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

by Paterniti, Michael

  ‡ Depending on the source, fatalities would total more than 350,000, including tens of thousands of “enemies of the state” who were murdered after the cessation of hostilities, and tens of thousands who withered of starvation. In addition, some number of children (sources claim anywhere from “hundreds” to 30,000) were forcibly separated from their leftist parents. Atrocities by the Nationalists, known as the White Terror, outnumbered those by the Republicans. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe on April 26, 1937—an incident that claimed up to 1,000 lives and was immortalized by Pablo Picasso—became perhaps the most famous, but a brutal incident at Badajoz on August 14, 1936, was more typical: a massacre in which civilian “prisoners” were gathered in the town’s bullring and then systematically slaughtered by firing squad, leaving between 2,000 and 4,000 dead, some tortured and mutilated by bandillero lances. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ response—known as the Red Terror—featured attacks on the Spanish clergy, including a parish priest in central Spain who was forced to reenact a parody of Christ’s crucifixion and was finally shot, and the Bishop of Jaén and his sister, who were allegedly paraded before thousands of ecstatic spectators and put to death by a female executioner nicknamed La Pecosa, the freckled one.

  § Cliché until it wasn’t: During this same time, in 2003, NASA had programmed the Hubble telescope to photograph what appeared from Earth as a thumbnail of empty, black sky. But what emerged when four hundred images were superimposed as “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field” astonished even the astronomers: Out of that nothing patch came ten thousand galaxies and a thousand trillion stars just like our sun.

  ‖ Signed two years after Franco’s death, the 1977 Pacto de la Moncloa, known as “the pact of forgetting,” offered amnesty to those who might have been implicated in atrocities. While the pact ensured the transition from dictatorship to democracy, it also had the adverse effect of silencing history. When the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory began its work, editorials decried the exhumations, and vocal critics lined up to warn about the dangers of going back to the chaotic days when both Republicans and Nationalists alike had committed atrocities. If people started digging, the argument went, who knew where it all might end? What the new generation didn’t understand, according to the older one, was that everybody—everybody—was implicated.

  a Later, when I spoke to another association member in Madrid, the researcher José Ignacio Casado, he described the pressure this reclamation work had put on his marriage. His wife’s family had been Nationalists, and were displeased with his investigations. His wife’s feeling was that for every victim, you pulled up a killer. Which hadn’t stopped Ignacio Casado. In another grave near Aranda, fifty bodies had been buried by street sweepers. One man heard that his grandfather had not been properly executed and was found alive near the ditch; the story went that, when he claimed to be thirsty, his attackers urinated on him, then finished him off. Later, some of these killers were seen walking through town in the clothes of the dead. “My wife and I almost split,” said Ignacio Casado, “because she knows that I’m a very thorough person, and that if I’m going to do this, I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

  15

  HONOR THE GRAPES

  “There was something in the air above the village.… And then it fell.”

  THE WEATHER OF CASTILE OWES ITS PARTICULARS TO A DYNAMIC known as the North Atlantic oscillation, which is defined by an atmospheric low that hovers near Iceland and a high that does the same near the Azores. The fluctuations in differences between these—in the various collisions of Arctic chill and warm southern air—define the intensity of the winds and storms buffeting Galicia, the piling clouds that gain momentum as they race across the Meseta to Guzmán, sometimes hurling lightning and rock. The seemingly endless, heat-battered days of summer can change to mayhem within minutes, which is why the Old Castilian always watches the sky for signs—and never more so than when the grapes go from being hard pellets to fleshy baubles, when they first come into their nubile own and ripen with juicy guts, and the countdown to harvest begins.

  That summer, there’d been little chatter about what kind of grapes the vineyards might yield. Perhaps it was superstition not to talk about them before their time. But the weather had been scorching and dry, perfect for the vines. Under Ambrosio’s direction, Josué, of the flowing locks, and Kiké, of the Mohawk and many piercings, had lavished care and attention on the vines. They’d clipped and fed and sprayed. And the closer we came to September and the harvest, the more vulnerable it all seemed. In the dead heat of those long summer days, time crawled. The suspense became unbearable.

