One of his most famous paintings, entitled The Family of Charles IV, depicts the royal couple, inflated by arrogance, striking a weak-chinned, toadlike pose with their brood. From our vantage, it seems an almost merciless rendering, the frog who became king without first having transformed into the handsome prince. The nineteenth-century French writer Théophile Gautier saw in Goya’s handiwork a royal couple who could be “the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery.” And yet as Goya’s biographer Robert Hughes points out, the king was lucky to have Goya’s talents—for perhaps Charles was even uglier in real life—and asks, “Did ever so dim a monarch deserve such virtuoso treatment?” He describes the painting as “a free, spotted, impasted crust of pigment that keeps breaking into light,” and “an exciting defense of kingship.”
It is indeed stunning, on many contradictory levels, but what always draws my eye is that figure in the shadows at the back of the room: Goya, paying homage to Velázquez’s Las Meninas by painting himself into the scene at his easel, grinning as if to say, I alone consign these people to history.
When I imagine the deaf painter in that farmhouse at the edge of Madrid, that’s who I see: the storyteller who’s lived a teeming double life, remunerated for trying to glorify a drab king in his portraits even as he takes to the streets and fields with his sketchbook to paint the king’s subjects. One moment he’s worrying over the fabrics and dispositions of his royal subjects, the next he’s drawing the lowly and defenseless (children and women in rags, the insane), as well as the repugnant (murderers, pederasts, and rapists, in full pillage). He paints massacres in war, and on one canvas of a mother and child on the verge of falling prey to a vengeful mob, he scrawls the words “I saw it,” placing himself at the scene of the crime as a documentarian.
I picture the dabbed paint on the walls of the farmhouse that will make twelve images known as the Black Paintings. In one, two boys flail at each other with cudgels, lumped up to their knees in Iberian earth, as if sprung from it like stalks, doomed to bash each other to bone and viscera. In another, Saturn, huge and monstrous, gray haired and bone colored, appears possessed by a carnality so overpowering that he seems shocked to find himself gnawing on his son’s headless cadaver. Here are witches in icy blues, the devil in dark shadow, the Fates in dun-colored ugliness. And then the head of a helpless, wide-eyed dog, just above what appears to be rising water. Here near the end, Goya paints the most terrible reflection of his home country, and the most truthful. The deaf man, who usually signs his paintings with his name, leaves these allegories blank.
Soon, after a quarrel with the king, Francisco Goya flees to France for his safety, leaving everything behind, including the Black Paintings. Whatever his disenchantments, he paints on. In one of his last works, that of a milkmaid reflecting youth and beauty, he eschews his brush altogether, using only his fingers, his palette knife, and rags. Before his death at the age of eighty-two, before his body is transported back to Spain and interred in a chapel a short distance from the monsters on the walls of the stone house, he pens a letter to a friend. “Pardon me infinitely for this bad handwriting,” he scrawls. “I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything—all I’ve got left is will.”
Is that what drives him, then? The will to express truths he’s already found, or has left to find? Does the younger man, ecstatic to be painting at court, worrying over the gold silks and orange velvets of his king, have an inkling, even then, that he will come to see his king as flawed? And if the king is flawed, why did he paint him so beautifully in the first place?
WHEN I HAD FIRST broached to Ambrosio the idea of my book—a book about him and his cheese—he seemed to take it all in, nodding with understanding, and said that he would do whatever he could for me. I’m sure something in the project appealed to his grandiosity, as it might for all of us. He appreciated the idea of being memorialized, but also perhaps of finding a bigger megaphone for what mattered most to him: his grandísima filosofía and setting the record straight about the cheese. (Did storyteller’s revenge factor into it, too?) Thereafter, when he found himself making an important observation, or thought I needed the correct spelling, he’d remove the notebook from my hand as if it were half his, and jot down the necessary information.
Thus, the book became known in Guzmán as AMBROSIO’S BOOK, eventually having little to do with its author, who seemed to take forever in writing it, who seemed to be a hindrance, actually. On occasion I’d be asked by some random townsperson: How’s AMBROSIO’S BOOK going? Or: When will we see AMBROSIO’S BOOK? Or: Did AMBROSIO’S BOOK get a lot of attention in America?
