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

by Paterniti, Michael

  One time, as Carlos spoke of the logistics of keeping falcons in his attic, one of his mousing cats was run over in the road by a friend, who slowed his car to a stop while shaking his head, disappointed in himself. Carlos kept on with his story while his friend backed up past the cat, writhing and bleeding in the road, to offer an apology.

  “Nahhh, hombre, no es problema,” Carlos said. His friend insisted on his sorryness, and Carlos leaned on his car, took up some tertiary matter with him that had nothing to do with the cat, and sent him on his way, beaming goodbye. Then he walked back, grabbed a shovel, and picked up another story—this about an unprecedented event, a four-mile road race held one year in Guzmán, the town innovators thinking this might attract some kind of crowd, or at least a human being who could actually run four miles. Regarding himself as the fittest person in Guzmán, Carlos entered the race, but riding in a tractor all day is different from physical activity, and he realized after sprinting the first quarter mile that he’d greatly overestimated his cardiovascular fitness and now found himself on the verge of dying. True to the Spanish character, this fight with death led Carlos to vow that he would finish the race no matter what. In the end, the record would show him finishing in last place among the five runners who had entered, but he still reigned as town champ, given that no one from Guzmán had entered the contest. “Would I do it again?” he mused. “I might.” Then, with the shovel, he buried the cat.

  On another late-summer evening Don Honorato invited us to his bodega, a neatly kept cave halfway up the hill. It was a perfect night, temperate and clear, and Don Honorato, regal with his carefully parted silver hair, told us a bit of his own fascinating story. His mother had disappeared when he was very young (that was the verb he used—desaparecer—but he didn’t specify whether she’d died), and his father was a delivery man who often went to the pine forests in the mountains of Soria in his mule-drawn cart to sell cattle feed, hay, and cereals harvested from the fields near Guzmán. This left behind Honorato, who at the age of six became a seller of spirits—aguardiente, to be specific. He was charged with riding his horse to fill huge jugs with the stuff at a nearby still run by women, who often took pity on him and fed him breakfast. Then he carried on to the fields, sometimes riding ten miles out and ten back, this diminutive child with big ears, selling liquor to the field hands. The teachers at school understood young Honorato’s situation and were lenient as he came and went. But Don Honorato acknowledged that he grew up with a tight ball in his belly and a chip on his shoulder.

  He remembered once visiting a teacher who played cards with the priest. Honorato had committed some youthful transgression, and for his punishment the men made him kneel, arms outstretched with a book in either hand, holding them aloft. Honorato held the books as best he could, body beginning to tremble uncontrollably, and when both men started to giggle, the boy grew furious, rose, and with his right hand threw one book at the priest and with his left threw the other at the teacher, then sprinted away. He would have been in big trouble, probably beaten badly with a stick, as happened in those days, had the men not, as he put it, “shit themselves laughing.”

  As with so many instances in the village, I found myself surprised by this excavated history. Here all summer I’d spoken to Don Honorato daily as he stood watering his lawn in two pairs of pants. I’d thought of him as almost erudite, admired his paternal manner and his considered words of wisdom, especially in regard to keeping grass green beneath the Castilian sun. His fixation was almost comical, and at the same time deeply sentimental, for his wife had loved the lawn. I realized I’d come to depend on him for those pleasant conversations without really knowing the first thing about him. My projection of him—faithful—stood in for everything he might have actually been, or wasn’t at all. The truth was, I didn’t have a clue.

  Now Don Honorato broke into song, conjuring the lyrics of his youth with ease. His voice was tinged with phlegm, but his was a sweet, in-tune tenor. The words filled the twilight:

  Que bonitas niñas que en Guzmán se entierran,

  Pues en esta tierra, es de lo mejor

  las unas son rubias, las otras morenas,

  pero todas bellas, esto es un primor.

  Tanta gracia como tienen las muy lindas cortearreras,

  Se pasean por las cerras en los dias de San Juan.

