Some villagers brought their own interpretation to Ambrosio’s designs, however, and as they did, his intentions took on a different quality and texture. By the time his enemiesh had their turn with it, the dream was a most pernicious plot indeed. According to them, Ambrosio wanted to turn back time, all right—to the Middle Ages, installing himself in the palacio and ruling Guzmán. Pockets of resistance swiftly formed. A vote was called: yea or nay to the cheesemaker getting the palacio. What emerged was a debate not about saving the palace, but about what los Ambrosios had up their sleeve.
True, the Molinos clan had long been regarded as Guzmán’s de facto royal family—monied, handsome, successful—and had been perceived, rightly or wrongly, as looking down upon their neighbors. Though here in the new Spain the ancient practices of patronage and entitlement existed only in vestigial form, it was an attitude, a bearing, an aristocratic manner that survived. As happens in a small village, the fault line existed. It was just waiting for a seismic event.
Ambrosio was the seismic event. Suddenly the issue became a referendum on him, too. Flamboyant, prideful, obstinate—the epitome of Spanish temper and duendei—he wouldn’t budge on his plan to restore the palacio. Why should he? It would benefit everyone. As much as he was becoming his own cult of personality with Páramo de Guzmán, he was creating a bit of an industry, putting Guzmán on the map as a destination. Travelers might arrive for cheese, but then also stop at the bar for a drink, take note of the village’s beauty. Perhaps because the villagers felt Ambrosio thought too much of himself—after all, it was very un-Spanish to elevate yourself over your villagej—or because they’d felt inferior to the Molinos family for so long, an unsettling thing began to happen. A campaign was waged against Ambrosio that turned aggressive, and he responded with aggressivity.k His motives—to his mind, absolutely altruistic—were questioned as ulterior and craven. Well, puta madre, went the line of argument against Ambrosio, Spain already had a king! The communal and sacred monuments of Guzmán were not there to be cherry-picked, for after all, the palace was an emblem that connected Guzmán to Spain, and Spain to its past.
At this time, Ambrosio’s family lived in a pretty, three-bedroom home with red-tile roof, the first as you entered the village, set down in a little hollow with neglected tangles of greenery, and, of all luxuries, a swimming pool carved out in the back. On the morning of the vote, Ambrosio left from the front gate of his house as usual—and, to his shock, walked into a blaze of white: fluttering wings of paper like some modern-art installation. He reached down and picked a flyer from the ground.
In the night, something crazy had occurred. Hundreds of leaflets had been spread anonymously, left on walls and doors, littering the streets. The flyer bore a picture of him, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, the cheesemaker of Guzmán, and read: DON’T LET HIM STEAL THE PALACE.
He could think of only one word: Why? How could one not feel let down and betrayed, surrounded by Lilliputians, all enemies now who would never grasp what could have been? Enough was enough. In the months that followed, with the help of Julián and his new investors, he moved Páramo de Guzmán to the factory in Roa, then moved his family to a house nearby, bitterly washing his hands of the village, while the village washed its hands of him, too.
THE OPEN ROAD FLOWED with memories such as these, as painful as they could be. But then there were loads to haul, pickups and drop-offs to make, schedules to keep. Up in the cab, in the throne room of his new life, the Meseta gave way to the Pyrenees, rocky mountains gave way to alluvial lowlands and limestone basins, the vineyards and rivers and forests that ran into more mountains—the Alps, Apennines, Carpathians, and Caucasus. Here were the plains of Hungary in gray light, the Crystalline High of Germany in icy blue, the North Sea in green storm. The world was much bigger than Guzmán. Let the village die its own silly death, then. He’d done what he could, offered what he had. And now he had nothing.
