The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (21 page)

And suddenly: tiny Guzmán on its hill, its skyline a cubist jumble but for the bell tower of the church and the square turrets of the
palacio,
as the 17th-century manor house is known. Some of the houses were so decrepit they appeared split open, as if by the fist of a giant. You could see a strewn book, someone's bloomers, artifacts of a lost life. Let there be no doubt, time had had its way here. You might have looked upon this place—and its detritus—and moved right along.

But something happened to me. Even now, I'm not exactly sure what. I have a friend who once told me about the first time he ever took a ferry to an island off the coast of North Carolina, and how he knew, right there on the ferry—with the salt spray and the light off the ocean—that he'd come back to this same spot every year. He'd come to relive that feeling of leaving his old self behind. That annual renewal, the reacquaintance with the person he felt himself to be on that island, was something he wanted to organize his life around. Similarly, Guzmán instantly and improbably became
my place.
It made no sense, practically speaking. Even if I didn't live 3,000 miles away, or if I spoke Spanish, or didn't have a baby at home, it wouldn't have made sense. And that was part of its tug, too. I was certain this town had secrets to tell—and that maybe my best self was there to be found. Sometimes, travel is this elemental: the desire to replace the old molecules with new ones, familiarity with its opposite. To find the kingdom on the hill and stand in awe in its gold-paved streets, even if those streets are strewn, as Guzmán's were, with sheep poo.

 

II.

 

You may be reading this on a beach right now. Or in a cabin in the woods. You may be visiting at a friend's cottage. Or you've just returned from Montauk, the Adirondacks, Tuscany. Maybe you're packing to go, checking a list (bathing suits, fishing rods, novels), waiting to board a plane, anticipating what has been a year in the offing: your summer vacation.

It's possible you've found your “place,” too, the one to which you return, however temporarily, however near or far. When I was a kid, my family made an annual August pilgrimage to Cape Cod, where we rented a cottage in a little colony that brought the same families back each year. For that week, sometimes two, my father didn't commute or wear a suit and tie to his job, didn't wash the cars or regrout the shower on weekends, or sit at his desk on Sunday afternoon, paying bills, listening to opera. My mother didn't have to pack lunches or crisscross the county with her four sons, ferrying us to practices and music lessons and school events.

Even at the time, I realized my parents were somehow different on vacation, airier and at ease, youthful in their goofiness and laughter, more attentive to us—and each other—for during that one time of year, we mostly had ourselves, without distraction.

There were familiar vacation rites, too: the Sunfish we rented, the board games we played, the custard stand we walked the sandy road to each night. During the day, my father sailed with us, played football on the beach with us, swam with us. We, his sons, would ride his back into the piling waves.

What I now realize as a parent myself is just how much was really at stake on those getaways. And what inordinate disappointment could be evoked if things went wrong. I understand now how desperate my parents, like all parents, really were to “get away,” to hit Reset and slip into new skins again—and then bring those people back in the Ford LTD station wagon with us. They talked about their hopes. They read the Cape real estate flyers, dreaming of ownership. And it was sort of the same with us kids: we banded together, arguing less, wore sailor hats bought at some taffy shop, found ourselves jumping off the dunes with other kids from other families. And the picture taking was another cue: this was who we were on vacation—happy, absorbed, alive—lest anyone forget.

And then, it was over.

At the end of the vacation, on the last night, we always built the same UFO. Two thin pieces of wood nailed into an X, candles affixed to the crossbeams. A plastic dry-cleaning bag was attached at the four points of the X. The candles were lighted, filling the bag with hot air, and then the whole thing rose and was blown out to sea, all of us on shore watching it go.

Even the next day, as our packed station wagon followed the jammed highways home, I kept envisioning that UFO aloft, off the coast, over an island, alighting in some foreign country, England, maybe, where everyone wore Beefeater costumes and said, “Pip, pip!” I remember my childish defiance, and having a thought that would return to me over and over as an adult, though now that small loss was connected to a much larger one. The question was, Who says this has to end?

