Authors: Michael Paterniti
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (12 page)
“So I took the contract,” he said, emphatically jabbing the knife back into the table again, “and went straight to Julián’s office and said, ‘Hombre, tell me, what’s the meaning of this?’ ”
Julián, who was seated behind his desk, obviously hadn’t been expecting Ambrosio. “He had this habit, when he was nervous,” said Ambrosio, reaching to his neck to demonstrate. “He would pinch a little skin below his Adam’s apple and make this sound”—Ambrosio cleared his throat, and made a sharp staccato report, like a car engine trying to turn over in cold weather:
huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh
. Clear and cough.
And when Ambrosio confronted his best friend with the contract bearing his signature, that’s just the sound he remembered gasping from Julián’s mouth.
Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh …
“I trusted you.”
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh …”
“Why?”
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh …”
“How could you?”
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh …”
When Julián finally spoke, he denied it all. And yet the documents didn’t lie. And the nervous tic didn’t lie. And Julián’s evasiveness—the strange, fearful look in his eye, his inability to hold Ambrosio’s gaze—didn’t lie. As he looked upon Julián there at his desk, Ambrosio realized that it must be true: Páramo de Guzmán, the family cheese, no longer belonged to his family. He’d been checkmated by greed, by legal mumbo-jumbo, by the backstabbers of this modern world. He wandered out of Julián’s office as if having forgotten why he’d come in the first place, the armpits of his shirt soaked with sweat. In his bones he knew, but he was moving into shock, had the sensation of departing his body and watching from above.
“The pain and loss that I felt wasn’t for the loss of the money,” he said, “but because I was betrayed by my best friend. And I couldn’t admit it to myself.”
Ambrosio lifted the
porrón
, spun the wine in it, and replaced it without drinking. “If you rob a bank and walk out with a million dollars,” he said, “you’ve accomplished something. If you planned it out, and you have the ability and the intellect to achieve your objective, a monument should be built to you. You’re still a robber and it’s wrong, but it has some merit. But if you steal from a child—or cheat your wife—what merit is there in that? The betrayal of a friend? These are sins a thousand times worse.” Here he sighed, then continued. “I always thought that whoever has the
cojones
to work hard would eventually get ahead. But the thief who is spineless, who undoes all that work, that guy will be buried in his own misery and eat shit for the rest of his life.”
Both his resignation and lamentation seemed as complete now, in this moment inside the telling room, as it must have been a decade
earlier. “I went back to the cheese factory,” he said, “and I gathered the cheesemakers and told them what had happened, that I’d been betrayed and was done. I told them that the cheese factory was no longer mine. When I walked out that day, all but one followed me—one whom I’d trained from the beginning, one from Guzmán. He knew the mechanics, and he could go through the motions of making the cheese in my absence.”
When he walked out of that earthly mansion—the warehouse full of packaged cheese, the cellar full of sleeping cheese, the factory full of newborn cheese, there in case his father grew hungry—he entered his own waking nightmare. How would he tell them all, his parents and brothers, his children and theirs someday? For years afterward, he couldn’t taste anything he ate.
“He stole my soul,” Ambrosio said.
*
I would soon find out that digression was a national pastime in Castile, that to get to the crux of any matter you had to listen for hours, weeks, months, years. Not a fan of annotations and footnotes, I realized I had no say in the matter. Every story here was littered with footnotes and asides. And even then, after the storyteller concluded his tale—or, rather, after you’d gathered and assembled the shards of his story from a hundred other digressions—well, you’d go to the bar and have it immediately undermined by someone else’s digressive, heavily annotated account of the same thing.
†
So writes Elizabeth Kolbert in a 2009
New Yorker
review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s pro-vegan
Eating Animals
: “Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as ‘the stunner.’ ”
‡
Time, the ever-fickle berserker, brings the happy ending that it eventually undoes. Add a few more days, months, years to where the dire narrative ends and new forms emerge, beads of light suddenly cling to what was once a darkness. Perhaps the forlorn boy of “Araby” eventually gets the girl; the king, once in prison, returns to seize an empire. The happy ending relies on patience—but not
too
much. Add even more time, and the story curdles: desire momentarily sated, the boy becomes insufferable; the king is made a fool of. Someone calls for everyone’s head. Real life intervenes, and makes its mess of things.