He rode, keeping himself company, talking to himself as if split in two, as if he were both driving and riding in the passenger seat. No one could soothe him, he knew, but someday he might soothe himself with a tale that explained it all, a unified theory. Drawn out over Europe, he rehearsed. The body in the passenger seat (himself), listening so intently, believing so fully in himself (the driver self). He built himself back up on the road, and came home, and listened for what the wind said, the vines, the river. He wondered if happiness might ever be possible again, for he hoped it might be. He no longer expected it, of course. He came back to his homeland and drew his head down, waiting for some sort of retributive justice, though. As powerful as he was, he now felt like the victim of everything he’d loved more fiercely than himself.
* From the Middle English gruggen or grucchen, and the Old High German grunnizon, “to grumble or complain”—an examination of the word’s sedimentation suggests an emotional deadlock also, two deer stuck in antlered impasse, in thick mud that congeals as winter arrives and freezes them there. I once heard a story when visiting my father’s ancestral village in Sicily about a very old lady I saw caning down the road, then up a steep incline to the cemetery there. It was said that at her tortoise pace, the walk from home to cemetery and back took up to six hours. What grief inspired such travail: the visit to a departed child or husband? No, no, that wasn’t it at all, I was corrected in rather stentorian tones. Astio, bitter hatred. It was her archenemy up in that cemetery. Rain or shine, the old woman walked every day to her grave site, just to spit on it one more time.
† Ambrosio would later say: “Maybe I realized I wasn’t alone. My best memories of the cheese included my children, when they were very young, putting labels on the tins, decorating them. My wife had named it. This didn’t happen to me; it happened to us. And we needed to get through it together.”
‡ Ambrosio later described to me the arc of thought and emotion that had brought him to the city: “For years I planned Julián’s death, killing him every single night. Every single night I would create a different movie in my mind, trying to settle on one. I would picture what I was going to do—grab him, put a bag over his head, etc. On a full moon, I would go to Mon Virgo, smoke a couple of cigarettes, and start thinking, ‘I want to kill him, but I don’t want to. I can’t do it, I shouldn’t do it.’ At the end of the two years that I wanted to kill him, I discarded my personal vengeance and replaced it with a lawsuit. But then it became more difficult to resist the temptation to kick the guy’s ass.”
§ Later, when I did some investigation into the origin of Pringles, I couldn’t find a German castle-factory that belonged to the Pringle family—but traced the chip to its Ohio inventor, Alexander Liepa, a last name of Latvian and Lithuanian extraction that belonged to a food scientist who worked for Procter & Gamble, the company that began selling the potato chips‖ nationally in the mid-1970s. The name for the product had been picked from a Cincinnati phone book street address, Cincinnati having been settled by Germans.c Of most interest was the fact that the inventor of the distinctive red tube,e Frederic J. Baur, asked to have a portion of his ashes buried in one of his cans. Had Ambrosio lied?f No—I certainly don’t believe so. Or maybe I had something to do with it. It’s just that wherever he’d actually been, even if it was half in his imagination, it didn’t seem to be a Pringles castle-factory.
‖ In England, where potato chips are called “potato crisps,” the saddle-shapeda snack food was deemed by the High Court of London to hold too little potato content to qualify as a “crisp,” but was rather a British “chip,” which would have made it susceptible to a 17.5 percent sales tax.b Pringles lawyers claimed that the product doesn’t look, feel, or taste like a chip, arguing that potato chips “give a sharply crunchy sensation under the tooth and have to be broken down into jagged pieces when chewed.” “It is totally different with a Pringle,” they argued, “indeed a Pringle is designed to melt down on the tongue.”
a The shape is a hyperbolic paraboloid, reportedly designed by supercomputer. Meanwhile the saddle-
shaped food product is only 42 percent potato, the rest composed of a paste of wheat starch and flour, vegetable oils and emulsifiers.
b Judge Nicholas Warren ruled that Pringles did not qualify as a “crisp,” but the tax office exempted Procter & Gamble from paying the tax. Pringles are sold in one hundred countries and gross over a billion dollars a year. Some of the flavors include zesty lime and chili, screamin’ dill pickle, chili cheese dog, ketchup, pizzalicious, soft-shell crab, grilled shrimp (the chips are pink), and seaweed (green).
