Meanwhile, the king scours the castle for the remainder of Fadrique’s now scattered men, finding one in María’s quarters holding his daughter hostage, whereupon Pedro sticks and drops him with his poniard. Soon after, he stumbles upon Fadrique’s body, apparently not yet dead. Drawing a knife, he hands it to a lowly page, commanding him to finish off his half brother. After the deed is done, the king orders a feast to be eaten in plain sight of Fadrique’s body (blood, snot, ligament, bone), but whether there’s cheese on the table, and whether the food tastes better in that rush of revenge, with the thick scent of death-treacle in the air, the storyteller doesn’t say.

  NOT EVERYONE BELIEVED THAT Ambrosio intended to kill Julián, and of those who did, few were in favor of the idea. Relatives from the north called one evening for a hushed conversation with Ambrosio Senior: Does something need taking care of? It would be nice to settle this the old way, said Ambrosio’s father, but no, that’s a sure course to insanity. He reiterated to his son that a life in jail was hardly an even trade for having something, even the family cheese, stolen from you. It would be a double captivity. Others in the extended family urged Ambrosio to take refuge for a while at a nearby monastery, to cleanse himself of his anger, which was an idea he gave serious thought to. But the deeper Ambrosio fell into the meaninglessness of his life without Páramo de Guzmán, the more he lost a grip on his equanimity, the more vehement he became. If other people doubted his intentions, he felt all the more resolved.

  This kind of sudden disorder, this upending of happiness, this complex of futility, loss, and violent fantasy, gives rise to many strange bedfellows—drink, depression, self-loathing. Having seen Julián so completely as a doppelganger, Ambrosio lost his bearings. Yes, revenge was paramount, but was there something more to this wish to kill Julián? Was it a wish to kill some part of himself, too—to silence his mind? And was it possibly more useful to keep an enemy, thereby keeping yourself intact, than to eliminate him?c

  On the Meseta, you might drive thirty, forty, fifty miles to nowhere, a bunch of ramshackle buildings, and bump into the very person you’re hoping to avoid. There was a story about the time Ambrosio had taken his place at an out-of-the-way bar in Haza, a virtual ghost town. Ambrosio sat with his back to the door, and Julián had allegedly entered in the shadows, seen Ambrosio from behind, and instantly retreated, while Ambrosio’s poker-faced friends betrayed nothing, until much later, when they were sure Julián was long gone.

  Two years passed in this way, and who knows how many near misses there might have been, Julián entering a bar five minutes after Ambrosio exited, Ambrosio stopping for gas where Julián had just bought cigarettes. Ambrosio went on living his life, stalking Julián in his mind, ready for him when the moment arose.

  LET US RETURN NOW to the king, once more at his table, before the lifeless body of his half brother. How are we to read this man who is stuffing his gullet? As bloodthirsty murderer and irretrievably disturbed individual? Or justified somehow in his actions?

  In the Crónica, López de Ayala is quick to itemize Pedro’s revenge killings (sixty or so in all), as well as the granular bits of his grumpiness. It’s a wholly damning bit of storytelling. What shines through the centuries and leaves its afterimage isn’t the king himself. It’s not Pedro’s own version of his life, or that of his lover María, or the sweet reminiscences of his children, if they were sweet at all. What endures is not kindness or empathy or intelligence, though Pedro’s supporters argue that he was cruel only in avenging the wrongs perpetrated against his citizens.d They point to his tolerance of Jews and Muslims, a trait not shared by his Trastámaran half brothers,e as proof that the king had dimensions, perhaps even a greater compassion and sense of egalitarianism than those of his day.f But in general, for as much pain as Pedro may have inflicted, he has become a victim of the storyteller. And so he’s died twice.

  The first death is simpler: Fadrique’s twin, Enrique, stages a night march that catches Pedro and his troops by surprise, and in an attempt to wriggle free, the king strikes what he believes is a deal with one of Enrique’s lead commanders, Bertrand du Guesclin: the king’s freedom in exchange for six towns and 200,000 gold doblas. When the king arrives at the commander’s tent, dismounts his horse, and enters, urging the commander to hurry, he finds the entrance blocked—and in strides Enrique, fully armed. Though
at first Enrique fails to recognize his half brother (it has been years since they last met), he draws his dagger and stabs Pedro to death, which begins nearly 150 years of Trastámaran rule in Castile. In symmetry with Fadrique’s murder, the king’s body is left lying on the ground for three days, while Spaniards come to mock him.

