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

by Paterniti, Michael

  One Sunday when Ambrosio was on the road, Carlos and I arranged to visit the cheese factory. We drove from Guzmán to Roa, parked before a chain-link gate topped by spools of barbed wire, and waited. I felt exposed on that roadside, preparing to visit the “dead cheese.” As if committing my own betrayal of Ambrosio.

  Eventually a man drove up in a clattery car and disembarked, squinting, hand outstretched. He wore a T-shirt under an off-white sport coat that bagged over his thin, wiry frame. He had a scar that ran from the middle of his neck to a spot below the lobe of one ear, and he rubbed his index finger against his thumb as if working a grain of sand. This was José, the alleged turncoat and the last one remaining from the old days, who agreed to see us despite the fact that Páramo de Guzmán was shut down for the weekend.

  He unlocked the barbed-wire gate, and we entered.

  The cheese factory had recently been robbed. That was José’s first declaration after the niceties. Thieves had jimmied the lock on the gate, then backed a large truck up to a corrugated metal building under cover of darkness. After disabling the alarm system, they had broken two bolted locks on the door and then loaded the truck with crates of cheese. José estimated that the heist had cost the operation somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000. “This stuff is gold,” he said. When I asked if there were any suspects, he shook his head. When I asked if anyone might have it in for him, he cocked his head, looked suspiciously at me for a moment, and then said, “No one that I can think of.”

  José led us through the first outbuilding, explaining things as we went in a most accommodating manner. A recent storm had flooded the workroom: every day a new challenge, it seemed. The cheese, he said, took at least fourteen months from the first boiling vat of milk to the dense wedges that went out into the world. Sometimes it was aged for up to eighteen months before being sealed in tins of olive oil. That’s what it took, he said, to make an award-winning cheese like this.

  Did he see in Carlos and myself prospective cheese buyers or big-time businessmen? I can’t imagine we gave off the scent of success, but nonetheless, he meant to put his company’s best foot forward, and I felt both an irrational dislike for him born of a protectiveness for Ambrosio and a tinge of pity, as if we were in the act of ambushing him somehow.

  “Who founded this business?” I asked him, playing the calculating naïf.

  “Ambrosio Molinos,” he said, with no hint of malice. “He’s originally from Guzmán, but he left town to earn a living in transportation. He still has farms in Guzmán, though. In May and June he’s practically living there, planting and harvesting cereal and grains.” José continued without encouragement, rubbing his fingers, blinking sleepily. “He was in his thirties when he started, and I was very young, nineteen, when I began here.”

  “And you’re still very young,” I offered, though not without a liminal note of sarcasm, for in my mind’s eye I could see Ambrosio, a vibrant man full of warmth and good humor who had suddenly aged before my eyes when describing what had happened to his beloved cheese.

  “It’s my birthday,” he said.

  His birthday … today? What was he doing showing a high-school Spanish teacher and a journalist around a cheese factory? He was, it appeared, guileless, incapable of diabolical plot, another cog in the machine. He was someone with parents, secret wishes, a cake with candles, name smeared in frosting. He was someone proud to have a job, who took pride in the product he made. José filled the vacuum created by my sudden silence with a description of how the milk was heated from 4 to 32 degrees Celsius, until it became cottage-cheesy. “We grind it down into little curds,” he said. “If you want a liter of cheese, you need to start with five liters of milk. And the leftover liquid becomes a waste management issue: You can’t just throw it in the river, because it has high acidity.”

  He showed us long tanks of coagulating milk, boiled until the surface thickened, when cheese harps were employed to separate the curds and whey. He showed us presses where the curds were molded and forced into blocks. There were drum strainers and cookers and hoops. And the overwhelming impression inside that warehouse was that this was no mom-and-pop outfit but one of gleaming technology and an antiseptic cleanliness, of hairnets and silver tanks. There was no straw on the ground. No stable across the street from the house in which the cheesemaker had been born. No “Eurekas” and the joy of discovering a new world. There weren’t even sheep to milk here; instead, tank trucks drove up to the gates bearing thousands of gallons of milk from whoever offered the best price.

