The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (24 page)

“This is a lawn of courage,” he announced the first time we met. “A lawn of miracles. How can it survive heat as hot as this?” He gestured at the patch of green beneath his feet. “My wife loved this little lawn.”

She was gone now, and he was still in mourning. They’d been famous in Guzmán for their dancing. They’d won local competitions. There were trophies to prove it. In a village this small, they’d been Fred and Ginger, dancing not only the
jotas
but the fandango, the bolero, the
zambra
. Now he stood alone, examining the clumps beneath his feet. On this dusty plateau, his was one of the rare lawns of
green grass, perhaps only ten by ten feet but as thick as the hair on his head. We left him there, murmuring to the grass.

Along we went—fifty yards to the end of Calle Francisco Franco, then a right-hand turn skirting the side of the
palacio
to its front stairwell. This was the spot where, more often than not, we might encounter Clemente, another old man who always seemed to step out of the same shed, a bit more spry than Don Honorato, taller, lankier, same head of thick hair, clad in checked, collared shirts, with loads of advice and dire warnings. “You must remember to lock your doors!” he scolded, in exasperation. “And put down your shutters in the heat of day!” Of course, I never asked how he knew our doors were never locked, as I never asked anything, finding it impossible to get a word in edgewise. At the end of his diatribe, he’d look down on Leo in his batting helmet, perhaps convinced the poor boy had a head injury of some sort, and speak kindly, almost softly to him, taking pity.
“Precioso,”
he said, and fished a sucker from his pocket, then knelt to look him in the eye. “Hombre, I have a little secret for you. In this place, you will burn up under that shiny hat of yours. Take water as often as you can.”

We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was:
strolling
. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like “rushing,” or “hustling,” or “guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker.” Sometimes, for no reason, I’d break out running, just to get between two points more quickly, because I was always behind, or so it seemed. But strolling—this was really something
astonishing
!
^§
The sky overhead kaleidoscoped with clouds and colors, flecks of orange, blue, green; the road below our feet was etched with fault lines and signs of life. I took my son’s lead in this happy distraction. Look at the ants, in the middle of their own rush hours, streaming over the rocks!
And over here—a piece of aquamarine glass! Now we are collecting glass, except we can’t find any more, so we’re collecting rocks. How many rocks can I carry? As many as Leo hands me … 
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen
 … I will leave them in a pile now. He doesn’t want them left in a pile. Now I’m strolling with my arms full of rocks, with my son who wears a helmet to protect his head injury, down to the
frontón
covered with sheep shit, to play baseball.

Just like any other day.

We passed the women sweeping their front stoops. This was a competition, really, to see who could appear most fervent and fastidious in the daily ablution of the home. Points seemed to be awarded for the generation of the biggest dust cloud, furiousness in the act of sweeping, and general effort as determined by most times blowing loose strands of hair from face. Caught in the act, the women, in their worn dresses and aprons, would pause, only slightly embarrassed, and once they sighted Leo, come forward into the street to pinch his cheek. “Oh,
cariño
,” they chirped.
“Tan serio con su cachiporra para cazar!”
Yes, he
was
so serious dragging that cudgel for hunting! Though I knew next to nothing about these women and their lives, about the frustrations of living in a rigidly patriarchal society, about the loneliness of their days, the scratchy radio inside echoing to the street, knew nothing about the loss that striated their lives—the Civil War, the hardships under Franco, the societal shifts that set the last lance in a village such as this—I think I loved them best, for their sheer exuberance when confronted with a fair-haired beacon of youth. They couldn’t contain themselves, and, fluttering like pigeons in their own dust, they shared a kindliness that seemed unwarranted.

On we went, the road gathering a current, Leo’s hand in mine, then drawn away, running fingertips over every fleck of mica in the crude stone walls that hid courtyards full of chickens and hung laundry. Bowlegged, he veered to and fro, chased cats, pocketed treasures, and froze in awe, eyes wide, mouth in an O when white clouds—the sheep herd—came up through town, led by the three Basque brothers in their Che Guevara T-shirts. There were forty or fifty fluffy animals,
smelling of lanolin, tufted with coarse fiber, flowing past him, while he stood lost up to his shoulders in fleece. That road from our temporary home to the
frontón
may have measured half a mile, but it seemed forever. We were a father and son, bathed in that eternal Castilian light. His hand slipped back into mine, and we carried on.