c The word “pringle” actually seems to possess Welsh roots, meaning prencyll, a hazel-wood, from the words pren, a wood, and cyll or coll, hazel. Pringle is also an obsolete Scottish coin and the name of a luxury knitwear company named after its founder, Robert Pringle, in 1815.d
d Now owned by the Hong Kong–based S. C. Fang and Sons, the clothes company released a cheeky cartoon video, describing in a nutshell the forces of mass production. “We take the wool from the belly of the goats because the rest of the wool gets really manky,” it begins. “Manky wool is no good to us because we have really high standards.” Then, it describes the process by which its products are made: “And then the yarn gets put on to bobbins. And the bobbins get put on to bobbin trees. And all the bobbins start spinning.… In the olden days, before we had the machine, we had old ladies sitting there knitting all the jumpers and cardigans by hand but nowadays we make about seven hundred billion jumpers and cardigans a day, and if an old lady tried to knit that many her hands would catch fire and she’d die. Anyway,” the video concludes, “.… probably everybody else should be banned from making jumpers, and just make socks, because they’re crap.”
e The iconic cartoon figure on the red tube with parted bangs and a big brush-stache is known as Julius Pringles, who looks like a German butcher with a red bow tie.
f “Lie” is such an incendiary word for a storyteller. His product is packaged and designed to melt on the tongue, to be pleasing. To that end, he offers what appears to be a potato chip or crisp, perhaps idiosyncratically saddle shaped, an amuse-bouche to entertain and delight.g
g One last note here: When I went back to my transcripts to find this story, it varied from what I’d written in my notes. There, I found the phrase “story of Pringles factory,” but also evidence that suggested that it might have been “a juice factory.” Ambrosio claimed it was in “southern Germany” and at another point “near Vienna.” (A Google search reveals a Pringles factory in Belgium.) The word “dwarf” was used by me, apparently confirmed by Ambrosio, but then he never used the word when he told the story. “All the people here were very small and really round and very colorful,” said Ambrosio, “like, very red with suspenders and hats. And everybody with their thumbs in their suspenders, and smiles.”
What was the explanation for these differences? First, there was the ever-digressive, often-fractured, footnote-within-footnote nature of Ambrosio’s stories, which meant that those stories were often revisited with subtle shifts. At the same time he might answer a direct question from me as a “yes” or a “no,” perhaps without having heard the question at all, but just trying to rush the story free of my pesky interruptions, of which there were many. Once, in fact, when I interrupted him yet again with another detail-oriented question, he finally lost his patience. “What is it with you, My-kull?” he boomed. “You always ask the color of the shirt I was wearing when this or that happened. Sometimes, when you tell stories, you need to use your imagination, hombre!”
As to whether he visited a Pringles potato chip factory in a town of dwarves, my journalistic inclination is to say it was a juice factory with “small people,” that this entire footnote is built on the shape-shifting nature of truth and language, the gaps in communication, as well as the journalist’s frenzy to nail down a patina of facts and the storyteller’s gift for imbuing events with supernatural qualities and “mythological observation.” And yet, if put to it, I have no doubt that Ambrosio could lead us all to a village of small people somewhere in southern Germany/Belgium, and much of it might be exactly as he said. The question remains, however: What percent?
h A group of these formed around his former friend Emilia, the eventual mayor of Guzmán. Perhaps their disagreement had started over religion, Ambrosio disparaging the priest, Emilia as one of the most devout in town rushing to his defense. Perhaps the two were too similar, hard nosed and hard driving, convinced of their rightness, which exacerbated everything. What is true is that over time they entered into an intractable feud, Ambrosio launching his broadsides at her from the bar, while she parried from the streets and town offices.
i Writes Federico García Lorca: “The duende is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment. The duende resembles what Goethe called ‘the demoniacal.’ It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word … for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.”
j There was a saying that every Spaniard was first from the village, second from the region, and lastly from the country of Spain.
k A friend told him: “It’s not what you’re saying, it’s the way you’re saying it that’s turned people against you. People feel bullied.” And perhaps this is where Ambrosio fell short. His proposition was jackbooted: Give me the palace and we’ll talk. Instead of: You seem kind of old and tired, Guzmán, let me help you to the bar, buy you a drink, and let’s talk about the decrepit palacio and ideas for saving our heritage together.