 

III.

 

How I came to touch down in Guzmán, Spain—and to think of it as the place where there would be no end—is, like all good travel stories, a tale of going in search of one thing and finding something else, of what happens when you become the UFO and allow yourself to float away.

In 1991, I picked up some part-time work proofreading a monthly newsletter at Zingerman's Delicatessen, an exalted foodie haven in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the rabid clientele lined up early on football Saturdays to buy their corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. In that era before we could carry on deep conversations about the virtues of Humboldt Fog versus Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, the newsletter was a gourmand's playground—and an argonaut's, too. Ari Weinzweig, the author and one of the deli owners, spanned the globe finding unusual and delicious victuals—and the newsletter was packed with culinary stories and histories. October of that year turned out to be “Spanish celebration month” at the deli, and the newsletter sang the praises of various olive oils, sherry vinegars, and Sephardic Jewish cooking, but there was one entry that seemed most remarkable, about a unique, otherwise anonymous Spanish cheese called Páramo de Guzmán. Until that time, it was the most expensive cheese the deli had ever sold, a house cheese from Castile that tilted toward Manchego. “Rich, dense, intense,” Weinzweig wrote. “The result is . . . sublime.”

According to Weinzweig, it was entirely handmade from an old family recipe, by a farmer from the small village of Guzmán named Ambrosio Molinos. He produced the cheese from the milk of his herd of Churra sheep, in a stable across from the house in which he was born (and his father before that, and his father before that). Ambrosio cut the curd into very small pieces, a time-consuming process that increased the density of the cheese, then aged it in a cave for up to a year, eventually drenching it in olive oil. In keeping with its idiosyncratic, outsider status, the cheese came sealed in a white tin.

At that time, I was monastically broke, too broke in my mind to try even a smidgen of this cheese, but I did rip out and save that four-paragraph entry, and nearly a decade later, in the year 2000, working as a magazine writer, I carried that ripped piece of paper on assignment to Spain, where I went to profile the futurist chef Ferran Adrià, whose culinary innovations and 30-course meals, each new dish served in three-minute intervals, seemed to embody the digital speed of our times.

On that trip, I had Sunday off, so I flew from Barcelona to Madrid, then drove up the gut of Castile and back in time to the cheesemaker's village of Guzmán. It was a lark, perhaps, but it was also a pilgrimage of sorts, my adult self enacting a dream of my younger, poorer self, to try that fabled cheese in that little Castilian village. As I drove, the radio reported more Basque bombings, and the day was so hot, the car tires actually began to melt on the pavement.

I found Ambrosio in the cool of his family cave, or bodega, the place where he aged his cheese. In Guzmán, there existed two dozen or so caves burrowed in the hill that marked the village's northern boundary. Some of the bodegas were said to date back as far as the Roman occupation of Spain. In a time long past, the fruits of the harvest were brought to the caves and stored—grain, apples, and, in particular, cheese and wine, the latter transported in casks made from cured goat carcasses—to be accessed during the harsh winter and spring. Legend had it that a man would sit in a room built above the cave and itemize what went down into the cellars, to report it all back to the lord of the land. This room became known as
el contador,
or the counting room.

As the families in the village built or inherited bodegas, they also added to these counting rooms, sometimes sculpturing a foyer and perhaps stairs that led up to a cramped, cozy warren that included a fireplace. Soon, people gathered at the bodega to share meals around a table and pass the time. And as the centuries unfolded and the caves came to serve a purpose less utilitarian than social, the room took on the other definition of
contar,
“to tell.” The
contador,
then, became a “telling room.” It was the place where, on cold winter nights or endless summer days, drinking homemade red wine and eating chorizo, villagers traded their secrets, histories, and dreams. In this way, the bodega, with its telling room, became a mystical state of mind as much as a physical place, connecting the people here to their past.

