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

by Paterniti, Michael

  On the street, I pressed the buzzer, and a woman’s voice said hello.

  “Ta’ lo,” I responded. Then, in English, “Is Julián in?” There was some confusion on her part. “Soy americano,” I said. A few excruciating moments passed, Ambrosio somewhere back through the light and shadow at the café, and then the door buzzed open.

  Upstairs, I was shown in by Julián’s secretary, seated, and abandoned when she disappeared through a door. The office suite had that typical, antiseptic nondescriptness of hushed law offices everywhere, binders and briefs, bound collections of the Law on shelves. There was some muttering through the wall, and then after an interval she returned and said, “Julián will see you now.”

  In retrospect, Julián must have thought I was an opportunity of some sort, and his curiosity must have been piqued. Otherwise, how would I have made it through that door? Perhaps that was one of the pleasures of the job: You never knew what problem or proposition might blow in on the day’s breeze. A real estate deal? A new company needing incorporation? At the very least, it wasn’t often that a foreigner showed up in Aranda. I could count on two fingers the Americans I’d heard about in town (one was a veterinarian; the other ran Aranda’s English-language school); most expats could be found in the warmer, more sybaritic climes of Spain, attending language schools or taking advantage of tax havens like Gibraltar, living on the beach or partying in Seville, where the sangria and good cheer were always flowing and hibiscus and hyacinth filled the air with sweet scent. As it was, in the old days of unforgiving Guzmán, foreigners—meaning anyone not from the village, not just those from abroad—were taken up to the fountain and dropped in the stone basin. They got their asses kicked. And an element of that Castilian wariness persisted. Strangers were sometimes still greeted not with “Who are you?” but “Whose are you?” As in: To which family do you belong?

  Julián was a tall man with a full head of hair and firm handshake. His handsomeness was disarming, for even in that symmetrical face with its square jaw, small, tilted ears, and shy brown eyes, there was a boyishness that came through, someone capable of friendship and enjoyment. He was neatly dressed, in white collar and red tie, dark slacks, a verdant blazer. The office was a large room with a window full of sky. His black lawyer robes hung in the corner. A colorful poster commemorating Old Havana hung on the wall behind his desk. He held a piece of paper in his hand and at first affected a sort of distraction, as if still drawn to whatever was on the page.

  I apologized for arriving unannounced and thanked him for his time. He was, as Pascual Llopis had said, impressive, commanding. And he was curious now, gazing intently at me as he sat in a green swivel chair. I realized almost instantly that my anger toward him was really just Ambrosio’s anger, that I harbored this tumor of hate on his behalf, and yet not knowing Julián but face-to-face with him now, I bore him no ill will. How could I? He was just a lawyer in a tie. Besides, Llopis’s words played again in my mind—He was tricked, too—and a sort of pity anesthetized me.

  “What brings you in?” he said, smiling.

  I told Julián I was visiting the region for a book project. “It’s set in Guzmán,” I said, and then I added that I’d become good friends with Ambrosio Molinos, and at those words Julián seemed to recede. Literally seemed to roll back in his chair. Or had I imagined it? His smile reflected a cocked curiosity, but his fingers didn’t grab for his throat and no strange sounds came out, no whimper for mercy. Did he think I’d come to kill him? If so, he never reached for his supposed gun, either.

  “I’m writing a book,” I said, “about Páramo de Guzmán. Of course, there are many stories about this cheese, and I thought I’d better come and hear yours.”

  “Yes,” he said, gathering himself. He stood up, removed his jacket, draping it over the chair. He seemed quite thin, and I noticed a blotch of dry skin, eczema or something, on the side of his face, the back of his hand. “Yes, Ambrosio is an old friend. Or was. There’s been a misunderstanding. Are you—do you speak with him often?”

  I assumed he was trying to gauge the depth of my friendship with Ambrosio, but here my cynicism was met again with surprise. “We were best friends,” he said. His hand tremored almost imperceptibly. “And I’ve been hoping to have a conversation with him for years.” He asked me if I’d be seeing Ambrosio soon.

