The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese
Page 19
And for a moment I wanted it more than he did.
* Eventually I would sort out some of the names for the land, and I offer one last refresher here: The land above—what was identified as arriba by those in the village—was also the páramo, the high flatland. The undulating land below the village was called the coterro, but also where it dipped was called the ribera, which also described the previously mentioned barcos.
† He was a doomed Yankees fan living in Red Sox territory back home, and I could never get over how often people, old and young, went out of their way at the doughnut shop to disparage the Yankees cap of a three-year-old, as if the kid were the conglomerated reincarnation of Babe Ruth/Joe DiMaggio/Mickey Mantle/Bucky Dent and every other reminted Yankee who’d at one time or another eviscerated the dreams of Red Sox Nation. Here in Spain, he refused to remove the plastic Yankees batting helmet that had become his signature. He ate in it, played in it, tried to sleep in it—and no one cared, or knew what team it was. They just treated him like a three-year-old.
‡ The frontón was a relic from the times of Franco. It was said that El Caudillo had provided these handball courts for all the northern towns—and most especially in Basque country—in hopes that people would forget some of the atrocities that had been done unto them during the Civil War. One can almost imagine the Caudillo’s line of thinking: Remember the bombing of civilians by the Luftwaffe at Guernica, the rubbled town, the hundreds of innocent dead? Well, it’s time for amends, folks …
The frontón in Guzmán stood at the base of the village, to the south, about halfway between Abel’s soldering shed and Ambrosio’s long metal caseta. It was L-shaped, with high green walls. No one really played handball here anymore, but the shepherds kept their sheep in its penned-off area, which meant the ground was covered at all times with little pellets of sheep shit.
§ Writes Henry David Thoreau in his famous essay “Walking”: “I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” He also advises one to “walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.”
‖ Well, no, in fact, they didn’t. We would come to find out that in most of the homes there existed an abbreviated kitchen downstairs, just a galley space for the making of food. This was to keep the cooking—and especially the heat, for nothing was air-conditioned—well away from the living area. Eventually, Clemente shared this insight with us, too, though again, we did not take his advice, cooking in the kitchen on the second floor, which led to the eventual violation of another sacred rule: Because of the heat, we switched our comida (the Spaniard’s big lunch-dinner) with our cena (the Spaniard’s smaller dinner-lunch), usually eating the less labor-intensive meal at midday, while our neighbors stuck to their big meal at lunch. Our secret shift represented classified information that we promised not to share with anyone, though I suspect Clemente knew from the first, just by sniffing the air around our abode. One day, when he could stand it no longer, he came to our door, knocked while walking in, and summoned me to behold the cavelike room on the bottom floor that was meant for cooking. “This is where you move your stove, hombre,” he said, exasperated, but he knew we were hopeless, and I think something broke in him, then, in regard to us. He summoned his usual goodwill when he saw us and still offered advice—because he was genetically programmed to do so—but he never again let himself believe that we might actually take it.
a He pronounced my name My-kull, dragging out the L sound, giving it ululation and lullaby. My, for I was his, and kull, conjuring “skull,” or “my empty one,” which he filled with words and axioms.
b As luck had it, I’d first met Carlos because my wife was best college friends with Carlos’s wife, Melissa. In fact, the two were part of a five-woman posse known as the “Dzawns” (short for “Dzawns”) and each bore a tattoo on her ankle of a tiny fish blowing bubbles, as part of some secret Skull-and-Bones pact their husbands would never find out—as if their husbands cared to find out, because they didn’t. Might the number of bubbles signify the number of people they’d killed? Probably, but who cared, really. There was so little care about this that I’m ending the footnote now. And now. Unless the bubbles stood for something stranger than murder. Like the digging up of graves. Or the interstate transfer of spleens. How many bodies did they leave in hotel rooms, in tubs packed in ice? We’ll never know, but for the tattoos that no one cares about. At all. Now.
c Ambrosio’s great-uncle was known for his good wine, which he sold out of his bodega (Ambrosio’s bodega now) in this strategic way: Some shepherds or field hands might come knocking at the door, and great-uncle would happily greet them. His clientele was often strapped for cash, so he had to devise a way to make them pay more for the wine than they might otherwise. He started by having them taste an admittedly weak wine, while disparaging it. “It’s a pity you don’t have a little more for the good wine, it’s very good,” he would say, then: “Would you like a taste? It costs nothing to taste.” Great-uncle would disappear to a cask deeper in the cave, then materialize with a porrón, and the shepherds would drink, agreeing that yes, it was a very excellent wine. But when great-uncle named the price, it was four times the amount of the first. The shepherds would appear crestfallen, and Ambrosio’s great-uncle would let a beat pass, then light up with an idea, snapping his fingers. “I have just the thing,” he would say. “Come with me.” Then he would lead them outside, following a trail that circled the hill. He would walk slowly, saying, “I think you will be very pleased. A nice wine, in between the two others.” Partway around he would stop, and if the day was hot, mutter the words “¡Puta madre!,” wipe his brow, then pull from his pocket a piece of cheese—the family cheese—and offer his clients a piece, and then another. The cheese was buttery and tangy, setting off a flood of taste. Then great-uncle quickly led the shepherds into another telling room, one actually connected through the hill to the antechamber of the first telling room, where the wine casks were kept. He disappeared, poured the cheap wine all over again, and this time the shepherds, or field hands, would shake their heads, yes, yes, more than we wanted to spend but for this wine, very nice, very fine. Great-uncle would charge half of what he’d asked for the expensive wine and double the cheap wine, which now posed as the sensible, tasty median. And in this way, thanks to the cheese, great-uncle sold cask after cask of dreggish wine for double the cost.