  Con sus motos de Bracete, con de pars de tambori,

  y con sus bellezas luciran!‡

  It was a song that the men of Guzmán once sang to their women, at fiestas, the bar, the bodega, to celebrate their beauty. Don Honorato said he’d been asked to sing it by friends and acquaintances from Bilbao to Madrid, everywhere really. It brought people back to another time. He couldn’t remember exactly who had written it, but it was indicative of the way small villages self-mythologized, of how they reminded themselves that theirs was the charmed life, that theirs—and ours—right here and now was the magic moment. That was what we’d begun to find out for ourselves, grounding ourselves among the grounded, two feet on this lawn, water glubbing its nourishment.

  AS PART OF OUR goodbye tour I went to see Emilia, the mayor of Guzmán, in her modest home directly across from the palace. Her front door opened onto the road, and the downstairs was dark, with low ceilings, which made it feel burrowlike.

  “Hombre, venga!” she said, motioning me in. Though by now most people might have seen me as Ambrosio’s lapdog—and perhaps rightly so—and though that fact should have meant the poisoning of any relationship between Emilia and me, the truth is that I was fond of the mayor. I’d first encountered her during an early visit to Guzmán, when I’d attended Mass one Sunday. Afterward she’d approached with a big smile, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Would you like to see our bells?” We passed through a door at the back of the church, and spiraled up to the bell tower above. Suspended from open arches were four bells, made of bronze. They’d been crafted by a reputable German bell maker, Emilia said, and were rung only on special occasions: before Mass, to start the fiesta, or when someone died. Back during the war, the bells would sound a warning when bombing sorties flew overhead, and people took shelter in their bodegas and basements.

  Short and busy, with a raspy contralto, Emilia smoked cigarettes automatically, with zeal. She made tea, brought out a plate of pasteles; her fine, feathered pet, a white parakeet, flew through the cramped rooms, eventually perching on my shoulder. Although at this point I could fumble a few questions in Spanish and understand some in return, I clicked on my tape recorder as backup. The parakeet muttered; Emilia lit a cigarette.

  “Que tal, Miguel?” she said. “Has it been a good summer?”

  “Marvelous,” I said. “Magical.” She smiled and repeated “Bien, bien.” Sitting across from her now, I regarded her as one of my majos—if I had majos here.§ And I marveled at how similar she was to Ambrosio in her energy, warmth, and decisiveness. Their alikeness made it easy to understand how they’d been friends, and why they might be enemies. The cause of their rift was, as Ambrosio’s daughter, Asunita, had told me, “forgotten,” but apparently unsolvable now. Had Emilia been behind the flyer campaign that drove Ambrosio from Guzmán? Had Ambrosio started the pernicious gossip that turned public opinion against Emilia’s mayoral doings, running his own shadow administration out of the bar? Who knew? But these were the chiseled narrative lines that their enmity ran on.

  We started with chitchat, how the children were doing, the shortening days and cooler weather, how soon we would be leaving. She asked about my book; I told her it was going well. Very well. And super. I described our field trip to Covarrubias, mentioning that Ambrosio had been our tour guide. If the segue was ham-handed and Columbo-like, I didn’t care.

  “Una pregunta,” I said. “What do you remember about that time when Ambrosio wanted to move his cheesemaking operation into the palacio?”

  “Hombre,” said Emilia, shaking her hand as if she’d just touched something very hot. “It was a long time ago.” It was hard
for her to speak openly about anything, she said. Her job as mayor required impartiality, for she was often called upon to mediate various land disputes, financial issues, or tensions between neighbors. But she admitted that she was tiring of attacks on her character, most of them related to her handling of the recent state-funded renovation of the palacio, which was still in process. If she’d indeed faced off with Ambrosio over possession of the building all those years ago, she’d won. At least temporarily. But it came with a cost. When I told her that I’d heard inferences that she had something to do with the flyer campaign that ran Ambrosio out of town, she looked sad. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

  In the Guzmánian sense of time, Emilia had been an interloper, which made her a target, too. She’d moved here, to her husband’s village, almost thirty years ago, while in her early twenties. Together they had two children, a boy and a girl. They were like any other family here. They went to church. They became embroiled in town life, the town had elected her mayor, and now, after working so hard for her family and community, it seemed Emilia was wrung out, struggling to find herself. “I’ve tried for four years to bring a cultural life to this village,” she said, emitting an exasperated puff. “I have two more years left in my term. It’s lonely being mayor, hombre,” she said.