  It became clear that José had no filter, would say almost anything. He told us that Harrods, the famous London department store, had carried, then recently dropped, the cheese. “Our problem is that we have short supply because it takes so long to produce this cheese. They got angry with us and canceled their order.” When I asked if he remembered the first time he’d tried the cheese, he said, “When I tasted it, the only thing I wanted to do was cry. I didn’t like it at all. It has a very strong taste. It’s a very radical cheese. It tastes like the land here. Select clients prefer this type of cheese because it’s made the traditional way, the way it’s always been made in Castile.”

  One of those clients, as I already knew, was the king of Spain, Juan Carlos. “Not only does the king love it, but there’s an official distributor to the royal family who distributes our cheese,” he said. He turned to continue our tour, pointing to a saltwater bath. “After the cheese is pressed, you have to drop it in here so it gets some salt.” He showed us to a room full of metallic coffinlike cylinders in which the cheese was aged in order to prevent mold and bacteria from growing. And finally we entered a huge, temperature-controlled space where the cheese, stacked in wheels thirty high, was further aged in temperatures between 7 and 9 degrees Celsius, at 77 percent humidity. In all, José claimed, there was more than 120,000 pounds of cheese currently in storage, waiting to fully ripen and then be shipped out.

  Eventually he led us to the back of the warehouse, where we found wooden pallets piled high with those distinctive white-and-gold tins. For a moment I wanted to give that cheese a chance, wanted to believe that it wasn’t a satanic cheese at all, or a lame one that hadn’t won an award in more than a decade. I wanted to believe that this cheese still embodied the values that Ambrosio had conferred upon it, the ones that had first brought it such attention and acclaim. The abundance seemed nearly perverse, like a garage full of shiny vintage cars or shelves lined with Fabergé eggs. We flitted before those tins, then José conducted us outside, across an expanse of loose dirt, to show off the girders of a new structure, a winery that would soon house an impressive operation to rival, he promised, some of the best vineyards in the area.

  Of course, Ambrosio felt ever present here. I could almost see him counting canisters of sheep milk or checking on the inventory of rennet. I could see him hulking across the parking lot, falling into his vehicle, heading out to check up on the local shepherds. I could imagine those former halcyon days, the burst of hivelike activity after Ambrosio had first purchased the factory, when everything must have seemed possible, and when the operation had been limited to the old stone building, well before the warehouses had been built. I imagined Ambrosio arriving early and leaving late, perhaps alone in the factory at the end of the day—gazing on the tins waiting to go out into the world to transmit his love, to bring back memory—and for one moment confessing that here he’d left some sort of mark, every day making the king’s cheese. But then an Old Castilian knew better than to count his good fortune.

  At the end of the tour José took us into the stone building, said to be five hundred years old, the original cheese factory with its underground cellar. He led us down a long stone ramp to the basement, empty now, with cobwebs garlanding the rafters, where Ambrosio had risked his life when that beam broke, had held it in place with his bare hands until they were able to stabilize the structure. That’s how far he was willing to go: life and limb, everything for his dear cheese. In the name o
f Páramo de Guzmán, he was capable of superhuman effort.

  Upstairs, in a tasting room, José poured a red wine for us, then reached below an oak counter, retrieving a tin of Páramo de Guzmán. He worked a can opener, una lata-abrir, until the lid came free. Inside, bathed in olive oil, were two wedges of rich, amber color. It didn’t look like dead cheese at all. José offered a piece and I took it, stealing a glance at Carlos, who took another, attaching little ceremony to what otherwise might have been momentous had Ambrosio been our guide.

  I took a halfhearted bite.

  I’ll admit it: It was good cheese. It was really good cheese. But it was all wrong. José watched me closely, gauging my reaction as if a substantial sale depended on it. Under the full force of his attention—his fingers rubbing that grain of sand—I slurped wine and masticated without thought, nodding politely. It was sharp, that much I can say, but had I tasted centuries of love and care, of generosity and perfection, as defined by the Molinos family? Had some mystical transference occurred between this substance and my tongue—and then spread through my body and out the top of my head?

  Nah.