12
THE LAWSUIT
“… 42 percent potato …”
IT WAS SPRING IN THE DARK TIME AFTER THE DEATH OF HIS CHEESE—and another night atop Mon Virgo, drinking and cursing, psyching himself to kill. Ambrosio Molinos was like the jilted lover, the bereft, boozy father gazing upon his taken child through the fence of the state orphanage. The story couldn’t be rewritten, for it was always the same: the same betrayal, the same loss, the same grudge.*
What they were doing to his cheese was unconscionable. The introduction of inferior milk meant an essential molecular change in the milk that made the cheese, but more, it gave the name Páramo de Guzmán an empty lyricism. Soon there was nothing of the páramo, or Guzmán, in the cheese, which meant to Ambrosio that the cheese was officially deceased. “The dead cheese,” he called it, or “the soulless cheese.” The whole operation, to his mind, was an empty front, a desastre ateo, a godless disaster.
He also knew, or assumed, that the workers—he would never dignify them with the sobriquet “cheesemakers,” those who had replaced his happy brood at the factory—were clock punchers, like everyone these days, there to do their time and collect a paycheck. How could such automatons make something remarkable, let alone create a delirious, sublime cheese of memory and strength? They, too, were thieves, if unconscious ones, afflicted with the disease of mediocrity. After all, why were you put on this earth, to serve humanity or the jefe’s bottom line?
When he came through the front door, he could hear the deep breathing of his sleeping children chorusing through the house. In the dim light, he could see the certificates and medals hung over the desk, all won by his faithful cheese. He walked the long hallway to the back bedrooms, pushed open the door on his twelve-year-old daughter’s room, and saw her eyes tracking beneath the lids in some dream that had nothing to do with cheese—or his rage. Her art covered the walls, but it was one earlier drawing that caught his eye that morning, one of her first. This daughter of his, Asunita, had dutifully painted a tin of the cheese, then written in her best hand: “Páramo Guzmán.” Yes, the iconic sheep looked a little like a turtle with table legs, but it was so true and heartfelt, rendered in her eight-year-old hand, full of such promise, and the word at the bottom scrawled in script said “Artesano.”
Ambrosio regarded this daughter, drooling slightly in sleep, then gazed at the painting again. Here in this house, nothing stood between him and his daughter, or his sons, or wife. Here no cage or fence or signed contract separated him from what he loved most. It was important to differentiate: The cheese embodied an ideal of love, and he’d loved the ideal. He’d poured himself into that ideal, and animated the cheese with it. But it was his family that loved him.
The realization was both profound and inconsequential, for in that moment he wasn’t suddenly freed of grief or sadness. Nor his mourning, or pain. He still wanted to kill—yes, he very much did—but what seeped in was this notion of belonging to a collective, his family, and the fear of losing them. After all, this was the same family who’d given everything to the cheese, too.† Minutes earlier he’d been resolved to kill a man, and now he unresolved himself.
He made no promises for tomorrow, that he might not try again, but for this morning, at least, Julián would live.
SOMEWHERE IN THEIR ILLUSTRIOUS past, the Molinos family had been milliners in Aragón, and with the rise of Spain their business had prospered and grown. Eventually the family had migrated to Castile, to be closer to the sheep that grazed on the Meseta—and over time, through marriage and wealth, had acquired vast holdings of land, including tracts in Madrid that later became the Chamartín neighborhood. Ambrosio’s patrimonio had included the fields around Guzmán, and when the bank claimed those to repay his debts, he lost one more part of his family’s legacy.
Now he drove in a borrowed car from the slopes of the Guadarrama, teeming with boar and weasel, into exurbia, and then the city itself. He entered Madrid on Paseo de la Castellana and drifted through the bustling capital, past Bernabéu stadium, where Real Madrid played soccer, and on to the Plaza de Colón, sluicing past fountains, foreign embassies, and government ministries. It wasn’t a trip Ambrosio relished. The baroque buildings evoked that hollowed-out feeling: Among this many people he always felt alone.‡
Here was an irony: He didn’t have enough money to buy a coffee, and the lawyer’s office was situated near the Ritz hotel, the Prado, and the capital’s grand park known as El Retiro (“The Lungs of Madrid”). In the hub of Castilian commerce, among luxury apartments, boutiques, and high-powered corporate suites, came the rough-and-tumble, bare-knuckle reality of a modern life Ambrosio eschewed, the business lunches and drinks in fine places after work, the fast talk and instant gratification. Time moved in spasms, businessmen gilled for their bloodthirsty profit, with no fidelity to any idea, furthering their own names and wealth. At least that’s how Ambrosio, the Old Castilian, saw it.