  But the second death of the king is more ignominious in some ways, for it is repeated over and over, as many times as readers pass through the gates and into the Crónica de Pedro. What is really happening here, behind the words? One answer comes from the scholar Estow, who argues that López de Ayala, an aristocrat, lieutenant, and chronicler par excellence, who became one of the first “caballero historians,” needed to justify his own betrayal of Pedro,g whom he supported until quite late in his reign, at which time he jumped to the Trastámaran cause. His account, she says, is a “literary gem” that mimics the truth even as it may veer radically from it. But then, these are the plots and subplots of the storyteller, too: the grab for power or meaning, the self-glorifications and justifications, the critique of a subject other than oneself to divert attention from one’s own failings (or unconsciously reflect them).

  It leaves one to wonder: If Pedro seems unusually cruel, and is a projection of the storyteller, then what great cruelty is cloaked within the breast of the storyteller, López de Ayala, himself?

  * Key to his success was Liston’s enormous left hand, which he used as a tourniquet while his right hand did the cutting and sewing. Before anesthesia, when time was of the essence, Liston was described by one writer: “He was six-foot-two, and … sprung across the blood-stained boards upon his swooning, sweating, strapped-down patient like a duelist, calling, ‘Time me, gentlemen, time me!’ to students craning with pocket watches from the iron-railinged galleries. Everyone swore that the first flash of his knife was followed so swiftly by the rasp of saw on bone that sight and sound seemed simultaneous. To free both hands, he would clasp the bloody knife between his teeth.” However, Liston’s reputation may have gotten the better of him when, during “a bravura performance,” dressed in his familiar bottle-green coat and Wellington boots, he allegedly amputated one patient’s left testicle, as well as two fingers of an assistant, both of whom died of gangrene soon thereafter.

  † By the way, this murder plot was no secret. Ambrosio told his story far and wide, in the bars of Roa, Aranda, and Burgos, to his vast circle of friends, and in the bodegas of trusted allies throughout the land. It was a tale of two men who had loved each other like brothers, the one who trusted and the other who cheated. It pitted purity against greed, creation against destruction, heart against spleen, the Old Castilian against the new. And when a listener asked what kind of justice might be done, Ambrosio would say, “I could kill him.” Part of the joy he derived from concocting Julián’s slow, delicious death, one might surmise, was the relief (or surge of power) he got by telling people the details of what he planned to do.

  ‡ … might …

  § The genius-esoteric but ever impractical Benjamin died of a morphine overdose as he fled Vichy France in 1940. Detained at the Spanish border town of Port Bou, he was essentially quarantined at a local hotel and, believing he was at risk of being captured by the Nazis, ended his life. Though his traveling companions soon resolved their bureaucratic snafu and found themselves on a ship to America, Benjamin’s left-behind body became the subject of another controversy. He was misnamed in death and mistaken for a Catholic, and evidence of his grave was lost in the cemetery above the Mediterranean. In Michael Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’s Grave, the author writes of the confusing transpositions: “You see this name in the receipt made out to the dead man, the difunto Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay that includes five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress. You see it in the receipt made out by the physician for seventy-five pesetas for his injections and taking the blood pressure of the traveler, el viajero, Benjamin Walter. You see it in the death certificate—number 25—made out on September 27, 1940, for Benjamin Walter, forty-eight years old, of Berlin (Germany—as noted). You see it in the receipt tendered by the carpenter to the judge in Port Bou for making a cloth-lined coffin for the dead man, el difunto, Señor Benjamin Walter, a receipt that includes eight pesetas for the work of a bricklayer closing a niche in the cemetery for Benjamin Walter. And you can see it in the receipt made out by the priest dated October 1, 1940, for ninety-six pesetas, six of which were for a mass for the dead man and seventy-five for ‘five years’ rent of a niche in the Catholic cemetery of this town in which the cadaver of B. Walter lies buried.’ ”

  The irony, of course, is that in death he’s confused with someone he isn’t, the confected, ever-mysterious Señor B. Walter. And though his body can’t be found, his voice still rings in our ears.

