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

by Paterniti, Michael

  “Is that what caused the fight over the palacio?” I said.

  Pelayo did a double take. The controversy was almost fifteen years old at that point, and he must have wondered how I knew, let alone why I might care, which is when I added an addendum about my friendship with Ambrosio.

  “Ambrosio is very clever,” Pelayo said. “And is nice. A friend for many years. And strong. He told everyone, ‘I got sheeps, and I got their milk, and I make cheese. The palacio is in ruins. Let me fix it and move the cheese in there.’ ” Ambrosio first offered his house in the lower part of town, with its pool and gardens, in exchange for the building. “But the people became very, very angry,” Pelayo said, “and fought him.”

  This was how it had always gone, said Pelayo. This is exactly what he was talking about, this small-mindedness on one side and this self-righteousness on the other, all of it wrapped in fierce independence.† “You can’t be free in a small village,” he said. But at least no one had been hurt. Not like that other time, when someone had been “felled and killed by the people.”

  He dropped the phrase in such a way that I almost missed it. Wait—who had been felled and killed by the people? Leo was dribbling the soccer ball, which topped out at his knees. As the ball rolled, sheep pellets attached themselves to it and pinwheeled off. He kept shouting out my name—my soccer name, Zidane. And when I didn’t respond he hollered, “Daaaaaaaaaddddd!”

  “Who was felled and killed?” I asked, the ball ricocheting off my shin.

  “A brother,” he said. “But no one can talk about this.” Pelayo was inadvertently telling me anyway, and, realizing this, he seemed uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. We were passing through some choppy strait to the concealed truth, and unlike my recent encounters with Ambrosio, I was steady on the throttle.

  “What happened?” I asked, knowing that it would pain him to turn back.

  The story, or what remained of it, went like this: In the years before the Civil War, there’d been a marriage, a woman from Guzmán betrothing a man from away. On such occasions the groom was expected to throw a tip to the hometown boys, as a gesture of respect, to say in effect, “Okay, I’m taking one of yours, but here’s some money in exchange: Go have some wine and lamb, and we’ll call it even.”

  For some reason, on the day of the marriage the groom didn’t pay the tip. One of the local men was a Republican named Martín—or Martínazo, because he was very tall—and he started heckling the groom. Things escalated. There was shouting and shoving. Martínazo was pushed to the ground, and as he lay there, the father of the bride lifted his cane—some people said it was a knife—and before he could strike Martínazo, Martínazo drew a revolver and shot him.

  Martínazo was subsequently tried and sent to prison. When the Republicans came to power in Madrid, however, he was freed and returned to Guzmán, where he became mayor. If once he’d been abrasive, went the legend, he came home a more moderate man, addressing people politely.

  Yet, after the Civil War began in July of 1936, Martínazo was forced out as mayor, and a man named Alfonso—of the opposite political persuasion—took over. With the first spasm of war came some of the worst atrocities: “Savage acts on both sides,” said Pelayo.‡ Martínazo believed, rightly it seems, that Alfonso wanted him dead, so he fled, exiling himself to a forested area a couple miles across the páramo from Guzmán. From here Martínazo could keep watch over the high fields, but it had to have been a rough existence, one undertaken out of pure desperation, for Nationalist hit squads were eliminating their enemies, dumping bodies by night in hastily dug graves throughout the region. Apparently Martínazo began sending clandestine messages back to his family asking for food or company, setting up secret meetings with his brother at this or that majano boundary marker. Until one of those messages was intercepted by the mayor, Alfonso, and his gang, who went out to the fields one night at dusk, armed to kill Martínazo.

  The younger brother of Martínazo—Orel—walked out of town and up the northern hill, finding the sheep path. By most accounts Orel wasn’t interested in politics and had no desire to get wrapped into the hot-blooded bipartisan violence. He was a brother doing his brotherly duty, probably delivering some food, cheese and chorizo, some bread and wine. He came across the fields at dusk, stalwart and doomed. At some point he must have heard other footsteps—the ka-chunk of boots in the soft dirt. He must have realized he had a problem, that he was jodido.