It was difficult to explain that AMBROSIO’S BOOK was really a pile of half-finished drafts moldering on my desk in the attic back home. In the year after our return, I sequestered myself and wrote, always concluding at those same end-of-the-summer scenes, shipwrecked in that vineyard after the hailstorm with Ambrosio among the bleeding grape-corpses or sharing his last tin of Páramo de Guzmán, and I couldn’t bring myself to push on. What held me back wasn’t exactly writer’s block, because I kept writing, amending, adding pages.
Perhaps it was some underlying complex: I didn’t want to go any further because I didn’t want to add time to the story, to Ambrosio’s or mine, to life itself. (Add more time and the boy becomes insufferable; the king is made a fool of. Someone calls for everyone’s head.) At dinner with a friend in Manhattan, I laid out the whole problem, and he suggested taking a page from Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession, creating a doppelganger in hopes that this might release the book, that by halving myself, half of myself could stay and half of myself could scout the territory ahead. This made perfect postmodern sense. If not Rothian, I did contain multitudes, didn’t I?
Thus, I embarked on a draft featuring myself and my alter ego, nicknamed Possum, a draft that caromed and cascaded for a couple of hundred pages, and should anyone suggest that the writer’s life is nothing but glory, I’ll never forget a meeting with my editor, who had just returned from Japan, jetlagged and more than slightly irritated by Possum’s impossible megalomania, saying, as she patted the pile of paper that represented months of work, “I think you need to start again.”
And so I did. I wrote the Speed Draft and the Footprint Draft, the Here We Go Draft and Almost There Draft, the I’m In Hell Draft and the Kill Me Now Draft, all of them—again!—breaking off at the finale of our Guzmán summer, with May in my arms and the taste of Ambrosio’s cheese on my tongue.*
What was my problem?
I missed my first deadline, and was given a new one. Don’t freak, I was telling myself. You’re freaking.
I tried to work up my own grandísima filosofía: Time is irrelevant—and writing a book is like building a house that will be a hundred years old (in book years) before anyone is allowed to inhabit it: entire rooms have to be rewallpapered; wings added and torn down; the chimney clogged with ash swept clean, billowing with smoke. The roof needs repair, the windows need cleaning, and when it comes time to put it on the market, you hustle to create the illusion that it has always been perfect, of a piece, that it was born into the world fully formed—or, at the very least, habitable.
My book advance spent, I traveled for magazine stories—Australia, Ukraine, Afghanistan—living on that familiar adrenaline rush of perpetual deadlines. What made matters worse was that I’d stopped talking about the book altogether, stashed it away like the obscure tomes in my backpack, as if they were CIA case files: Gatherings from Spain, Fields of Castile, A Romantic in Spain. When someone asked after this book of mine and I actually admitted I was writing about cheese, the most common response was, “You mean like Who Moved My Cheese?” At first I thought nothing of the analogy, knowing nothing about it, but eventually I visited Wikipedia to find that the book in question was a “business parable” with two mice characters, “Scurry” and “Sniff,” and two miniature humans, “Hem” and “Haw,” who meet at a place called “Cheese Station C” and
gobble cheese until it’s all gone, at which point the mice move on to “Cheese Station N” while the miniature humans begin arguing, and hurling recriminations about how the cheese disappeared at “Cheese Station C.”
After that, when people came around and said, “Like Who Moved My Cheese?, right?” and started guffawing, I would join them (A-HA-HA-HA …) until they stopped (… HA-HA-HA …) and moved away (… HA-HA-HA …) or, with a look of concern, said they were sorry. And I would say, Oh no, this is not a book about the conceptual, perceptual whatnot of businesspeople and how to build an empire thing: I’m writing the epic history of the ingenious Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, visionary cheesemaker, witch doctor of human truths, and storyteller extraordinaire.
And that usually put an end to the conversation. Occasionally someone would exhibit the kind of bewilderment reserved for the platypus tank at the aquarium, and would raise the question that frightened me most: Why?
Why? Because something that started as a lark to a broke grad student—to go to Spain and someday try THE MOST EXPENSIVE CHEESE EVER SOLD!†—turned into nearly two decades of my life, thus conflating said lark with love, loss, birth, and death.