  I looked toward the window, knowing that down below sat the man himself at Bar Pepe, that we could have easily gone down and had that conversation right here and now, if Ambrosio wouldn’t tear him limb from limb first.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll be seeing him tonight.”

  “Would you convey a message, then?” he asked. His voice was soft, polite, cordial, but almost pleading underneath. “Anytime he has time, I’d love to meet—at his bodega, in the telling room, in a bar—to try to mend our friendship.” He reiterated that there’d been a mix-up in the past, a confusion, and that it was time to set it right.

  As for his side of the story, Julián said it would have to wait. He gestured to the piles on his desk. “There are pressing matters that need attending to today,” he said. And with this, his air became a hint more officious. Underneath this initial exchange, I detected something else at play: He wanted me out of his office so he could regain his footing.

  “But I’m not at all averse to meeting and talking to you,” he said, adding that he’d welcome the opportunity. No, this week was bad—but later, yes, absolutely. Could I meet him in Madrid, in a month’s time? He was there often, in court. There was a bar he liked. He consulted a calendar: 5:00 P.M. on a Tuesday?

  I said I’d be there, affecting nonchalance, making the unspoken point, I thought, that I cared only tangentially about his version of events, that he should be worried not for any physical threat I posed (zero), but for those “myths of observation” that I might carry away from this place to employ in the making of my own story. That his would have to be the mother of all closing arguments.

  But there was suddenly something more. In the coliseum of the adversary who didn’t seem much like an adversary, this was no longer about Ambrosio, or Julián for that matter, about versions of events that had transpired fifteen or twenty years earlier. This, I now realized, was about me, my version, wasn’t it—and why I’d thrown over everything for it. No, this wasn’t Ambrosio’s book after all. It was mine. And I was gathering my breath to say something. But what?

  “I’d like to hear your side,” I said.

  He came around his desk and we shook hands. “Vale,” he said. He averted his eyes briefly, his vulnerability making him sheepish again. Then he scratched the dry patch at the side of his face.

  ACROSS THE STREET, BENEATH the plantano trees in the square, and then through the glass door of the café, sat Ambrosio, smoking, drumming fingers on the red tabletop. I wondered as I walked whether Julián’s eyes were now on my back, gazing down from above. These oscillations between poles left me feeling like Boutros Boutros-Ghali trying to solve some intractable diplomatic crisis. About cheese.

  How had this happened?

  “Hombre,” Ambrosio said. “Sit down. Una caña?” We’d been apart for twenty minutes, max. He ordered me a beer. “Dime,” he said. Tell me.

  What was there to tell? “He misses your friendship,” I said. “He wants to meet, at your bodega, whenever you say the word.”

  Ambrosio fell back in his seat, ran a hand over his whiskers. “Did you ask about the cheese?”

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re going to meet again to go over all of that. But the main thing is that he’d like to talk with you.”

  Ambrosio descended into thought for a moment. Gazing upon his face, I noticed something. It looked as if he’d been crying again, or, at the least, as if his eyes had been irritated by emotion. Was I imagining this, too? I didn’t think so. Somewhere out there, the church bells sounded, seeming to ring for Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras. And now this—an old friend reaching from the past. For a moment he reached back, to that protected, idealiz
ed place of their early friendship.

  I’d once seen faded pictures in a photo album at Ambrosio’s house, and in frame after frame, Ambrosio and Julián appeared as they were in those years, best friends. They were seated against a wall mugging for the camera, maybe twenty at the time, Ambrosio tall and thin, in a work shirt and black beret, hunched and making a silly demonic face, while Julián sat upright, in a heavy wool jacket, holding his beret as if it were a steering wheel, that head of thick, curly hair, the two more identical than Ambrosio and his own brother Angel, who sits to his left, short by comparison, less instigator than neutral musketeer.