  The men stood in a noosed circle with their guns loaded and cocked. Martínazo, coming across the fields, saw the shadows and knew something was amiss. There was yelling, cursing. The circle opened, one man’s arms outstretched in surrender. A gun was raised, a shot fired. Then Martínazo’s brother fell.

  IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN surprising that the Civil War had reached Guzmán, for it had reached everywhere else in Spain. Yet for some reason, I was surprised. I’d just assumed that everybody here must have lined up on the same side, or that a village so small and remote had nothing to fight for, or that Guzmán, while rife with internal politics, was somehow exempt from the bigger catastrophes of the world. Maybe I mistook the purity of the cheese for the purity of the place where it had been born.

  When Pelayo finished telling me about the murder, he said, “All Civil War stories are nightmares,” adding that “people here don’t forget grudges until they’re settled.” After the war, there’d been no prosecutions, no truth commissions. The past, in its own shallow grave, had been left unresolved, with lingering questions like the ones I had now: What had been said in the moments after the killing, and what was done with the body, and what did Martínazo do, having seen what he saw, knowing what he knew?

  That night, I lay awake until I gave up on sleep and took myself to the roof patio. The sky was hung with faraway suns, and I was a cliché thinking about the enormousness of everything,§ about how small we are, but then how consequential, too. Martínazo and Orel, both strangers from seventy years ago, now rummaged inside my mind. I had no idea what they looked like or who they were. I just knew one brother had watched the other die. And now their story was partially mine, too. I leaned back in a wooden chair and sucked in the night air. What was a person to make of all of these stories? Everybody had at least one to tell, and then their own version of the hundreds of others that got told already. Everybody kept adding more story-noise to the clamor. It was dizzying and enthralling and what kept us bound together.

  As I sat there, I was thinking, too, about Ambrosio and what Sara had said. Maybe the reason I couldn’t seem to move forward on my book was that I’d come here to move backward. This was a special case, wasn’t it? Or that’s what I told myself. As a journalist, you entered other people’s lives, collecting what you could, positioning yourself off to the side, as the ultimate observer. Later, after you wrote the story—your story about their story—the reaction was never predictable. Sometimes you ended up friends; sometimes you never heard another word; every once in a while, you were threatened with a lawsuit. Perhaps this was my unconscious hedge with Ambrosio, then: If I wasn’t a journalist, he wouldn’t have to be my subject—that is, we’d never have to be anything but friends. If I wanted to be in his world, then I wouldn’t have to stop and observe. I could just live it.

  When it came to the cheese, it was easier to assume the same avoidance pattern with Ambrosio as everyone else because clearly talking about it made him feel miserable. It would have made him feel even worse, I imagined, if I’d gone behind his back to talk to Julián. In the meantime, there were all these stories, like constellations residing in the same atmosphere, in conversation with each other, by turns connected and disconnected, overlapping and individuated. Perhaps I’d lost my gumption to press Ambrosio about the cheese because I didn’t want the stories to end. With the telling of each one, he connected me to Guzmán—and then he connected Guzmán to Castile, Castile to Spain, Spain to the world, and, finally, the world to the stars. He was already telling me everything he th
ought I needed to know about him and his cheese.

  At the telling room the next day—sitting in the cool, late-afternoon shadows with Ambrosio, Carlos, and Ambrosio’s father, who dozed off and on at the table—I asked about the murder. We grazed on chorizo, bread, and Manchego. As Ambrosio happily loaded and reloaded the porrón, his eyebrows raised at the question. As the keeper of my education here, he seemed genuinely startled to find I’d acquired knowledge—let alone a secret—without him. “I’m not completely sure of this story,” he said, “because no one talks about it. I guess in several generations people will forget about it, but now it remains a very sensitive topic because of the grandchildren.”