§
Later he would say that the happiest man was the one who did what he loved most regardless of the need or desire for money. He lionized a certain local sculptor, Santiago of Sotillo, whose work was world famous and highly sought after. According to Ambrosio, the sculptor wanted only to sculpt, and so he’d struck a deal with the people of his village. As long as they kept him fed and housed, as long as he could go to his studio and work all day, hammering at stone to make beautiful things, the village could have whatever money his work raised. Meanwhile, each day a different person brought Santiago his meals; every night he had his own roof overhead. What more could he have wanted?
Likewise, Luis, one of Ambrosio’s closest friends, had a workshop in Roa, where in his free time he crafted antique keys patterned after ones he’d dug out of ruins or that had been given to him or were illustrated in picture books. His workshop was lined with the keys he’d made, fine products of craftsmanship that he often gave to friends as gifts. Those exquisite keys—of nickel and brass and gold plate, some jointed or with fantastically ornate handles—opened no doors, for the doors they might have opened were all gone. They were without use—or useless, if looked at only one way. And yet by the light of his kiln, pounding at molten pieces of metal, Luis was that portrait of the fully realized man, in Ambrosio’s opinion, having momentarily escaped the soul-crushing ethos of the modern world where everything that was made had to be consumed, where the symbolic had been replaced at every turn by the disposable commodity.
‖
Guzmán, too, was the jackass penguin, barely clinging to its habitat, which, right from the start made me feel like a zoologist, there to see the living thing one last time before it vanished.
a
Claiming that his goal in writing was “to touch your finger to the ulcer,” Cela was known to be a man of dyspeptic temper, sharp tongue, and strange outbursts. The 1942 book that brought him early fame,
The Family of Pascual Duarte
, was condemned and banned by the Franco regime for its violence, sex, and rough language. (It was first secretly published in a garage in Burgos, but with the passage of time was widely considered to have reignited Spanish literature to the extent that the Nobel committee, upon awarding the prize in 1989, called it the most popular work in Spanish since
Don Quixote
.) A biter of nuns in his childhood and the author of such irreverent books as
Chronicle of the Extraordinary Event of Archidona’s Dick
, Cela appeared on Spanish talk shows later in life, claiming he could suck a liter of water through his anus and offering to demonstrate this on air. A portly basset hound of a man who took a second wife forty years his junior after an acrimonious divorce—in a 1997
Paris Review
interview, he claimed “she fucks me so she can tire herself out a bit”—he was known by some to have abandoned his man-of-the-people persona for a Bentley and expensive suits.
Said Ambrosio of Cela, “My friend Fermin introduced me to him at a restaurant, saying I made a ballsy cheese, and we talked about the cheese, and he recognized the name of the cheese and the tin, and he was more interested in talking to me than the people he’d arrived with. He wanted to show them that he wasn’t interested in them. When Fermin said I was the owner of Páramo de Guzmán, from that point forth he listened to me attentively, which means he reacted like most people do: gauging one’s worth by what one possesses rather than who one is.”