  In another from that era, the camera captures the people closest to Ambrosio. Taken in someone’s telling room, Ambrosio’s mother, Puri, appears to the left in profile, abstemious, nibbling on bread, ever regal with a thick swirl of dark hair, wearing earrings and a bracelet. Then comes Asun, Ambrosio’s wife-to-be, a kid with long black hair, holding a cigarette between tapered fingers, looking fresh-faced and coltish. Next is Ambrosio, his wavy hair worn over his ears, that imperial profile, the strong nose and the heavy brow. A Herculean mass, he sits with one hand in his lap and the other casually holding a cigarette. To his left is, of course, Julián, affecting nearly the same pose as Ambrosio, elbows on knees, one hand holding a half-eaten apple—even the point of his collar is the same as Ambrosio’s, as if each acts as a reflection of the other. And finally, there’s Angel again, in too-tight white shirt and blazer, porrón set before him as he looks somewhat lugubriously at a pot apparently empty of its stew. What’s noteworthy is how they listen—especially Ambrosio, who seems more intent than the rest—to someone just out of the frame, and here I imagine Ambrosio’s father stage right, telling a story.

  A last photograph, my favorite, features the familiar three—Angel, Ambrosio, and Julián, plus a friend, Pepe—all four in a man-hug on the streets of a fiesta somewhere, clad in white shirts and black berets. In a strange way, however, this feels like a photograph meant only for Ambrosio and Julián, with the other two added as an afterthought on the left of the frame. In fact, Pepe is caught sidelong, gazing adoringly as the best friends look directly into the camera, big and unafraid, at the height of their physical powers. Ambrosio wears an unruly, Fidel Castro beard, his white shirt unbuttoned to just above his belly button, revealing a spray of chest hair, while Julián, clean shaven, with his lantern jaw and good looks, has his shirt unbuttoned half the distance but with a thicker mat of chest hair and what appears to be an expensive watch on his wrist. Ambrosio’s arm is draped lazily over Julián’s shoulder, his paw of a left hand hanging there, and Julián’s left hand, clutching what seems to be a cigar, reaches up to it. Whether he’s about to grasp it or already holds it isn’t clear, but what’s most arresting isn’t their physical comfort with each other, which is very Spanish, but rather the way the two possess the world together, how they form a locus, or sun—one hydrogen, the other helium, locked in their magnetic sphere—that seems to propel other planets around.

  In the café now, Ambrosio was talking about those old times once more. “I loved him like a brother,” he said. Family: It was hard to imagine it had come to this. Then a tear sploshed on the tabletop—and another. Ambrosio wanted to know: What had he said again? I told him: Anyplace, anytime. What does he want? To make it right, I said—to mend this rift, to stitch back the lost eras until everything becomes whole again.

  Ambrosio pondered. He looked beyond me out the café window, across the street to the front door of Julián’s office building, doing some internal calculation. His face reflected a deeper spasm of pain. Then he let out a sigh.

  “¡Venga!” he said, clasping my shoulder, “let’s go home.”

  20

  MON VIRGO

  “Before my gentlemanly giblets could take on the pallor of hoarfrost …”

  OF COURSE, I WASN’T THE FIRST. THERE’D BEEN A DUTCH GUY who’d come to Guzmán for a number of months—but no one ever quite figured out why. They thought he might have been studying agriculture—writing a dissertation?—yet he never asked any questions. Then disappeared. There were the Basque brothers who came, settled, and were still here. And there’d been some other guy everyone remembered from the eighties, a cultured, city personage, a Spaniard who’d renounced his privileged life and declared himself a shepherd. He bought six sheep and gave them full human names. “People shit themselves laughing,” Honorato’s daughter, María, told me one day. “I remember taking in the laundry and I could hear him over the wall, talking to the sheep: ‘Hey, Little Fred, get your nose out of the tomatoes.’ ”

  People said that his transformation had been a capricious stunt, but María disagreed. “He was very poetic, and very nice to the children,” she said. “He was having an experience. Until winter came, and he realized the house had no heat. So he left.”

  I remember having had a good, unself-conscious laugh with María about Little Fred. God—what a goof! I saw no connection whatsoever between me and this man who talked to sheep, whose innocent belief had led him to seek a simpler way of life even if it had also led him astray. My blindness to this seems all the more absurd in retrospect, given what I had up my sleeve. I’d harbored a secret idea, a self-initiation, that I knew must be performed to enter that exalted circle of Old Castilians.