Ambrosio found the lawyer in his office, decorated with oriental rugs and pastoral paintings. The man projected an air of equanimity and well-worn wealth. In this cocoon of reassurance, in the calm created by the lawyer’s inviting, rather efficient manner, Ambrosio told his story, then listened intently for the possibility of justice. The law of the land, with its precise volumes and impartial scales, would weigh the matter of Julián’s deception, said the attorney, but hearing events as Ambrosio unfolded them, he believed there’d been malfeasance, that Ambrosio had a winnable case. As he warned his client, though, justice was a slow-moving process. And there were several issues here to parse out, including alleged fraud and the recovery of back wages. Due to the intricacies of the law, these would have to be broken into separate proceedings. But he was willing to try.
When Ambrosio left that day, he found himself inflating with the slightest hope again. He’d been offered an alternative plot—legal revenge—and grabbed hold, as if to keep himself from falling into that cistern of roiling must.
Still, the lawyer was going to cost money. In order to pay his fee, Ambrosio was soon hauling grain north out of Spain, through parts of Italy, on to Germany. His travels took him to the Black Sea. He waited at border crossings with other truck drivers from the Ukraine, Romania, and Poland. Ambrosio, like most enlightened Castilians, saw himself as a citizen of the world, for every Spaniard knows that Spanish blood is mixed liberally with Arabic and Jewish blood—and that of any invading tribe from the Phoenicians to the Visigoths.
Sunflowers and cocoa to Holland, juices to Austria, wine to Koblenz, chocolate back to Spain: Driving a truck suited Ambrosio just fine. “It’s like a research grant to study other cultures,” he would tell friends.
He traveled with a store of victuals—including bottles of his homemade wine—to avoid a culinary predicament in which he might be forced to consume fast food. He packed morning eggs from the chickens, and some excellent sausage made by a good friend, and a special jar of fish conserve. Instead of eating a hamburger or “some kind of shit meal,” he would pull out a camping stove he kept in the cab and scramble some eggs. In gas station parking lots, he could be found at twilight, gobbling a plate with chorizo. It was part of his mission, to be that man at the stove in the shadows of the neon flow of modernity, to practice what he called enlazar, or enlacing, the bringing together, the intertwining of nature and nutrition, the old and the new. At the closest bar, where he always went to take his coffee, he met people easily, traveling bard that he was, and he collected some of their stories, too.
He told one of his own about arriving at a place—a castle-factory, he recalled—somewhere in Germany, and a small man—a dwarf?—magically appearing before him, allowing him through the gates for his pickup of Pringles potato chips. In that odd wonderland, Ambrosio was taken to a bar where he spoke nothing but Spanish while being met with nothing but some dialect of German, and yet never, he said, had he felt such a connection as that day, with that dwarf and his brethren, as they spoke their own languages and understood everything about each other.§
The downside to roaming all that open road was all that time Ambrosio had to contend with memories of his deceased cheese—and also the memories of his oldest, closest friend, Julián—memories that recurred when he was most trying to forget. On the horizon, in a bright sunset, he might glimpse that one scribbled signature on a piece of paper, loops of ink hanging him from the clouds, again and again.
The road does this to a person, impels him backward into memory as he hurtles forward, the episodes of a life flickering in the passing fauna of the land: Here now is the caseta, the little stable across from his parents’ villa, light outlining the cracks in the door as a man labors late into the night for that first taste of ancient cheese; here are the sheep shuffling on hooves, awaiting an early-morning milking in the filmy lig
ht of the barn; here are the strange cars drifting up the narrow lane and into town, windows descending, asking after the rumor of a certain cheese said to be made in the village.
Sometimes another vivid flashback played like a film in the windowed screens of the truck, from a time during Páramo de Guzmán’s heyday, when the cheese was still being made in the stable across from his parents’ house. Ambrosio’s idea for expansion had been, he thought, inspired: If the cheese could be made in Guzmán, by the people of Guzmán, perhaps an opportunity existed to rehabilitate the palacio and turn it into a factory.
With its two towers and an imposing limestone facade, the palacio was a no-frills castle. Yet it anchored the village, serving as a secular nexus to the church’s religious one. At some point the palacio had been left to disintegrate, becoming the public property of Guzmán itself. But it seemed such a tragedy: Gazing up through the gutted, four-story carcass, one could spy patches of sky, birds funneling through torn rafters into the blue. It had become an irretrievable mess, a monument to the disintegration of the village.
Enter Ambrosio’s dream: The palace would be revived and transformed into a state-of-the-art facility, with the finest cheesemaking plant, a bodega for storage, a tasting room where visitors could try Páramo de Guzmán paired with local wines, and meeting halls to be used by the citizens of Guzmán for town business. Since the village had no money, Ambrosio cast himself in the role of altruistic lord, like the original Guzmán.