When the stone walls fell away, the vineyards lay before us, the grapes hidden deep in the vines, trying to keep cool. Everything tucked itself away from the heat. Leaves curled like withered hands; the green fields seemed to wilt toward brown, the grain going critical, until somewhere out there, at allotted intervals, huge sprinklers sputtered on, and everything momentarily revived in a false rainfall. Then the wheel of fire caught again, and heat came pounding back from heaven, flattening the life out of every breathing thing.

We played not on the
frontón
surface but in the shade behind the high wall, in the dirt and rubble. We replayed the same game over and over again, ad infinitum, way up there on the Meseta, a game from thousands of miles away. The Yankees facing the Red Sox, a close contest to the ninth inning, though Leo did most of the batting, and, coming to understand the game and its language, a lot of the talking, too. “Jeter to the plate … and
strike two
! … Jeter at the bat … and
strike three
! … Jeter puts on his batting glove … and
strike four
! …” I threw thousands of pitches behind that wall blocking the sun, and Leo, not quite grasping the concept of a “ball,” swung at every one of them. These games always had to end on a climactic moment, a clutch homer, an against-the-odds single to bring in the winning run. And afterward, Leo insisted on celebrations, something at which he excelled. So we threw hats in the air, ran into each other’s arms, ruffled each other’s hair. Farmers passed on tractors; the shepherds returned; someone schlepped off to his vineyard or out to hunt rabbit.

Then my son replaced his batting helmet and we dragged ourselves back up through town. Leo could scarcely walk. It was blindingly hot, and wet tendrils of hair stuck to his forehead. His cheeks flamed red. This was usually when the whining began—and the parental bribery,
too, incentivizing his progress with a highly prized Spanish lollipop. “If you make it to the palace,” I told him, “you can have a Chupa Chup.” And so we ended up together, sitting on the shaded church steps, the pocked limestone cool against our backs as we sucked the last drops from our bottle of water, and the lollipop appeared. Nearing the midday hour, nothing moved in the streets, not even the cats. The sun was its own kind of death. Two hundred yards from home, it was Everest, and we couldn’t find the energy to make it.

Eventually came a hint of the
comida
, the scent of eggs frying, a piece of meat. Somewhere, the
thup
of a cork signaled a cold wine being poured into a
porrón
. We got up and trudged the last inclines, came through the door, climbed the stairs, entered the kitchen to find Sara and May, both flush from their own adventures, May tottering here and there, squawking her first words:
hola, agua
. Her brother called her name, rolling a rubber ball down the long hallway, and she came waddling by as if blown by a huge wind. We began cooking the
comida
while the children played, loath to increase the temperature in the house, and yet that’s what people did here, didn’t they?
^‖
We nibbled on cheese and thin slices of chorizo, nuts and olives, then served plates of
chuletas
and salad, or fish and rice, abbreviating and amending for the kids. Satiated, we led the children to their room, lowered the metal blinds, and let them nap.

They slept in old beds in an unadorned white concrete-walled room. They could have been mistaken for wee Castilians until that moment when the lava light pried their eyelids open again. Then their voices filled the house with
hola
, baseball,
agua
. Leo in his batting helmet, May goosing around in a chubby diaper. New plans were made, and soon we were out in the streets, down to the bar, up to Ambrosio’s
bodega
, to the
pantano
. Doing nothing in that dream. Everything.

I’
D TOLD
A
MBROSIO ABOUT
this proposed book of mine, or book of his. (So what was it: mine or his?) He understood, of course, what had delivered me here in the first place: his cheese, Páramo de Guzmán. And then what had brought me back: his telling of a slow-food fable gone so awry that murder hung in the balance. I suspect he was flattered by my interest, which he gauged by the questions I asked. And I asked about everything—the fields, his philosophy, Castilian customs, history, and stories—but not as a journalist, it seemed. As an interested party, as a would-be participant.