  He continued, “Back then, the situation was dire. My own grandfather went to prison because he was a Red. Other members of my family, who were Nationalists, protected him in jail. But not everyone was afforded such protection. Brothers fought brothers. Friends and family became enemies, and because they knew each other so well, they could be the most cruel.”

  Ambrosio’s father roused himself and said, “Santos cojones!”—holy balls!—“why are we even talking about this? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” He was so good-natured and loveable in old age, but now he struggled to rise, and get away, with a grimace on his face. It took awhile, and he mumbled irascibly as he went, in his blue mulo, hunched over a cane. Ambrosio’s face filled with boyish wonder as he watched his father maneuver around the table, down the steps, and out into the bright light.

  “Papá,” he called after him, “do you need a ride?”

  And his father said, “Oh, go fuck yourself.” Which made Ambrosio laugh with a mix of surprise and pride.

  Meanwhile I was working backward, doing the math in my head. Anyone in this village who was eighty-five now would have been about eighteen at the time of the murder, old enough to go to the fields with Alfonso’s hit squad. So maybe that’s why no one wanted to discuss it. I thought of those angelic, bereted old men on the bench across from the bar, or playing mus or julepe at the tables by the window. What secrets were they keeping? What role had they played?

  I asked Ambrosio if he knew anyone involved with the murder, and he said no, he was certain that all of them were dead now. But he did remember that Martínazo had eventually returned to Guzmán after the war and lived out his days here. He and Alfonso passed in the street often, but despite everything between them, they never exchanged a word.

  THAT SUMMER OF 2003, a number of curious, makeshift settlements began to appear in the Duero region around Guzmán, in spots just off the road, up a nearby hillside, at the fringe of a pine forest. We’d pass them as we took the kids to the public swimming pool in Torresandino or to shop in Aranda, and we’d wonder. They were shrouded from view by opaque plastic sheeting.

  In Aranda during the war, Franco’s Nationalists had run concentration camps, and the existence of mass graves had been a widely known secret. Someone’s father had gone missing—a mother, a son, a daughter. A farmer found newly turned earth where a day or week before the land had lain undisturbed. Over time, as the buried bodies decayed and lost volume, declivities formed. Here was a watch, the eyelet of a shoe, a fragment of bone. No one had the temerity to dig for their relations or ancestors lest they end up in the same hole.

  It had recently come to pass, however, that a man from Aranda named Restituto Velasco had gotten fed up and had gone looking for his grandfather. He began digging randomly, and two old women from a local village pointed him to a nearby mountain. They told him, “There’s one oak in particular. Dig by that one.” Despite the illegality of trespassing on the land, Velasco hired a backhoe and found six pits full of bones.

  When the Spanish government showed no interest in excavating the past, a small collective calling itself the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory took it upon itself to begin the retrieval of remains for proper burial.‖ Tent cities cropped up in the countryside. With the first unearthing of mass graves came squads of volunteers—a number, it turned out, from England, some of them students wearing bandannas and tank tops—living at the sites in makeshift quarters, driving borrowed, beat-up cars, spending weeks at a time digging in the red clay, trying to forensically piece together the past. Because there was still so much fear associated with these spots—an air of solemnity hung thickly over the proceedings—they were treated by most like Area 51, to be avoided. Although the mass graves were crime scenes, it was against the law to prosecute anyone, so the sites we’d been passing were designated as archaeological digs. One of those in charge of the excavations was a local archaeologist named Eduardo Cristóbal, a stout, hirsute character from Aranda whom Ambrosio insisted I meet.

  In the loud, crowded bar where we convened—and where Ambrosio sat listening for once in silence—I strained to hear Cristóbal, until he raised his voice. He said his grandfather had been branded a Red, while another in his family had been a Nationalist who was shot to death in Madrid. This was not so unusual, these divisions and bad endings within one family. What was unusual was speaking so loudly about it in public, seven decades later.

