The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (15 page)

Back home during this time, we’d had another baby, a girl named May, sweet and insistent, a beautiful force to be reckoned with. Now it was double the diapers, double the wake-ups (make it triple, because this kid never slept), double the joy and worry. Equal partners in every way, Sara and I found our roles briefly adjusted. During these, her childbearing years, I also bore more responsibility for supporting our family. After a first book came talk of another, something important for important times, having to do with our country’s all-consuming obsession with revenge and war. I went to Manhattan for meetings to write a book about John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, who’d been captured on Thanksgiving of 2001 at the age of twenty, fighting in northern Afghanistan. He’d been roundly
condemned in the American press: for his conversion to Islam at sixteen, for his unchaperoned wanderings through Yemen and Pakistan, for the traitorous militancy that led him straight into the middle of a prison uprising at Qala-i-Jangi, one in which an American CIA officer had been killed. Even the president, George Bush, had weighed in, calling the bearded and robed young Californian “some misguided Marin County hot-tubber.” Lindh became a symbol of treachery and betrayal, but I saw in his story something more complicated: the mirror reflection of an America I couldn’t quite recognize. I conceived the book as an update of Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
, remembering its prescient lines, written in the mid-nineteenth century: “This uncivilized little nation possesses arms, and it alone knows how to use them.” Or: “If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies.”

I left the city with an offer for a book contract, but the truth was my heart wasn’t in it. The project promised to leave me in a war zone while my children grew up, and I kept thinking about Guzmán and Ambrosio’s cheese. Would it have been absurd, in the middle of all this war and mayhem, to pitch
that
as a book? In this new world full of evildoers, could anyone see that a story like Ambrosio’s, which at its heart was about truth and purity, might be more important than ever? I wasn’t willing to test the waters at first, for fear of looking like a dope, but quietly—I’d say
sheepishly
—I returned to Guzmán to see what else I might find there, to gather yarn, as the journalist says, when the journalist doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

If I wasn’t an everyday face in the village with its population of eighty, it occurred to me that my appearances were like a repeating cameo in a real-life sitcom in which I, the
americano
, stumbled and bumbled my way through customs and chitchat, providing comic relief by asking stupid questions about sheep or tractors, or, on one particular evening, why the leading brand of whisky in Spain was called Whisky DYC, trying to explain what the phrase “whiskey dick” meant in America, an explanation that was misinterpreted as a heartfelt
admission of my own erectile dysfunction.
^c
Once, while bravely consuming a stew of unknown origin, I reflexively horked up a swine hoof, or something. Another time, outdoors, I drank from the
porrón
in a high wind and ended up looking like a fire hydrant drizzled upon by beet juice. Oh, I was a riot to these farmers, a metrosexual punchline, a tadpole among bullfrogs.

Ambrosio, of course, was my
caballero
gold card. When I was with him, circles opened, drinks arrived, mysteries were solved.
^d
Thanks to him, I was fast-tracked past the Naugahyde ropes that hung in the bar’s entrance to keep out blackflies and granted immediate entrance to the back room, the inner chamber, the VIP
bodega
where men—some of them toothless, limping, or scarred—related the events of the day, swapped secret recipes,
^e
reviewed age-old legends.
In fact, Ambrosio thought more of these men, or cared more for them, because of their seeming defenselessness against society—and their deterioration—than of those who possessed the ability to push him forward in the world, those able-bodied men in the day’s haberdashery with big plans for profit. Whenever it came time to describe one of his posse in conversation, he favored the word
majo
, which for him translated as a great guy, a mensch, a beautiful human, an
hombre muy simpático
, but despite appearances also suggested a being of some higher spiritual evolution, a fellow traditionalist, a hidden angel among the earthbound. Everything these men did, and made, was worthy of hyperbole, of myth. His friend Manuel of the Pérez Pascuas owned the famous local vineyard that had supplied the FIRST SPANISH WINE EVER CONSUMED BY THE POPE FOR NEW YEAR’S EVE MASS. His friend Luis made exquisite ANCIENT KEYS for NO REASON but as a tribute to the EXQUISITE ARCANE BEAUTY OF THE PAST.
^f
His friend Javier of the Cristóbals
owned the BEST RESTAURANT in Roa and grilled the BEST ROAST LAMB IN THE UNIVERSE that EVERYONE AGREED was OF SUCH EXCEPTIONAL TENDERNESS AND TASTE that it FELL FROM THE BONE.
^g

