“Ambrosio’s aware that I’m talking to you,” I said, “so in a way I’m a bit of a messenger, even though as a journalist I want to make sure you get to answer these charges.”
Julián nodded. His phone was squawking. He took out a roll of bills, left a few on the table, reached for his briefcase, and stood. The Cuban, startled from his reverie, struggled to his feet. Julián extended a hand across the table. We shook, firmly, as if we’d made some sort of agreement.
“Remember,” he said, “I’ll be there tomorrow if he says yes.”
22
ALL SHALL BE RESTORED
“… his blood flowed from the same river.”
WHERE ONCE I’D COME OFF THE OVERNIGHT PLANE FROM the States bleary but on a speed-walk to the rental car desk, and after procuring my coche I’d gun that minicar and merge onto A-1 headed north, driving full of expectation, trying to skip minutes forward into my campo paradise, my double life, to get to Ambrosio’s house with its abandoned pool next to the Duero River, to visit the fields and village bars with him, chugging Cokes to stay awake (so as not to miss anything)—now I devised what excuse I could to loiter a little, to steal a night or two in Madrid, walking the barrios (La Latina, Lavapies, Huertas), visiting new friends in the city (including Ambrosio’s brother Roberto and his wife, Mika), inevitably ending up at the Prado to see the Goyas. On one trip, I went to the museum no fewer than four times, muttering at the canvases.
It’d become a rite of sorts: I’d visit The Family of King Carlos IV, my eye drawn past the toadlike king and his brood to Goya in the shadows, painting at his canvas. Then I would stroll around the corner to stand in awe before his Black Paintings, before The Colossus showing Saturn in full devour, and the drowning dog, and the two boys in Duel with Cudgels. I’d stand there and wonder: What caused those two boys to turn against each other with such fury—the cudgel cocked and ready to slice the air with whistling indignation toward the skull—for they seem nearly the same in body, dress, and disposition, just like mirror-imaged brothers, shoulders turned toward each other? What result could possibly favor either?
I saw Ambrosio and Julián in that painting, of course—and the intractable human condition, the seed of all civil war. But did that really warrant all the time I spent standing before it? What was up with me standing in this spot, like Fernando in the shade of the tree across from the church in Guzmán?
Afloat before the Black Paintings, I was reminded of an alternative legend about the paintings brought forward in recent years by a Spanish historian, Juan José Junquera, best known for his writing on eighteenth-century furnishings. When he was commissioned to write a book about the Black Paintings, he combed the archives in Madrid, stumbling on a trove of documents about Goya’s farmhouse, Quinta del Sordo. In Goya lore, it was believed that the Black Paintings were completed sometime between 1820 and 1823, and covered the walls of the first and second floors of the house. But Junquera was astonished to find one salient, undermining fact: At Goya’s death, in 1828, there was no second floor. That came later. “If the upper floor does not exist in Goya’s time, then of course [the Black Paintings aren’t] by Goya,” Junquera was quoted as saying in a 2003 article that laid out the entire imbroglio.
The drowning dog and the boys with their cudgels, among others, were allegedly found on the missing second floor: So how did they come to be? It was a mystery, according to Junquero, but to his mind, the myth of the painter lost in some spirit world, desperately trying to keep pace with the images haunting him, was flawed by fact. None of Goya’s intimates ever claimed to have seen the paintings, and those who wrote about the house described its walls covered with artwork but of a more rustic nature, scenes from country life, friends. It doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? Goya at the end, in a frenzy, painting … picnics and stuff.
The writer of the article, Arthur Lubow, claims that our ability to judge the authenticity of the Black Paintings is also partially clouded by this “biographical mystique.” “In addition to bearing a great-artist sticker, the Black Paintings come with a narrative of the most compelling sort,” he writes. “Like van Gogh’s crow-haunted fields and Pollock’s twisted skeins of paint, Goya’s Black Paintings are popularly believed to be the outflow of a tormented great soul. A reattribution would strip away their pained sincerity along with their authenticity.”