  And so I waited—and waited.

  And then my body said it was time.

  I’d just left Ambrosio in Abel’s barn, where the two were working on a new invention, a tractor attachment of some sort. Ambrosio had sketched it on a bar napkin, and now they were sawing, soldering, and hammering huge pieces of metal. Outside, the day was cold and gray, wind scraping bits of earth. I drove east out of the village, past the bar, hairpinning below all the hillside bodegas with their telling rooms—smoke from a single chimney the only sign of life. The coterro settled below, traces of snow blown beneath the bare grapevines, like bone-colored shadows.

  Driving on days like this, I was hollowed by the seeming nothingness of the place, by the wordless silence and grandeur of that nothingness. I was carried over that limestone-strewn pitch back to a world that predated language. In that season, there was an isolation one might have felt on the lava flats of interior Iceland or the empty veldts of southern Sudan. That feeling of utter windswept aloneness. But never had I felt more resolved.

  As I traveled deeper into the fields, the nothingness filled with silhouettes and signs of life. There was an improbable owl perched on a rock pile, the same dark color as the stones, with the same dapples of white. Rabbits bolted from the scrub brush and retreated back again. There were ruins, too: an old shepherd station, called a choza, half collapsed, and the piled majanos marking out the field boundaries. The dirt tracks on either side of the road split into more tracks, veining to more piles of stones and fallow fields. This was a landscape constantly touched not only by human hands, but by happenings. Had the earth a voice, the murmur rising from it now to tell all the stories would have been deafening.

  I drove past the field that had once held all those bright sunflowers from that summer long ago. Now, ragged stalks stood in their place—wrinkled and brown, tattered paupers in sad rags—and I drove on to the town of Quintanamanvirgo, past the bar there, which was shuttered and closed, down past the frontón, where there was a dirt turnoff. The car accelerated over a rocky track that slowly began to climb. With one more sharp right, the road canted to a steep incline. The tires spun to find purchase, and I was shot out onto the mesa, up over the world, into space.

  Up here, the wind was something fierce, an exhalation of anger. I got out of the car, sucking in the cold, and walked the circumference of Mon Virgo, hands stuffed in my pockets, tottering against the icy gusts like a penguin. You could see it all from this vantage, the towns and villages of this world, including La Aguilera, where Ambrosio’s mother had been born. I remembered Ambrosio’s stories of arriving here in the dark of night, in the time after losing the cheese, playing Lear on his heath, swearing an oat
h of revenge on Julián. Mon Virgo was the kind of platform that invited the dramatic, a long fall of land dropping away, rocks piling to make a treacherous downward staircase. Out to the west, Guzmán was a pile of limestone on a hill, and the other villages, down on the flats, seemed like fragments of the same broken rock. No cars or bodies moved below.

  I’D BEEN WAITING FOR this—the perfect confluence of bowel readiness and free time—since first meeting Ambrosio years earlier, to prove that I could be as Castilian as the next Mr.-Take-a-Shit-on-a-Mesa. In this moment, Ambrosio had said, it’s as if you’re seeing God. The wind was a battering ram, and there was no scent of the highland herbs, just the mineral smell of winter. I looked around, but everything was open and exposed. Where were you supposed to do your business up here anyway?

  My chosen spot was slightly protected, down off the lip of Mon Virgo. I’d done some backcountry camping, but this was rock and hard ground—steep, too—and it didn’t even occur to me to try to dig a hole. I glanced behind to make sure a shepherd wasn’t creeping up on me, and then I just crouched and fumbled with my belt. Almost immediately, it was all wrong: My fingers were numb from the cold, and as I tried to lever my pants off my hips, I began sliding down the hill, picking up speed, until I self-arrested. ¡Puta madre! I re-set myself and resumed pulling my pants down. With my jeans now bunched at my ankles, I hunkered into a crouching position … and began sliding again, a ski jumper accelerating down a track, unpeeled from the waist down.