  ‖ On this note, I’m reminded of the Eskimo storytellers whose tales tend to be divided into two groups: 1) ancient communal ones, and 2) newer local ones. The ancient tales are the well-practiced ones that hew to a pleasing, memorized script, though they make allowances for the peculiarities of the narrator (tone, gesture, and so forth), as well as for the occasional mapped digression. Meanwhile, the newer local stories require the Eskimo storyteller to weave brand-new tales, often concerning recent events. These are infused with asides and mysticism breathed to life by the teller, as surely as the original storytellers filled the original stories with spirits and phantasms, forming, as one ethnographer has phrased it, “myths of observation.” That phrase now seems so beautifully apt—myths of observation—as if describing what we call history or the genre of writing known as nonfiction and memoir, as if describing the truth of all storytelling really by the fallacy of its scientific/factual investigation.

  a Fadrique is really Pedro’s half brother, born of Pedro’s father’s twenty-year liaison with his longtime mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, an affair that produced eight more illegitimate offspring, of which Fadrique had been the fifth-born, with a twin, Enrique. To Pedro, the whole lot of bastards wasn’t to be trusted.

  b The Castile of 1350 was a land divided, with Seville acting as a southern colony of sorts. In the wake of victory over the Moors, which drove them back across the Straits of Gibraltar to Africa, 24,000 Castilians had been repatriated to Seville, and the king was soon to embark upon an ambitious renovation of his castle there.

  c In this way perhaps, Julián ceased to be a real person, or never fully was. He became a foil, an adversary, a bugaboo. Perhaps he was the ghostly embodiment of one Count Julián, a Spaniard from history blamed for the collapse of King Roderic’s Visigothic Spain in the eighth century. Rumor had it that Roderic had seduced Julián’s daughter. To exact his revenge Count Julián aided and abetted a Muslim leader named Tariq in battle against the king, whose army fell in surprising fashion, thus relinquishing the entirety of Spain to the Muslims, who would remain on the peninsula for the next millennium. While the story was completely untrue, Count Julián had served as a convenient scapegoat. In order for Spain to believe in her own greatness, her downfall could only be caused by another’s horrible underhandedness.

  d “Proud, high-spirited and confiding, his confidence was met with treachery by one after another of those he trusted,” reads a 1911 New York Times review of a book sympathetic to Pedro. “Rebelled against by his brothers, he sought reconciliation with them to be again deceived. He trusted his mother; she conspired against him.” The headline of the article, however, says it all: “Pedro the Cruel of Castile: A King Who Has Had the Ill-Luck to Be Portrayed Only by His Foes.”

  e After Pedro’s demise and the ensuing fall of Toledo, Enrique auctioned off the Jewish citizens, ostensibly as slaves, in order to pay his army.

  f “Oh noble, oh worthy Pedro,” says Chaucer in the Monk’s Tale, “glorye of Spaine.”

  g After all, one need only have glanced one kingdom over, toward Pedro’s contemporary Pere III, the king
of Aragón and Catalonia, who may have been much more paranoid and creatively zealous than Pedro when it came to persecuting his enemies. In one case, after quelling an uprising of the Unionists of Valencia, Pere ordered his men to boil down the bell used to call meetings by the rebels so they could “taste of its liqueur.” The molten lead was then poured down their throats.

  11

  AMBROSIO OF THE MILL AND FIELD

  “Give praise.”

  THE WINDOWS OF OUR BEDROOM WERE COVERED BY METAL SHUTTERS meant to block the Meseta’s relentless glare, and yet at dawn first light came oozing like lava through the crannies, setting the bedroom ablaze. Sara and I would groan and bury our heads beneath the pillows. The patter of feet flurried down the hall, and our kids did their morning ambush, if they weren’t already sprawled between us from the night before.

  How did the Spaniards do it? They drank each night with celebratory élan, ate their cena somewhere between midnight and two, popped up early in the morning, and started all over again, cleaning, talking, walking, cooking, farming. I’d read somewhere that in all of Europe, the Spaniards ranked themselves highest in sleep satisfaction. Meanwhile, we’d never slept less.

  The village rooster didn’t help, of course, nor did the dogs living next door, whose call-and-response with Chanticleer created a rushing pandemonium of first wakefulness that sounded an alarm. The sun was pulled a little higher on its string, and some days, not more than fifteen minutes after sunrise, we could feel the heat pulsing through the walls, as if we lived in some fairy tale about the strangers who came to town and chose, to the confusion of the natives around them, to live in a Dutch oven.