b
In a blog entry on his website, the American writer and town crier for all good Spanish things Gerry Dawes reflected on his first encounter with Ambrosio: “Early on during my travels in the Ribera del Duero, I met Ambrosio Molinos, an aficionado of great regional food, a gourmand of repute, and one of the great artisan cheese makers of Castile.… It was the Pérez Pascuas brothers, the exceptional wine making family of the nearby village of Pedrosa, who introduced me to the stout, jovial Ambrosio, who came over to Pedrosa to eat wild boar with us and brought his guitar and one of his wonderful Burgos cheeses with him. Ambrosio has a quick and easy laugh, an incredible sense of humor, and always seemed to be in good spirits. We soon became fast friends because of a common interest in wine, regional cuisine, and his penchant for scandalous jokes.… Ambrosio loves to eat as much as anyone I have ever met. He relishes the intellectual aspects of gastronomy as well and can talk for hours about the art of eating, then on occasion after dinner, can spend another hilarious hour on the scatological joys of eliminating what he eats. He is a hefty man. One hot summer day, when I stopped by his home in Roa … I encountered Ambrosio shirtless, having a casual lunch with his family. When I kidded him about putting on weight, he clutched a roll of fat at his midsection, and told me, ‘That’s not me, that’s my shirt.’ ”
c
Later he would tell me a story. “I have a little jar in my cave,” he said, “a four-liter jug, the last wine made by a good friend of mine before he died: Joselito. It is now the second anniversary of his death, and I’m always thinking of him. I think of how he might have laughed at this joke, or that moment. Any little thing will remind me of him. And once in a while I want to drink his wine. I want to drink
him
, not his wine. I take a swig of it, of
him
, and I put the cork back on him. Maybe someone who hears this thinks I’m off my rocker, but this is what I believe: When I give anything—wine, a tortilla, my cheese—I am inside that. And of all the people who eat what I offer, only a special few realize that there’s a spirit present, that there’s my love.”
d
1991:
still
bad.
THE SUNFLOWERS
“Divinity, not machines.”
E
IGHT HOURS AFTER ENTERING, WE EXITED THE TELLING ROOM
. Day had turned to night, which had turned to very early morning:
1:32
A.M.
, read Carlos’s watch. Ambrosio fumbled with an oversized key to lock the door behind us. The sky radiated with such a multitude of stars that everything—the church tower, the stone ruins, an abandoned tractor in a field below—appeared in bright snowdrifts in the silver night air. The beams were so thick you could nearly cup them in your hands. It was bizarre, that cosmic snow.
And that silence. (Some Almighty finger had pressed Mute.)
Ambrosio came up, and we said our goodbyes. For such a solid man, he conveyed a sense of emptiness now, a fleeting inconsequentiality. We were quite far from lodging options, he said. He offered to call ahead to some roadside motel somewhere
out there
. When I assured and then reassured him that we’d be fine, and after he’d lingered a moment longer to demonstrate his concern, he said goodbye the way they said it here,
“Ta’ lo,”
which was percussively short for
hasta luego
, and translated as “until later” or “see you later.” But in
Guzmán the phrase meant the following, all at once:
hello … so long … how are you again? … until we pass … we are passing again … oh, hello! … goodbye! … again? … again! … and round we go!
At first one might have thought everyone here had short-term memory loss, but it was a rat-a-tat adaptation meant to capture the circularity of life in a small village and a reminder that, though very much alone and seemingly shipwrecked in the world, these sun-scorched orphans of Castile could at least depend upon seeing each other one more time. With our brief admittance into this circle, it was assumed that we’d meet them all again, too.
Now we shook, his rough hand enveloping my computer-soft one, and parted ways outside his
bodega
: us to our car and him to his house. We watched as he slumped past the dark mouths of caves burrowed into the hill—including the one where we’d first met with the
porrón
—then he went twisting down among the cubist jumble of stone houses, finally dematerializing through the narrow, unlit streets that by dawn would hum with tractors on their way to the fields. There he went, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras. Or: Ambrosio of the Mill and Field. Bearing the halo of his agrarian virtue.
Carlos and I collapsed into the car. I found myself reeling, but oddly exhilarated, too. I turned the ignition, the engine gurgled to life, and then we were drifting toward somewhere that was nowhere, into the nothingness below us, held by the nothingness above.
O
N THE RIDE
I prodded Carlos for first impressions.
“I was really surprised by him,” said Carlos. “He’s a big man. He has beautiful eyes. Very nice, very warm. He was almost crying at certain points while telling the story of his cheese. As if he’d lost a child.”