One February morning when we woke to the village buried in drifts of storybook snow, the roofs all white mushroom fluff, some of Ambrosio’s friends gathered at a
peña
, one of many social clubs that I hadn’t known existed. They lurked behind Guzmán’s corrugated metal sheets, in empty garages, in little apartments with pool tables and kitchens, all of which were thrown open during September’s fiesta, when the
peña
members would emerge wearing the bright colors of their club and compete—by singing songs, banging drums, blowing horns, lighting fireworks—at making the loudest commotion around themselves. Though the roads were apparently impassable that day, this
peña
contained maybe a dozen men, some from neighboring towns, all playing hooky in the storm. Ambrosio entered with sausage, someone sleight-of-handed a couple dozen eggs,
porrones
were filled with red wine, and before long Ambrosio had the gas stove going, making a breakfast plate for everyone while regaling the crowd with joke after joke. The laughter came in waves that broke upon themselves, belly laughs, uproarious spasms of joy. It was a roast of sorts—and he went around the room to the great pleasure of the crowd, deconstructing each one of us. In fact, Ambrosio was honoring us with his insults. Who farted the loudest. Whose manhood was permanently compromised by too much wine—or had never worked in the first place. When it came time for me, Ambrosio began by introducing certain unnamed men, famous gauzy figures of legendary ilk, who could take the
porrón
and, rather than aiming the wine into their open mouth, could stream it off their forehead, let it run the bridge of their nose, and shift their mandible in such a way as to catch
the waterfall driblet as it passed over the septum cliff. Then Ambrosio said, “Hombre, you’d go thirsty waiting for the wine to travel Michael’s nose.”

Of course, I picked up only bits until the full translation came, but could intuit a little from watching the crowd, which seemed to move in slow motion, eyes lighting, toothless mouths opening, guffawing, then nervous glances cast to assess my reaction. And there I sat with my dim smile of incomprehension, set as usual on time delay. But oh, what pleasure it gave when I did understand! Oh, this was rich! This was really good! If I was receiving correctly, what Ambrosio said was that my nose was so big, so epic, so monumental, that wine flowing from the headwater of the bridge of my nose would take forever to empty into the gulf below it. Mine was a Mississippi, a Zambezi, a Yangtze River nose.

I suspect it took a nose of
some
caliber to recognize a nose of
such
caliber, but what made the moment particularly satisfying was that it went against all notions of Spanish hospitality to insult a guest; thus, with a touch of pride, I realized that I was no longer a guest. I now sat at the
majo
round table, not one of them, but then not an entirely special case either. Gauging my character by Ambrosio’s tacit recommendation, these men were willing to allow me to be here, to laugh at me and let me laugh with them—and at them, too. Perhaps it shouldn’t have felt momentous, but for me it meant brief admission to a new sort of brotherhood, a brotherhood of forgotten brothers.

I knew that in Ambrosio’s presence I was living a fantasy, one in which I’d been freed of all responsibility—no logistics, no late-night wake-ups, no old, incontinent dog to clean up after, no bills or recycling or flat tires. I glommed on to him in the same manner as a barnacle takes to the hull of a boat, as a matter of survival, of one small organism attaching to the force of a larger one. My ardor was portioned in equal parts, for him and then the stories he told: Somehow, of all the millions of villages of the world, from tundra to tropics, from Kirkenes to Ushuaia, I’d found Guzmán and its native son, Ambrosio
Molinos, the great storyteller, who held the real secrets of the world as well as the key to its happiness.

G
UZMÁN
’
S
B
AR WAS AS
unprepossessing as the village itself, shadowy at midday and bare-walled but for a calendar and a few
noticias
, a colorful ad for a bullfight, a knitting bee to meet at town hall. There were a number of plain wooden tables with uncomfortable chairs starred about, a couple of shelves behind the bar with an unimpressive if potent display of liquor. The top shelf here would have been bottom shelf elsewhere, and the bottom shelf was swill. The room was a sarcophagus hung with heavy drapes of secondhand smoke. The floor was a site of archaeological interest: nubbed-out cigarettes and errant napkins, scrips of scribbled notes and receipts, tapas toothpicks and bottle caps, a potpourri of expended things.