  It was during this time that Sara and I loaded up the kids and headed north to Cantabria for a brief getaway. One evening while we were gone, Ambrosio found himself in the barn, putting up bales of hay, when he first heard a soft pinging over his head, and he thought, Good, it’s going to rain, it’s going to rain and clean off the leaves and moisten the dirt a little. It’s going to water the vines and the worms and the earth.

  In this moment, he had no inkling that anything might be amiss. He’d spent the day with his sons. There’d been some minor repairs on one of the tractors, which Kiké had handled. Josué was irrigating, adjusting the huge sprinklers that arced water over the dry fields in a thick, cool spray. Another day full of hours to add to the thousands they’d spent already. After stacking the hay, Ambrosio planned to go up and say goodnight to his parents, maybe have a quick drink at the bar, and then be home for cena.

  Later, when Ambrosio spoke to Kiké, trying to trace the origin of the disaster, Kiké described a strange occurrence. He’d been up on the páramo at about 8:30 P.M., when clouds began to gather and a wind picked up, a very dry, hot wind. What surprised Kiké was that behind the wind came a sudden blast of cold air, as if it were pouring from above or from all sides, frigid and directionless. The cab of his tractor was buffeted; branches came loose from the trees, and the dust swirled.

  There was no inkling of this in the barn sheltering Ambrosio and the bales of hay, just the benevolent ping-pinging on the roof. With the passing moments, however, the hits became louder, more insistent and tinnier, picking up in frequency. Ambrosio listened in the dark to the tumult of what soon sounded like pots and pans smashing against each other. He frowned and drew air through his nostrils, but all he could smell was the hay, piled high in the open bay. It was a remarkable shade of gold, bright and burnt pale enough to give off a glow in the murk. And when freshly cut like this, it flooded the barn with the scent of Castilian earth. Ambrosio paused and breathed in again, almost tentatively. It was just as he thought: Through an eddy came the smell of ice. The time between realization and physical reaction was a matter of seconds, and sluicing through those seconds were other bitternesses, a lifetime of them, revisited. His voice rose reflexively. “Me cago en la leche de Dios,” he said out loud. I shit in the milk of God. “I … SHIT … IN … THE … MILK!” The hunting dogs looked up from their bed in one of the stalls.

  There was something in the air above the village, above the atmospheric layers of dream-ghost-metaphor that already hovered over the village (the flung birds were revenge; the flying leaves, ancestors). And then it fell: el granizo, hail. From the cold ceiling of a massive cloud, the ice guillotined, gathering rime as it hurtled earthward.

  The cloud covered a mile and a half, and moved whichever way the wind blew it. Ambrosio followed the hail’s pattern across the roof, intuitively marking its path. Following that line, and at that speed, it would strike the family vineyards within minutes. This was something that couldn’t be undone. The clouds didn’t tally all the hours a father and his sons spent in the fields. The wind didn’t know that wine was a religion to these people, as precious as any family heirloom. (Ambrosio used to say that his father always perked up at Mass whenever the wine was being blessed, that he would literally spring from a deep sleep for that promise of a holy swig.) And the hail, the hai
l struck only what stood between it and the ground. When it hit the grapes—halfway to being ripe, not young enough to heal magically—it ripped and slashed and ruined.*

  To Ambrosio, the grapes were alive, and helpless, and being slaughtered. To think about it was nearly too much, even for a man who’d seen it all, who when he’d returned to his village at nineteen—the now tender age of his boy Kiké—had vowed to live his life as an Old Castilian, burdened and set free by the land and its harsh vicissitudes. His pact had been simple: He’d accept what the earth and sky gave.

  But why did he have to accept this? Just to consider the intricacies of the vine, especially the older ones, was to confront the intelligence of grapes. The leaves acted as solar panels, tilting toward the sun in the cool of morning, allowing light into the plant, and then creating an altogether impenetrable canopy to survive the heat of midday. Drought was often the vine’s moment of reckoning, and the plant would do everything it could for the grape. A stressed vine curtailed its growth and underwent hormonal changes to survive the rest of the hot summer. It became tough and focused, and the oldest were the most tough and focused. As a result, its fruit became more concentrated and flavorful, something to revere.