  I could imagine it, especially for someone with her energy. The day we’d first met, she’d pointed out from our bell-tower perch all the improvements she hoped to bring to the village, from gussying up the trash-ridden playground and cemetery to the introduction of streetlights. But there was hardly money in the budget, and change didn’t strike everybody as a good thing, though it kept coming in small, personal ways: Someone died, someone went to a nursing home. Someone, like the bright young woman Rosa, moved back to care for her dad, Antonio, the Andalusian.

  Rosa was an interesting case study. In her twenties, sweet and funny, she was a good friend of Asunita’s. Once she’d worked at Pinto’s bar and then at a hotel in Roa, where the gossip mill surrounding her and her possible suitors was always grinding. The rumors were so pervasive that she could barely converse with a boy before there were inventions of a torrid affair. This affliction, for that’s what it really was, seemed to place Rosa on the defensive, slowly removing her from some life she might have dreamed for herself, for to have fallen in love, or even let herself go for a night, was to have fulfilled someone else’s pernicious prophecy of her, when quite the opposite was true. She seemed to be sacrificing life to be here, not living it.

  Emilia’s enervation, meanwhile, was the kind that settled into the bones over time. Sameness was Guzmán’s charm and curse: Pinto sat behind the bar, grumpy or happy, ignoring or doing his job. The same farmers came and went from the fields, sometimes in a new shirt or with a haircut, sometimes shaven or hung over. The old men gathered for cards and the old women swept out their houses. The sun rose and set. Opinions ossified, never to change. Spring came, followed by summer, the hail, the gathering cumuli of autumn, the crippling blast of winter wind. People were friendly and remote. Grudges were frozen in blue ice. Was this glory or closed-minded obstinacy?

  Because Guzmán was so strictly bound by the codes and rituals of its past, because someone in that tight circle of eighty people was always naysaying your actions, it seemed inevitable that defeatism would set in—and Emilia’s seemed to reside in the unrealized visions she’d had for Guzmán as a tourist destination. When validation wasn’t forthcoming, when the hordes didn’t arrive (Castile was never ever going to break the grip of Provence or Tuscany) and her efforts at refurbishing the castle were second-guessed, something in her seemed to have broken. And now she echoed what Pelayo had observed.

  “Little villages like this have a way of squelching your dreams,” she said. In that moment, she could have been speaking for both herself and Ambrosio.

  It put me in mind of a story I’d heard about the man who owned our summer rental. He’d retired to Guzmán, his birth village, with his wife. Then he built his dream house, not fancy or perhaps even attractive from the outside, but its virtues were its amazing views, light, and space. When it was finished, they moved in, but his wife was soon diagnosed with cancer and died quickly. In the aftermath, the man—I’ll call him Consuelo—appeared to let himself go, didn’t wash, developed a host of mysterious physical ailments. The village worried for him in his grieving. They felt they would soon lose him, too. But then something amazing happened, something that should happen to all lonely old people: He fell in love.

  The woman was from a town in a different region, but she came to live with him in that house on the hill. And, oh, how they carried on, kissing in public (unheard of!), dancing in the street (escándalo!), and, most shocking of all, sunbathing nude on the rooftop patio. Consuelo would go down to the bar with his pals and share certain intimate details of the boudoir. People were titillated, incensed.

  The shock of the residents—and worse, his children—wasn’t something that concerned Consuelo. Yet he must have been worried for his paramour, for she was the one suddenly branded with a scarlet letter. Guzmán wasn’t a stage set for the scene in a movie where two lovers trip over each other in a trance of self-referential adoration, then make out in a fountain. The priest spoke from the pulpit about modesty, restraint. The woman was shunned. Eventually the lovebirds took wing to her town and were rarely seen in Guzmán again, which was cause for some relief, for had they continued with their liberal ways, who knew how it would have ended?

  “Gossip is the only activity here besides television,” Asunita once told me, “especially in the winter.”

  “You can count on your enemies,” said Emilia now, “but sometimes it’s the one who smiles who keeps you up at night.”

  There she sat, a crucifix on the wall behind her, framed photos all around: the children, a wedding shot, Emilia with her young family at the beach. She looked like a kid, tanned and full of life.