The village had only this one bar at the time, and it was the hub of social life, of all the feuds and compacts that played out among Guzmán’s diminishing citizens. It wasn’t so strange that good friends, over a period of a lifetime, might never see the insides of each other’s homes, but would meet every day at the table by the window to play a game of cards. And no matter what the hour, if the bar doors were open, there was always some sort of commotion inside.

Pinto, the bartender, was both impresario and dictator. In his forties, he lived alone in his family’s ancestral
casa
. If you stood on the bluff behind it, the back of the house appeared as if it had been torn open by a hungry giant. Apparently Pinto felt no need to address the destruction, nor the open display of homewares and undergarments strewn about within. Neglect was his primary coat of arms, his wrecked modus operandi. It wasn’t exactly the trait one expects for someone in a service industry.

In the normal world, a bartender stands behind the bar and serves his customers their drinks. But Pinto saw it like this: He was John Wayne, if John Wayne had been a short, untucked, punchless man
with patchy black hair. And if John Wayne had been wonderful in the kitchen.
^h
Yet Pinto had no problem making the leap. The bar was his stage set. He answered to no man there. And when he wasn’t in his own bar, he was either sleeping or trolling other bars as a paying customer in Roa, where there seemed to be an overabundance of watering holes.

Ambrosio said that perhaps Pinto was happiest when walking into a bar in Roa: He’d push through the door slowly, squinting, sit deliberately, light his cigarillo, eye the other hombres, order his poison, and take that first satisfying slurp. After a couple more sucks, emitting plumes of smoke as if on fire, he would get up abruptly, leaving his glass half full, and search out the next stop, his evenings an endless composition of entrances that only he believed held high drama. And while no one understood the fetish exactly, part of its meaning was easier to intuit: Trapped in the Guzmán bar, he was a stationary pourer of libations, while on his off nights he could forever be the shadowy, multifarious man who blew in and out on a dangerous breeze, sipping whisky before pollinating another dark place with his cowboy mysteriousness.

In the Guzmán bar, the rules were simple: If Pinto felt like serving drinks, he would. If not, he might come around the counter and take a seat at one of the tables, cigarillo drooping from his mouth, a washrag slung over his shoulder. He’d prop his feet on the table and watch television turned up to an intolerable volume, drowning out conversation, leaving his irritated regulars to fend for themselves and newcomers to scratch their heads. Was this one of those hidden camera shows?

More than once I heard Ambrosio call him a
culo de gallina
, or “the asshole of a chicken,” which only induced Pinto to throw up a
hand in rebuke.
Whatever
. Meanwhile, he harbored little love for me, the
americano
, primarily because my Spanish was mostly limited to ordering beer.
“Una caña,”
I might say, and Pinto’s reaction was always the same: a smirk that said, “You can’t be serious.” Half the time, Pinto would ignore me in order to make me ask again. And then when he did fill a smallish glass and delivered the cold beer, he always muttered something, but in a slurry rasp I never understood: Was he reaching out or insulting me?

The answer seemed obvious—and yet even despite Pinto, the bar came alive each evening. The air was hot and close and stale, but that garrulous Castilian conviviality glamorized everything. It was here I met Carlos the farmer. In a town of prodigious talkers, Carlos perhaps ranked as the most voluble. And like Ambrosio—both men’s formal education ended at high school—his recall of Spanish history was encyclopedic. Carlos lived in a cluttered house just yards from the front door of the church, and he kept hawks in his attic. He was a sun-stroked ball of energy who kick-started most of his long explications with
“Nahhhh, hombre …”
and then was off, flannel-mouthed (in the garbled, not glib, sense of the word … never the glib in Guzmán), reciting the precise ecology of the declivity south of town known as the Barco de Siete Palomas (Valley of the Seven Doves). Or how the Romans built fish shelters every thirty miles on their sheep highways, in order to transport seafood inland from the shore. Or how the seventeenth-century monarch Queen Isabella II once took as a lover the son of an Italian pastry chef, which only compounded her obesity.
ⁱ