There are also indications that the Black Paintings don’t entirely belong to Goya: the crude, clawlike hands, the heavier use of black, the fact that X-rays reveal other images beneath. Every canvas contains its own story—and mystery. Adding to the confusion are photographs taken at Quinta del Sordo in the 1860s that show some of the paintings in a form very different from what would eventually appear on the canvases at the Prado.
Junquera’s theory, however shaky, is that Goya’s only son, Javier, may have been the auteur, painting them for pleasure, and when he passed away and his son, the profligate Mariano Goya, thought to sell the property, he saw a greater financial upside in calling the paintings his grandfather’s rather than his father’s.
You can imagine the cacophony raised in opposition to this theory, but does it make it less valid? And if not Javier, then couldn’t one honestly say that the curator and painter Salvador Martínez Cubells, who took the images from the walls of the Quinta, restored them, and then transferred the Black Paintings to canvas—perhaps for the worse—deserves a credit, too?*
No, we’re enthralled by the story, the biographical mystique. Even when Lubow visits with Manuela Mena, the Prado’s head curator of eighteenth-century art, she claims The Dog is one of the most revered paintings of our time and tells the story of Joan Miró’s last visit to the Prado. He wanted to see two paintings: Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s dog. And so go the last lines of Lubow’s article: “ ‘For [Miró], The Dog and Las Meninas were of the same level intensity,’ ” Mena said. She looked at me challengingly. ‘We cannot send The Dog to the museum basement because it was on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta.’ ”
So was that to say that mystique won out over the truth every time? All the best stories and strangest dreams metaphorically seemed to exist on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta, didn’t they? In the end, it wasn’t so much that there was an alternative narrative—there always was—but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps most to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?
I WAS TELLING MYSELF a story, too. So who was I kidding? This whole business had long ceased to be journalism. It was mythicalism, the making of and suspension in something mythical. This was encouragism, the telling of a story to remind yourself of your higher angels. Before it became discouragism. Or discombobulism. Before it became implicationism and possessionism.
After meeting with Julián, I’d needed to process. And yet in the space of twenty minutes, Ambrosio had called my phone repeatedly: five, six, seven times. Why? More than anything, I felt as if I’d been had. Or I’d let myself be had. Or that I needed to think about whether or not I’d been had, and by whom.
Eventually I returned the call and said that the meeting had gone well, that there were contradictions of course, and that we’d cover it all when we returned to Guzmán in a couple of months. I had a plane out the next morning, to Portugal for a story. I was glad for the space. And soon I was back home, sitting in my attic office, watching the squirrels as they ran on their power-line highway to nowhere and back, as I turned it all over in my mind. 311 pages now, and here’s what I knew:
1) Julián the puta didn’t seem like a puta at all.
2) Ambrosio the heroic suddenly seemed grasping and flawed, like an actual human being.
3) I’d somehow entered the drama as the Negotiator.
So wasn’t it finally time to force the issue? What if I could find a way to mend their friendship? We might repaint Goya’s Duel with Cudgels (for if one were to erase the cudgels, the two
men appeared on the verge of falling into exhausted embrace), or unbury the dead in their mass graves. Yes, this was all about cheese. And now by resolving it, we could begin on the road to world peace.
This was my muddled thinking when I returned to Spain about eight weeks later and found myself killing time in Madrid, visiting the Goyas again. But then I had a nervous feeling in my gut. I’d always been the tide to Ambrosio’s moon. He moved me as he pleased, and it had never been the other way around.
I went north to find him in the family room of his house, a fire in the fireplace. He wore a sweater vest, and boomed hello, that wonderful way he had of saying my name—MY-KULL!—as if discovering it for the first time. We embraced. I stepped back, and looked upon him with the fire lighting his face. The mournful eyes, the mirthful mouth. How many years had it been since we’d first met? Almost ten? He was aging before my eyes—and I before his. And how I loved him—and depended on him to say the right thing now.