  “Someday,” she said, sighing, poised with a cup of tea in one hand and cigarette in the other, parakeet fluttering in the air behind her head, “I may move somewhere far away from here.” But something in her face in that sallow light made me think that it was almost certain she wouldn’t.

  NEAR THE END of our stay, in the first days of September, Ambrosio invited us up to his bodega for a merienda. Though the invitation came as a matter of course, spoiled as we were by him, he informed us that he was also gathering some friends, which added a hint of uncharacteristic formality. What friends—and for what occasion?

  When Sara and I arrived, towing Leo in his Real Madrid jersey and May in a red dress and hat that described a big triangle below and a smaller one on top (as if she’d arrived directly from some Paris of one-year-old sophisticates), we found a covey of Ambrosio’s best majos, all of them in various aspects of enjoyment and inebriation. There were the bloodshot eyes and crooked-tooth smiles, the togetherness that comes from elbow-to-elbow eating and drinking, from conversation that forms a bridge connecting human landmasses, all of it the trademark of Ambrosio’s telling room. Even before we were halfway up the hill we could hear throaty laughter pouring over the village.

  Inside, the windows were thrown open and a breeze stirred the smoky room. Mon Virgo loomed to the east, and through the casement the roofs seemed lit on fire with their glowing red tejas, or tiles. On the table a minor feast awaited: clay pots covered with foil, plates of chorizo, the porrón and aguardiente going around, bread and olives. We were met by the scent of some sort of consommé—and then Ambrosio, with his great blast of welcome. “AMIIIIIGOS!!” he boomed, drawing out the word, singing it. He pinched May’s cheeks and lifted Leo from the ground, swung him, and placed him down gently again, his feet finding purchase in slow motion, like an astronaut first touching the moon.

  Ambrosio introduced the men at the table, many of whom I’d met during the summer. Ambrosio Senior was there, ears jutting, that smile on his face, working the porrón when conscious, provoking his son to make a familiar joke about
how, after years of avid tippling, after thousands of gallons of wine waterfalling from spout to mouth, his father had notched a groove on his front tooth where the liquid pooled before flowing down his gullet. Don Ambrosio nodded at that and slurred something that everyone laughed at—and then, in the moment’s diversion, snuck another lengthy pull from the porrón.

  We were told that there was stew in one pot, and in another, orejas de las ovejas. OH-RAY-HAS DE LAS O-VAY-HAS. Because the words were so sonically similar, this sounded like “sheep of sheep,” or “ear of ear.” When we asked for clarification, we were told it was deep-fried sheep ears, and that seemed very funny to us, the way Old Castilians might prank unknowing visitors. We assumed appropriately shocked expressions, then moved to the no-but-seriously. Seriously—it was deep-fried sheeps’ ears. And since they’d only been waiting on our arrival to eat, the foil was unpeeled from the pots, plates appeared from a basket, and then the deep-fried collection of ears—two, three dozen in all?—were divvied up and the sweet-smelling glop was ladled. Before her serving even became a possibility, Sara demurred. She said she didn’t eat mutton, then mumbled “Ears, mutton ears.” Meanwhile, outwardly I showed no fear, affected an expression of joy and anticipation. Venga! Dame! I was trying hard to prove I’d passed my summer audition, that I was one of them. I wished I could say something appropriately Ambrosio-like, for instance boom out: Joder, hombres, I shit in the milk, for it’s been three weeks since my last chewy ear. And then slap someone on the back—or something. Ear of sheep, I imagined, was probably going to be like leather tongue of shoe (potentially manageable) … or deep-fried frog (less get-throughable) … and then my mind went blank.

  I was not drunk enough for this, hadn’t had a drop yet, but at the table a place was opened for me, a parting of flesh, and I squeezed between two of the smoke-stained men, where a plate sat with four sheep ears. I smiled broadly, trying to convey assurance. In other travels I’d been occasionally called upon to eat strange food: blood pancakes; rotted, urine-infused shark meat; whale steak. I’d had ants and crickets once in the Burmese jungle, and while not ready for Zingerman’s prime time, they were enjoyably crunchy. There was a whole raft of food I took for granted—foie gras, hot dogs, even eggs—food you couldn’t think too hard about. So what if back home animal ears were used as dog chews? The Old Castilian recognized a delicacy when it was laid out before him.