During our first weeks in Guzmán, then, Ambrosio did a most extraordinary thing: He appeared at the house one morning and asked me to hold out my hand. “
Para tí
, Michael,”
^a
he said, laying a heavy object in my palm. It was dark metal, a couple pounds and ruler length, with a clef at the end. The key to his telling room. “There’s a full
porrón
on the table,” he said. “You’ll write our book there.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d told me how it was going to be—and it would hardly be the last—but, regardless, the gesture was laden
with meaning. I looked at the key in my hand and back at Ambrosio. “Really?” I said.

“Hombre,” he said, as if he didn’t want to hear another word about it.

Ambrosio became our guardian angel. When he wasn’t driving his truck on a long haul or out in the fields, he might pull up before the house and issue all sorts of exhortations and invitations: to his house for lunch, to this or that village fiesta, to the bullfights, to a famous monastery or village. He wove us into the fabric of his every day. And the kids adored him, if they couldn’t quite figure him out: the giant, ceaselessly talking in that smoky baritone. He mesmerized them. He’d lift them from the ground, fling them around, and loft them to his shoulders, and they would appear wide-eyed, uncertain, looking to their parents, who smiled reassuringly. He spoke to them in encouraging tones, but never pandered. If they fussed, he would drop a pearl of folklore on them—one they didn’t understand but for the mock-seriousness of his voice—and their eyes would go wide again.
“Chicos,”
he said, “don’t let the wolves hear you.”

When Carlos arrived with his family,
^b
he and I spent more of the day with Ambrosio while the mothers and children found adventures of their own. Sometimes Ambrosio led us to the bar at 11:00
A.M.
for fortification; sometimes we were in the fields until after sundown. There was no guessing what the day would bring. A run to the grain-sorting machine, an ancient mechanical contraption that separated
seeds. To Abel’s workshop, where Ambrosio stood among blowtorch sparks discussing an invention he’d sketched on a napkin, an attachment to a tractor that, to Ambrosio’s mind, would improve the efficacy of planting seeds. To lunch in Roa, to meet a
majo
with whom Ambrosio was talking about purchasing grapes. The only constant was the
bodega
. It was nearly guaranteed that at some point along the way we’d end up in the telling room with Ambrosio holding forth, in great word gusts of appreciation for the joys of Castile. He slurped wine and let out wondrous sighs, saying, “Its taste reminds me of the old people who once sat here. It’s a privilege to drink this wine.” It was a privilege to eat the almonds and the chorizo and
jamón
, too. It was a privilege to sit on one’s derriere in the telling room and get pleasantly soused while hearing stories. It was a privilege to walk this land, to live in this place, to watch the grain grow.

Each day Ambrosio added more to his
“grandísima filosofía de vida,”
the stylings of which glorified anything representing an antidote to the shrink-wrapped, digital mess of the modern world: an old farm implement, for instance; a certain funny
cuento
about an ancestor;
^c
a meal from the field graced with a bursting tomato or sweet
green pepper. These were the simple, exquisite testaments that he looked for at every turn. And found. If only in Guzmán.

His philosophy might have been reduced to two words: Give praise.

Even the town of Aranda, a mere half hour away, posed a threat to his
grandísima filosofía
. Once, when we stopped at a supermarket there together, Ambrosio seemed lost in the aisles, in the pale-purply klieg light glow of commerce. I couldn’t tell if it wasn’t just an act—after all, how many forty-something men have never broken the plane of a supermarket’s electric doors?—but the moment did have the feel of someone touching down in dusty, cosmic boots, then traipsing lost through a plentiful wilderness of dish soaps and multicolored cereal boxes. In the wine aisle he asked, “Why would anyone spend ten euros on a bottle of wine when the stuff you make at home has feeling?”

He made a point of stopping at the cheese counter and asking after what they had. He listened, shaking his head gravely. He said something I missed, which made the two women behind the counter laugh, and turned back and mumbled something about their cheese being crap. Come to think of it, that’s actually what he must have said to them:
Don’t you have anything better than this crap?
But he always did it in such a disarming way, with a wink that invited everyone in. It wasn’t a threat; it was irreverence meant as humor. Before retreating from the store, he stopped to survey some ham sealed in plastic. He touched the smooth packaging with his finger. He lifted it to his nose and could smell nothing.