  Cristóbal’s task had been to collect records and interviews in order to identify the dead. He’d gone from village to village, living room to living room, talking to old people, listening to stories of cruelty and heartbreak that made you question humanity. “In theory, these bodies were supposed to be the Reds who were taken from these camps and killed,” he said. “In reality what we found were innocents: a girlfriend or boyfriend of someone suspected to be a Red. Or grudge killings, people using the war as an excuse to settle old scores: a brother-in-law murdered so the sister could inherit his money. Another man killed for leaving his girlfriend. Family enemies disappeared.”

  Cristóbal had spent months climbing down into these shallow trenches behind the plastic barriers, examining skulls and skeletons, shoes and clothing. It was trying detective work, but it was also something more: an emotional journey to build narratives. He’d found children and grandparents, two brothers hugging in death. They followed him home at night, haunted him in dreams. It was almost easier to focus on precise details—the bullet hole in the skull, the frilly lace on the shirt—by way of detachment. “Most of the victims were in summer wear, in alpargatas”—sandals—“or boots, between the ages of twenty and thirty-five,” he said. They were killed in the summer of 1936, in the melee at the beginning of the coup, by German Mausers loaded with Spanish ammo, shells marked FNT, for Fábrica Nacional de Toledo. Astonishingly, Cristóbal found that if somebody had a copper coin in his or her pocket, the coin magically preserved the fabric of the pants, the underwear, the shirt, within a ten-centimeter radius of the coin.

  “No one told me about this special property of copper,” he said, “but it’s been enormously helpful.”

  The other thing was the hands. If Cristóbal found someone with a limp hand—that is, with the finger bones easily extended—it meant the person had died immediately, often with a precise shot to the head, whereas someone with clawed fingers had died in agony, digging his or her nails into the dirt. Or at least that’s what he surmised. “My job is to give the relatives as much exact information about their loved ones as I can,” he said.

  Given the immensity of the task, the emotion it undammed, and the strenuous, at times threatening, condemnation it evoked in certain pro-Franco quarters, Cristóbal seemed outwardly stoic.a He was compiling a report that would be released through the University of Burgos itemizing his findings, identifying the dead and describing their last moments. He planned to deliver his results in a public forum in Aranda, but he admitted that, judging by his encounters so far with families of the deceased, it would be difficult bringing them back to the precise moment their worlds exploded. And yet nothing could stop him now. He had the righteousness of a storyteller, recovering time, reanimating the ancestors, telling the most difficult story, based on forensic truth, in order to set it free, once and for all.

  “It’s the most important wor
k,” he said, “finding the voice of the dead.”

  * Raúl González Blanco, the all-time leading goal scorer for Real Madrid: Handsome, speedy, prolific, he represented a fluency that Leo now found his three-year-old self aspiring to. The game’s geometry and constant teamwork, its action and its postgoal celebrations, all coalesced in his mind as something greater than the New York Yankees. When we procured tickets to see a game at Bernabeu, Real Madrid’s 85,000-capacity home stadium, his conversion was complete. Before his eyes on that emerald pitch came the new knights of Spain, and Raúl had a true, alert, generous playing style, scoring two goals that night. I only wished that Leo would follow Raúl’s muted postgoal ritual of kissing his wedding ring, but soon at the frontón, there was Leo after scoring, shucking his shirt, waving it like the more flamboyant megalomaniacs of European soccer as the tractors passed.

  † This mule-headedness had otherwise served Castile well at its inception. According to a Library of Congress study of Spain, Castile was born as a loose collection of strongholds in the tenth century, when the kingdom of León looked to create a buffer between the Christian north and the rest of Spain, which was Muslim. Castile not only had the blessings of the kings of León but was granted fueros, which were special dispensations that left it virtually autonomous. “Castile developed a distinct society with its own dialect, values, and customs shaped by the hard conditions of the frontier,” reads the study. “Castile also created a caste of hereditary warriors whom the frontier ‘democratized’: all warriors were equal, and all men were warriors.”

  When it came to the palacio, the sense among the townspeople was the opposite: that all men weren’t created equal, that “los Ambrosios” were trying to take what they saw as theirs, and this gave rise to an atavistic fury.