  I faked it pretty well, though, as did Carlos, and we bought a couple of tins by way of thanking José, the birthday boy, for his time. With that ersatz, soulless cheese stashed in our trunk (hidden there because I didn’t want Ambrosio to know I’d met the enemy and paid cash for his contraband), we made our way back to Guzmán, wondering what a tin of the original Molinos cheese might taste like—and if one could really taste a difference at all.

  JUST WHEN IT COULDN’T get any hotter, it did—until we felt as if we were living life on a griddle, oil spitting and stinging, our bodies crisping like duck skin. The grapes curled deeper into their vines, and now came that pall of midsummer death moving in wisps and bony fingers, turning the land brown, and the pavement to goo. It drove us toward shade and cool water. In the absence of any discussion about his cheese—any late-breaking murder bulletins or court case updates—we retired again and again to the shadows of the telling room, where, between long pours from the porrón, Ambrosio spoke.

  “I’ve seen a big deterioration in humanity,” he said, warming to one of his favorite themes. “People don’t know how to raise a chicken from its egg. Or how to hold an animal. How to go to nature for answers. Today, we’re dependent on medicines and hospitals. We’re victims of illnesses that never existed before. And do you know why?”

  I pretended to consider. “Um—people don’t know how to shit anymore?”

  “Exactly!” boomed Ambrosio. “You are listening, aren’t you! And this isn’t a rumor, hombre. There are three highest things in life: to eat, to make love to a woman, and to shit. You can say one is more important than the others, but they are all pretty much the same. What happens when you shit is that your body has taken the most important parts from the food—the nutrients—and the rest is waste. Claro?”

  Yeah, this sounded right. “So it’s the opposite of eating,” I said. “It’s the end.”

  “It’s not the other side of eating,” said Ambrosio, “it’s not the contrary. Otherwise it would be called ‘de-eating,’ or ‘not eating.’ The opposite of eating is to vomit.”

  “Then would it be part of the evolution of eating?”

  “Yes, in a way,” he said. “It’s part of your own life, a biological act that belongs to your own life. And yet it’s the most spiritual moment. It’s the moment when people can’t lie. When the death of food makes you most alive.”

  He again conjured the beauty of collective cagando on Mon Virgo. Of having the whole world laid out below you and your friends as you shat. But I was wondering how one was supposed to eat—let alone evacuate one’s bowels—with such a fastidious fixation on purity and with such inspiring vistas, when society had become so frantic that we were human versions of Marx’s time-saving machines. Yes, of course, with a little burble in the belly, it would have been nice to take an hour or three up on Mon Virgo, shitting it out with friends … but seriously. We didn’t all abide in slow-moving, single-minded Guzmán. Sometimes, Ambrosio sounded as if he lived in a plastic bubble.

  When I told him so, he wagged a finger. “Shit how you must,” he said. “I can’t do that for you, but it’s not hard to eat well.” He pointed to the almonds on the table before us, sloshed the wine in the porrón, took a drag. “These are almonds that are from the field here,” he said. “My father took the time with a hammer to deshell them, and later my mother preserved them by submerging them in salt water. Then, in an old pot, she heated a few drops of olive oil, added the almonds, and stirred with a spoon for a couple of hours—and this is the result.”

  He handed me one. I slid it between my teeth, salt sprinkling my lip, the hard hull poised, then cracked by molars. Its flesh—the nut itself—was soft and gave, and the wood and mineral was instantly transformed into something very sweet, spreading to the far reaches of my mouth. “Mmmm,” I mumbled.

  In Ambrosio’s presence, under the spell of his words, food had this way of ascending to sublime heights. Chorizo, lomo, stews, olives, fish, wine, nuts, aguardiente-soaked cherries, lamb, fresh lettuce, bread, cheeses, flan, paella, tomatoes, peaches—in the context of the telling room, around that ancient wooden table, on those hard seated benches, it all set a mouth watering, a body thrumming, and it left an afterglow on those gathered, one illuminated by the same food, the same nutrients, the same molecular transformation that now occurred inside our bodies, while the words washed over us.

  “But for me, it’s not special or unusual,” said Ambrosio. “The biggest satisfaction is to offer a wine from these fields or a little piece of cheese or some of these almonds from my mother. It’s another concept of life. It’s another way to plant your existence on this earth.” He pointed to the jar of almonds. “That’s about six hours of work right there.”