  The cloud crept across the barn, taking the noise with it, then knifed for the field just below, picking up the road and following it to the vineyard. It sprayed hail in indiscriminate patterns, sometimes ceasing for hundreds of yards, only to begin again. Now, it came in rapid fire. The vines and grapes took the blows like bodies at a massacre.

  Ambrosio sat in the barn, smoking cigarettes. Twenty minutes passed. He climbed into his tractor, drove to his mother’s house, and gave her a kiss. His mother didn’t say anything to him. She knew what had happened, she knew how her son was. How could you not consider yourself damned, to lose your grapes to hail after all that work? He said good night and drove home in the tractor. The headlights shone on the damage, branches and leaves in the road, trees down at the edge of the fields. And yet by the time he’d made it to his own home and had some food, when it came time to sleep, he slept soundly. He couldn’t visit the vineyard until three days after the storm because the thought of it turned his stomach, but that night he remembered the worst and most difficult things done to him—including the cheese—and that perspective allowed him to sleep.

  The days after the storm were cool and cloudy, the skies low and leaden: sweater weather. The villagers assessed the damage and once again marveled at how the cloud had left a patchwork of destruction. The vast Pedrosa vineyards, which occupied the rising lands southwest of the village, had remained untouched, but not more than a mile away, there were vineyards that had lost 90 percent of their grapes. Some quietly rejoiced; others, like Ambrosio’s sons, took to the fields in green rain slickers, spraying the broken-skinned grapes with fungicide, leaving what looked to be green paint on the wreckage in hopes of stanching disease, in hopes that something might be saved.

  By the time Ambrosio came down to the vineyard on the third day, the weather was sunny and warm again, back to the furnace of everlasting summer on the Meseta. We’d returned from our trip up north, having heard about the storm. Ambrosio was already sweating through his shirt as he made his way through the vines, boots sinking deep in the embankment of loose dirt. I followed as he walked with his sons, then bent down to inspect the damage. He picked a grape, holding it between his first finger and thumb. The skin was punctured and slit, and he grimaced. He picked more murdered grapes, making his way along one row. He broke loose a cluster and held it up in the sun, then laid it down gently. He put his hands on his hips, exhaled.

  “It’s the way of the field,” he said, as much to himself as to the rest of us. “When the harvest is good, you enter the temple. When it goes like this, you’re fucked, and must live with it.

  “This is what it means to be an Old Castilian,” he said, looking out toward Mon Virgo, which levitated above us. “The weight of Old Castile falls on your back in moments like these, and you either have the strongest, widest back or you need to get out of here.”

  He turned and trudged toward the road, the boys following.

  When he came to the tractor, he glanced back at the vineyard, pressing his lips together. That evening he would be up at the bar, in the bodega, drinking, laughing, telling stories, singing—the most boisterous of them all, trying to forget—but now he looked once more on the wreckage.

  “Honor the grapes,” he said in a hoarse voice to his sons, “because they were once whole like you.”

  * This comes from an eighteenth-century account of a hailstorm in Madrid by one Pedro Alonso de Salanova, who described the hail as the size of “hen’s eggs”: “It killed many small creatures such as doves, rabbits, hares, ducks, sparrows and other birds. It wrenched the branches off many trees leaving them leafless and fruitless; it wrecked many kitchen gardens, vineyards, olive groves, melon plots and unreaped wheatfields. Some say that this furious cloud was born in the mountain lake of Gredos in the nearby province of Ávila, because that day at 12 o’clock a dense, thick, sulphurous and flame-like vapour was seen to rise therefrom.”

  16

  GONE FOREVER

  “Wow … wow … wow!”