He motioned for me to sit. There was the usual rundown: my kids, his family, Sara and Asun; the latest news in town, the first plantings and vineyard prep, and so on. And then there was silence, a highly unusual thing in Ambrosio’s presence. He was rocking in his chair. He looked askance at me, then at the fire. Had he ever waited for something I had to say?
“I want to tell you about my meeting with Julián,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “tell me.” He dragged a forefinger over his lower lip.
“He had a lot to say,” I said. “And some of it sounds different from your version.” I could hear a little quaver in my voice. Crap. This wasn’t the Negotiator; this was the guilty ex–altar boy. I felt as if I’d jumped sides, right before his eyes. Speaking of Julián with such intimacy had the odd effect of putting Ambrosio on the defensive, something that seemed impossible. “The most important thing,” I said, “is that he’d still like to meet with you if you were willing to meet.”
Ambrosio went to speak, but I raised a halting hand. I’d thought through a short speech, and I intended to deliver it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about El Cid—” I said, and then I regurgitated his story, unraveling it slowly, describing El Cid’s loyalty for his friend the king Sancho, detailing how Sancho’s brother, Alfonso, and sister, Urraca, conspired to have Sancho killed, and after they did, how Alfonso took the throne, and how then, after some other nonsense, El Cid, the most loyal Castilian, was banished from Castile. “When El Cid was turned out by King Alfonso, he marched south,” I said, “and for every town he sacked, he sent the spoils back to his betrayer, the new king, all in hopes of seeing his homeland again.” Was I being presumptuous? Annoying? Was I striking a chord? “This is also the legend of what it means to be Castilian,” I said.
Ambrosio sat and listened. He considered deeply. The Cid alone was capable of this saintly sort of majesty. The rivers of Castile pulsed through his veins, the mountains and Meseta made him mighty and unshakable. Deprivation had made him all-powerful. He marshaled the wind, the hail, and lightning—and unleashed it on the world. He turned his betrayal into a righteous force for good.
Surely Ambrosio could understand such a tale, for his blood flowed from the same river. He saw El Cid as kinsman and life source. He saw him riding alongside his car, on his horse, Babieca, wielding Tizona, his sword, as we drove home from Haza on a stormy night. He spoke to El Cid when he saw his face in the clouds. To appeal to Ambrosio through the legend of El Cid seemed in some ways foolproof, for it gave Ambrosio the ultimate chance to save face: Be the legend. “As much as the story of El Cid is about courage and strength,” I said, “it’s about striving for a certain kind of forgiveness, too.”
Ambrosio rubbed his lower lip, averted his eyes to the fire. “Julián wants to meet,” I said. “He’d like for you two to put the cheese behind you, as you told me you’d also like to.”
I remembered the last time I’d seen Ambrosio, in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, when the world seemed cracked open, when—perhaps struck by a thunderclap that he was next in line, that death was hurtling toward him, too—he’d laid himself bare, weeping openly in the bar across from Julián’s office. But now as I spoke I couldn’t read him, and when I came to the end of what I had to say, his mouth fastened in a hard line.
I waited, entertaining one last image of vanishing cudgels, two men embracing. Then Ambrosio issued his final decision.
“No,” he said. “It’s not possible to forgive that fucking puta.”
IN FEBRUARY 2008 I received an e-mail from Angel, telling me that he and Ambrosio would be coming to New York for a few days. “We will have plenty of time to meet, in fact we have almost nothing to do, only look around,” he wrote. The reason for the trip had to do with Angel’s desire to invest in Manhattan real estate. He’d sold a finca he owned in Patagonia for $2.5 million and was looking to reinvest the money, given the favorable exchange rate and the burst U.S. housing bubble.
One evening, while Angel went off to see a few apartments, we—my buddy Carlos, Ambrosio, and I—met for dinner at a steakhouse, Keens, on West Thirty-sixth Street. We sat beneath a collection of clay churchwarden pipes hung from the ceiling, surrounded by ephemera—paintings, photographs, notices—on the walls. In Spain, I’d always been at Ambrosio’s mercy, in restaurants and bars, on the road or street, navigating a language I couldn’t completely grasp, but here, when he sat down in the dark-wood booth and opened the menu, Ambrosio seemed utterly lost and out of sorts.