  “Six hours in that jar,” I said.

  “Six hours by our hands,” said Ambrosio. “It sounds like a lot if you’re rushing, but in the context of life here, it’s nothing.”

  AMBROSIO HAD BEEN ITCHING to take Carlos and me to the town of Haza, another field trip to have a drink. “The place is essentially abandoned,” he said as we drove late one afternoon beneath a chiaroscuro sky. The wind had picked up, some sort of front approaching from Galicia, pushing hot gusts past the window with an occasional burst of cold air that sliced sheets of silt from the coterro and set them loose in tornadic rotations. When the weather came on the Meseta, it never meandered in milquetoast indecision but barged forth in ominous combinations: huge orange clouds, winds from competing directions, lightning in the distance forking the earth until the land opened to the faraway rain.

  The approach to Haza was a steep climb, a road grooved into a hillside. At the top we passed stone facades of old derelict homes (they were literally only facades, like a stage set), sunlight filtering through the walls in heraldic bolts. A castle stood in disrepair, its turret like a bitten-off Pirouline, its bell tower only a vestige, a half gesture of that word “tower.” Gravity seemed to be the village’s most active citizen, grabbing down rock and roof, grinding it slowly to rubble. We drove through a cluster of half buildings and parked as cats skittered into a nearby alley.

  Leave it to our Ambrosio to have close friends in a ghost town. The bar in Haza was nothing but a small room, cozy in that emptiness. Something about being so high up, with all that weather roiling forth, with all those resident spirits—another town, another legacy: Who had once lived in this castle, and what had befallen them?—everything felt more alive, interlinked, interdependent. Carlos and I sat in the warm suburb of Ambrosio, who introduced us to the bartender, and ordered us cold cervezas. “My son comes here sometimes,” said Ambrosio. “When you see this tall guy with a back the width of that doorframe, with really long hair that falls to his shoulder blades, you’ll say, ‘I shit on God, aren’t you Ambrosio’s kid?’ He’s so big he needs to bend down to walk through the door.” I relished Ambrosio’s Bunyane
sque descriptions. When Josué took to the fields, his long hair flowing like an Adonis,† the grapes grew larger, more succulent. The sun shone brighter. Ambrosio made no bones about how proud he was, never by saying so, but just in these descriptions of his eldest son as an organic, elemental force of Castile animated by the propulsion of native blood. And this was one form of enlace, too, the attachment of the child to the father, and with the passing of time the father to the child, so that even in death one lived on, carrying the ghost of the other like a baby inside.

  There was some talk about crops, and what the year might bring. So far the heat had caused many to hold out hope about the grapes, as the best yields came from that perfect combination of hot, dry days and cold nights, from the punishing extremes that might push the vines to their own extremes, releasing more sugars into the grapes, making for bigger-tasting wines.

  After leaving the bar, we strolled a little, ending up on the bluff, looking back across the coterro toward Guzmán, under darkening skies. Haza was a village, Ambrosio said, that now had no reason to exist; for all intents and purposes, it was dead. We were walking on a grave, another example of “the remains of Castile.” The only thing left was the nostalgia of a few hangers-on, and the stories about it that had been carried by its scatterlings out into greater Spain. “My fear is that this will be Guzmán in fifty or a hundred years,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s possible, but then probably no one here thought it was, either.”

  We piled back into the car at twilight, swooping down through the twilight as if it were a substance. I rode shotgun, and there beyond the windshield was that sky again, purple clouds layered over black ones, and now Ambrosio was really talking, shot through with adrenaline, evoking the crumbled history of Castile between drags on his cigarette. Oh, how they’d grown rich and fat on wool here in the fifteenth century, the best sheep in the world, and how, for that one fleeting moment when everything revolved around Castile, Fernando and Isabella‡ had sent Columbus to discover the New World. The shadows flew outside the metal steed that bore us, and now only the thinnest skin held back the past. Ambrosio accelerated, zooming round dark corners, and orange dirt came up in the headlights, a hare at the side of the road, another imploded outbuilding. Rock and shadow gathered and formed the first words of the story Ambrosio gathered himself to tell now, the ur-story of Castile, really, about the great knight El Cid.