Why? Because I was born into a family, like others, that had once left Europe behind, and so here, I thought, was my chance to regain everything lost by my ancestors, to reclaim the virtues of the abandoned, agrarian past.
Why? Because I could see those of my generation who were increasingly made miserable by their acquired bitterness, and—this will sound terribly naïve—I wanted to go backward and find innocence again.
Why? Because in Guzmán, nothing was ever disingenuous or ironic. In talking to Ambrosio once about the nearby convent named St. Domingo de Silos, one of the places where the Spanish language was first written down, he became animated, describing the spot as “impresionante”—amazing, astonishing, impressive—with signature emphasis on the word, the same emphasis he would have given it were he describing an old well or vineyard or lamb cooked over an open flame. “It has one of the oldest cypress trees in Spain,” he said, “and the church—you can feel the music in your body. The sound becomes your body. It rises to the cupola and crashes back down, a choca de física. That is divinity. That is what real sound should do.”
Why? Because Ambrosio seemed right so much of the time, and he forced his prescription for a better life on me—and I felt honored to receive it.
Why? Because in the end I saw this whole business as a learning moment of some sort—and I was waiting to see how he might resolve the ending.
I said none of this to those people who asked why I’d squandered so many precious American hours writing about a piece of Spanish cheese. In the end we were too busy for the long answer, which required time and concentration, eye contact and the negation of our personal, handheld self-reflectors for more than a minute. No, outwardly I shrugged, while inwardly the answer came in the piles of puzzled words and half starts, the drafts that became my own figurative quest to make cheese, none of the batches tasting quite right, but still, I told myself, in pursuit of something.
DURING THIS EXTENDED PERIOD of drafting and redrafting, hallucination and hard work, we had another child, to make three—towheaded Nicholas, born an exuberant bundle of motion. Now there was no containing anyone or anything. The children grew of their own accord, long unfrozen from the fleeting dream of timelessness in Guzmán. At night while I wrote in the attic, they slept on the floor below, mumbling in sleep, their bones elongating. They lost baby fat, grew complex emotions. Their sleep-talk evolved from the single bleats of “Why?” and “No!” to actual sentences, like one our daughter uttered: “You are not cookie-worthy, sir!”
Now—between her assignments out in the world (India, Portugal, Ghana)—Sara urged me to return to Guzmán, to ask some direct questions, to remind myself that this cheese drama wasn’t all just a figment, that it was real and deserved resolution. “You need to put an end to this,” she said. Drive a stake through it. Kill the bull, estoque to the hilt. For some reason this is what I seemed to dread most, the path that led to the end, to a knock on Julián’s door, like some muckraking journalist. Would it be opened wide or slammed shut? Was he a despicable snake or someone else altogether?
“No more digressions,” she said.
“Everything is a digression in Castile,” I replied, adding a scholarly addendum that Castile itself began as a footnote, a buffer between pages in the master plan of the northern Christian kingdoms against the Muslims.
She thought for a moment. “You’re not Castilian.”
“Well, Ambrosio’s story is,” I protested.
“But this is your story.”
If it was my story, then, what did it mean that I still didn’t have the answers to some incredibly basic questions? For instance: What was the status of the various lawsuits? Or: Why couldn’t Ambrosio go back to making a slightly different cheese without Julián? And what responsibility, if any, did Ambrosio bear in all that had happened to him? Could he really be guilt free?
So I packed my bag, bused to Logan, was lifted over the ocean by airliner, and found myself in Guzmán again, the beautiful village on its witness hill, the familiar sights and smells flooding my senses—the grain and loam, the wine and homemade chorizo. Ambrosio was Ambrosio, all-enveloping in his welcome. I’d resolved to start simply, by asking him for the name and number of his lawyer in Madrid. But even that left me fumbling in the telling room, mouth turning cottony with nervousness. For some reason the question suggested mistrust, that I would now be double-checking him. Asking it felt like its own kind of betrayal.