  BEYOND MY POSSIBLY NAÏVE BELIEF THAT AGRARIAN LIFE MIGHT solve all of our problems, what rooted me first and foremost to Guzmán was Ambrosio’s story of the cheese. It had begun with my original deli fantasies, leading to the intensity of that first meeting with the cheesemaker—during which, like the greatest of tellers, he’d drawn me in and ensnared me—and leaving off with this sort of stalemate. There was something lurking behind Ambrosio’s tale that I felt compelled to know/not-know, and that hindered its full unfolding. What was it, though? What revelation could ever undo the spell, or undermine the Storyteller with a beautiful-terrible story to tell?

  Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Our summer was vanishing, in seemingly uneventful fashion, discounting the fact that everything felt eventful. Carlos had returned home with his family to get ready for the upcoming school year. My mother arrived for a visit,* and left as transfixed by Guzmán as we were. We began our own countdown—four, three, two weeks left—even as my page count in the telling room slowed to a dribble and then, to my alarm, started running backward with some ruthless self-editing: sixty-seven pages … seventy-three … seventy-five … fifty-eight … forty-nine (!) …

  Normally I would have fumed and fretted about this, but according to my book contract, I had more than a year left to finish a draft. More than enough time. We began to pack the plates, lamps, and knickknacks we’d acquired, and took them in two boxes to Ambrosio’s garage. We tried to milk our last moments of escape: in the fields and telling room with Ambrosio, at the pantano and pool on family outings, at night in the bar† or streets. We’d celebrated May’s first birthday at the fuente above town, beneath the shade of huge oaks, the town bakers—Marcos and Ilena—arriving with their three-year-old daughter, Lucia, and a gorgeous vanilla-and-strawberry cake. We’d taken a bunch of family excursions with Ambrosio as our tour guide.

  One, to a town called Covarrubias, transported us to a picturesque valley in the mountains about forty miles east of Guzmán. Famous for its black pudding, the town seemed to be a perpetual medieval fair and tourist attraction. Ambrosio led us through a crowd of lute players and costumed dancers, jesters and knights, chicken grilling over open flames, to a small chapel at the end of town. Inside, musicians were playing ballads with antiquated instruments to a large crowd. The music filled the church, the voices and strings intermingling with clarity and feeling in that space. I had no idea what they were singing, but it was transfixing—and Ambrosio allowed himself to be transfixed by it. He stood for a long time in thought, then, when the concert ended, gestured for me to follow. He lumbered down a side aisle to two stones by the altar, etched with a name, Fernán González, the eighth-century count who ruled Castile, and that of his wife, Sancha.

  Ambrosio knelt by the stones and ran his hand over
them. “These are my ghosts,” he said. “The ghosts who made me. These are my ancestors. And this is one of my holy spots, where I feel most alive.”

  In the waning days we made our farewells, with last dinners and visits. Fernando the Mute shimmered beneath his tree across from the church; Clemente still ambushed us with advice; the sheep floated up through town, then out to the barcos. There was a legendary afternoon when Leo and I were led down into a series of half-collapsed bodegas—was it a test of our mettle or a friendly gesture?—led there by loquacious Carlos the farmer and his small son Alvaro. It didn’t seem like a great idea, but we scrambled down into the earth, rump-sliding into the breach behind Carlos, slipping on scree and loose dirt until we were emboweled in guana-filled caverns, convinced that one sneeze would bring it all down on our heads, or that a wolf might come charging. Leo suddenly burst into tears, unloosing an orphan wail, and Carlos, who held a small candle as he led us deeper into complete claustrophobia, brushed his dirty hand over my boy’s head in reassurance, an act that startled Leo out of his fear while we plunged deeper.

  Carlos was an intriguing figure, hyperindustrious, intelligent, and one of the hardest-working farmers in the village. He was an innovator, too, the only one at that time who had turned to organic farming, as much because he believed in its environmental benefits as because he realized there was a ripe global market, and profit, in it. I was often met by Carlos’s smiling face, up at his barn, as I returned from an early-morning run. He would begin telling stories even before I’d slowed to a stop, and with my poor Spanish I strained for meaning while using my refined method of serious head nods and the repetition of the word vale—a Spanish version of okay—to convey understanding.