Carlos translated for him, running through certain features of the menu: appetizers, sides, main dishes. Ambrosio ordered an aged, prime T-bone and nothing else but beer, because he appeared confused by the concept of “sides.” He fiddled with his stylized steak knife as if he didn’t know how to work it, as if fascinated by this fancified tool meant to slice his well-marbled piece of meat. I remembered a meal at his bodega, at the end of the summer we lived in Guzmán, to which we’d invited the whole Molinos clan as thanks, as if inviting them to their own telling room was an invitation at all. Knowing that ternera was normally a can’t-miss, Sara and I relied on a memorized recipe from an old Bon Appétit, one we often trotted out for our mignon-loving friends back home, that included a delicious, buttery sauce with roasted peppers. The result could be sublime, the chargrilled meat achieving succulence, the sweetness of the peppers, the butter of the sauce carrying it forward across the tongue in sumptuous sparks. On that special night of thanks at the bodega, when we were pretty sure many Castilian minds were about to be blown, everyone seemed to be scraping that amazing sauce off their meat, or if not, swallowing less than enthusiastically. Only much later, when I asked him about it, did Ambrosio admit, as politely as possible, that Castilians didn’t like “their meat hidden.”
At Keens, however, that was not the problem. The problem was that the spell was broken. In Manhattan Ambrosio didn’t seem to have the energy to talk about Guzmán, for it didn’t seem pertinent or resonant here, dwarfed and bewildered as he was by the city and its upside-down stalactites. He ate with gusto, of course, voracious with his appetite and appreciation, but in the end found it hard to say much of anything.
Afterward we wandered up toward Times Square, to the hotel where he and Angel were staying. We paused, beneath a five-story, lighted billboard showing M&M’s as characters of many colors and expressions, doing cartwheels because it was somehow important for the Mars corporation to spend millions to have us believe that M&M’s are alive and incorrigibly spunky. Once a monumental figure, Ambrosio was trying to be heard above the din, but all I kept seeing were yellow, green, and orange orbs doing cartwheels over his head, winking and saucy. In the capital of commerce, in a place where everything moved so quickly, Ambrosio seemed small and demeaned somehow, in need of protection.
We left him there, melting beneath the lights, half expecting he’d turn yellow, green, or orange himself, maybe throw a backflip with the other M&M’s. When I turned to find him one last time, though, he was gone—to his hotel room, to the
airport, eventually to solitary, dying Guzmán again, where he might don his farmer’s mulo once more, and everything that was good and right about the world could reestablish itself under his two feet.
* On the Prado wall next to Duel with Cudgels (here it’s translated as Fight to Death with Clubs) is the following clarification: “X-rays of this work and comparisons with mid-nineteenth-century photographs reveal substantial modifications dating from after it was detached from the wall [at Quinta del Sordo]. Both young men were originally standing in a grassy meadow.” When it comes to The Colossus, the Prado has reattributed the painting to Goya’s friend and follower, Asensio Juliá, whose initials, AJ, appear in the corner of the canvas.
CHAPTER 23
LEGENDS AND CHEESE
“… I could feel the goose bumps rise again.”
SARA COULD HAVE MARRIED A DIFFERENT GUY. SHE HAD A DIFFERENT guy, whom I’ll call Mark. They backpacked across Europe after college and ended up in Madrid, at the Prado, looking at the Titians and El Grecos, Velázquezes and Goyas. Afterward they lounged on the museum lawn, in the heat of a June day, and fell into a philosophical conversation. How it started Sara couldn’t remember—perhaps they were comparing the orderly realism of one artist to the chaotic dreamings of another—but eventually it boiled down to a simple question: What does one plus one equal?
Mark said two. Obviously.
One plus one equals one, Sara said.
Mark was adamant. It was an inviolable truth: One plus one equals two!
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese Page 33