13
EL CAMPEADOR
“… he still rides on nights like this.”
THE KEY TO THE TELLING ROOM WAS A CONICAL PIECE OF METAL, an artifact, it seemed, from Middle Earth. Because of its weight, I had to steer it with two hands into the lock and then crank it counterclockwise, whereupon the crosshatched wooden door floated open. Up five steps was the telling room itself, with its white stucco walls, benches and table, and the musty smell of hay and wet clay. When I threw open the shutters, the sun and warmth surged, bringing it to life.
Ambrosio had urged me to write here, on the plank table beneath the blue china plate of saints and a poster of Spanish cheeses, with the last precious tin of Páramo de Guzmán thirty feet below in the cave. As often as I could, I came here and spread out my notes, set up my laptop, and then sat staring at the porrón full of Ambrosio’s homemade wine, so fresh it had a little fizz to it. It glittered scarlet, working its hypnotic effect. Here I was in Castile, trying to live by the old code, and the computer and the porrón were at war with each other. My modern gizmo versus the time-honored decanter of the Old Castilian.
A thousand words and then a sip, I told myself. It’d be my reward. Make it five hundred and then it … okay, call it two-fifty. Eventually I gave in, wooing the porrón as if were my Juliet—“It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear .…” I tipped it high in the air and drank in big, satisfying gulps.* So many gulps that I soon found myself giddy, singing, mawkish. I banged on the keyboard, amazing myself with verbiage, sometimes writing out the lyrics to old Who songs as if they were just occurring to me. This is how I quickly became disabused of the notion that the writer—your Hemingways and Faulkners, your Dylan Thomases and Tennessee Williamses, indulging in smoky spirits, writing legless and bladdered—could somehow, under the influence, muster grandiloquent prose, let alone any prose. I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance—and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs.
Admittedly, it was slow going. I had ten, then twenty pages … then twenty-five. Another few weeks, and I had thirty-five. I threw it all out and started again. It wasn’t just the wine. I found myself struggling with how to capture Ambrosio, who somehow remained just out of reach when I went to render him on the page. His mild recalcitrance to revisiting his loss made it more difficult. �
�Hombre,” he said in response to any question about the cheese, “why would you want to ruin a perfectly good day talking about all that again?”
His reluctance extended to the court cases, too, which were still in progress. He allowed that they were proceeding in a variety of courts, in Burgos and Madrid, that there’d been victories and setbacks, but I never was privy to details—and never asked to speak with Ambrosio’s lawyer because … well, something stopped me short. It was the same thing that stopped me from going to see Julián, something I knew I’d eventually have to do, and filled me with growing dread. Why? I was a journalist used to getting in and out, asking tough questions, checking off my sources with ruthless efficiency. Here, Ambrosio Molinos was my only source, and for some reason, I kept it that way. Maybe I thought if I started asking around about the cheese it would violate an important trust we’d established, that it might suggest that I didn’t take him at his word. And that’s all an Old Castilian had in this world: his word.
ANOTHER HINDRANCE TO widening my circle of sources was that I spent almost all of my time with Ambrosio. He became the dominating force, operating under the assumption that I wanted to do whatever he had on the agenda. He showed up early in the morning, and ended each day with “What’s our plan for tomorrow?” And although I’d encouraged and invited such intimacy, it took the occasional day off for me to realize how completely I’d fused myself to his world.
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 20