When I looked at Ambrosio seated there in the crepuscular light, beneath the blue china plate painted with saints, I saw a good man, one of generosity and compassion. I saw someone who’d done something remarkable with his life, furthered the cause of the past by resurrecting his family cheese, by telling stories. And he’d been, in all those pages of writing, the necessary myth I somehow needed to tell myself. Egads, thought I, is this what I’d done with my life, then? Told myself a story?
When I worked up the gumption to finally ask after his lawyer, I did so as casually as I could, but the shift was awkward and palpable, a lurching curve in the road. He seemed to hesitate, looked down at his fingernails, which he made a show of inspecting, then said his name: Pascual Llopis.
“And his number?” I asked.
And this time, when he said it out loud, he didn’t reach for—nor did I offer—my notebook.
I wrote the phone number down in my own hand.
* Was this to be my midlife crisis, then, a book forever stuck at the end of the summer of 2003? If you could order such a thing from a catalogue, mine would have been called “The Miss Havisham,” the world frozen at twenty minutes to nine, wedding cake melting on the table.
† With Páramo de Guzmán at $22 a pound, this claim couldn’t be verified, of course, and it would have to be qualified. Most expensive cheese sold at Zingerman’s up until 1991? Yes, Ari had said as much. Most expensive cheese in Michigan? Maybe. But certainly not the world. As an example of cheeseflation these twenty-odd years later, one of the most expensive cheeses on the market today is a white stilton made with edible gold leaf and gold liqueur that sells for $450 a pound. Allegedly the priciest cheese in the world, however, is a smoked cheese called pule, made from the milk of Balkan donkeys, that costs between $500 and $700 a pound. It was reported in December 2012 that the tennis player Novak Djokovic had purchased the global supply of white, crumbly pule for a chain of restaurants he planned to open.
18
BEGINNING OF THE END
“He understands nada.”
“AMBROSIO IS A UNIQUE CHARACTER,” SAID HIS LAWYER, PASCUAL Llopis, triangling his fingers into a steeple and pressing them under the tip of his chin, striking a pensive pose. He sat behind a large leather-topped desk in a beige suit and brown-striped tie, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, while I sat on the other side, admiring the pastoral p
aintings on the wall, depictions of a grape harvest, a rabbit hunt, haystacks. He proclaimed that a man like Ambrosio was a bit of an endangered species in the new Spain, “a bohemian, an artist.”
In coming to see Llopis—this was December 2005—I felt something break loose, some winged bird take flight. I’d spent five years vacuum-sealed in Ambrosio’s world, and now I would find that there wasn’t a question Llopis wouldn’t answer, as he led me through the obliterated cheesescape of Ambrosio’s dreams.
Llopis (pronounced yo-PEACE) was maybe sixty, with a kinetic, busy manner. He conveyed a shrewdness ostensibly built on a bedrock of experience and professional success. He admitted that he was very fond of Ambrosio, even protective, and that he’d first heard about the cheesemaker from another client, which seemed to contradict Ambrosio’s version that they’d met through Ambrosio’s father.
The trouble began, Llopis said, after the palacio debacle in 1989, when Ambrosio went looking outside of Guzmán for more space. While Páramo de Guzmán was a darling of caseophiles and the international cheese cognoscenti, while world leaders and celebrities consumed it, and while it was sold in some of the world’s finest stores, it remained an eccentric cheese. It was one of the first sheep’s milk cheeses on the market, and one of the first artisanal Spanish cheeses to find a larger audience. And yet one friend and would-be investor gave Ambrosio this advice: Keep it small. “ ‘This is a niche product,’ ” said Llopis, quoting the friend’s message to Ambrosio. “ ‘Just because it sells well to a predetermined group of people doesn’t mean the whole world’s going to buy it.’ ”
“What he tried to tell him was: everything in moderation,” said Llopis. Meanwhile, Ambrosio had fallen under the spell of two local investors—Pedro Tallos and Teodoro López—who were hungry to expand their portfolios and whose sales pitch, according to Llopis, seemed to match Ambrosio’s vision for his cheese operation. All three were taken with the idea of buying property in Roa in order to build a state-of-the-art factory complex with a large cellar, a tasting room, and land to expand. “Ambrosio began to dream bigger and bigger,” said Llopis, “and it was easier—and in some ways, lazier—to go with the yes-men.”
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 27