At that first meeting in the telling room, over the course of eight hours, Ambrosio told me a fantastical story. He was a hulking man with mournful eyes. His voice rumbled along, seemingly without breath. Working closely with his mother, he claimed to have recovered the old family recipe (it hadn't been written anywhere, of course), and when the villagers first tried that Molinos cheese, they found it so good that they were transported back to their own mothers' kitchens. As the cheese was passed along, more and more people fell under its sway, until a cheesemonger from Madrid began to sell it in the capital. From there the legend grew: Páramo de Guzmán was sold at Harrods in London, won medals at cheese fairs, and later arrived at Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor. It was said to have been served to the Spanish and British royal families, to Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra. Julio Iglesias was a fan, and Fidel Castro liked it so much, he tried to buy Ambrosio's entire stock.

As the demand for Páramo de Guzmán increased, it was nearly impossible for Ambrosio to keep pace—milking, boiling, harping the curd, cutting it in fine pieces, etc.—and now there were complicated business concerns imposed on what had, at first, been a very simple act of creation. As Ambrosio unspooled the story that day in his telling room, he said he'd asked his best friend from childhood, a corporate lawyer named Julián Mateos, to help him with the logistical complications of a growing operation, and to help him finance a move to a new cheese factory in a nearby village. Somewhere in all of the expansion plans, Ambrosio, the bohemian creator, claimed (though I would later find out that this claim was contested by Julián with equal insistence) to have been duped, tricked into signing his name to a contract and relinquishing ownership of the company.

That is, he'd actually had his cheese stolen.

So, no, I wasn't going to get a chance to try it, Ambrosio said bitterly. Because he no longer made the cheese.

And then he said he was plotting to murder his best friend. For that seemed the only fitting thing to do.

 

IV.

 

There was more, of course. As compelling as the legend of the cheese was (had I really walked into the middle of a murder plot?), and despite the fact that my pilgrimage to eat Páramo de Guzmán had been stymied, I was riveted by something else, something that illuminated a deeper need I hadn't identified before. Ambrosio spoke with such authority, stood so stubbornly in opposition to the world I lived in, that I could feel him lifting me, however momentarily, from the unceasing current of my other life to the shore of his. His words were prophetic, aphoristic, instructive, bawdy, hilarious. He was an amazing storyteller. (I knew this because my friend Carlos had accompanied me there to help translate it all.)

I left and then came back again, three months later, having roped another friend into playing translator, to make sure Guzmán and Ambrosio were real. There was the village, in its worn, November splendor, the wide, empty fields stretching away in robes of ermine and gray—and Ambrosio was exactly as I'd found him the first time, salt of the Castilian earth, adding more axioms to what he called his
filosofía grandísima.

“The problem with modern life is that nobody knows how to defecate anymore,” he said. “This is the most important thing.” Then he held forth on the topic for an hour.

“Divinity, not machines,” he said at one point, referring to the need for people to raise their animals with care and love, instead of leaving it to the brutal regime of industrial meat farms.

“Pigs need to eat beautiful acorns,” he said. “And you need to converse with your chickens.” He talked about how the impersonal machinery of modernity had destroyed the values and sensitivities, the tenderness and powerful connection that came from living close to the earth.

I couldn't get enough of this. I returned to Guzmán again—and again—making excuses at home, cashing in frequent-flier miles, or using work as a way to jump the Atlantic, with a side trip to the village. And there I sat for any cluster of days I could get, up in the telling room, like a toadstool, passively absorbing every conversation. The more Ambrosio talked, the more I realized that perhaps I hadn't ever known what I really yearned for. He was sunk into the here and now, while I seemed to spend a great deal of time in my deadline life racing through airports, a processed-cream-cheese bagel in hand, trying to reach the future. But here in the telling room, I sat noticing everything, infused with mindfulness: the pallor of light, the still life of the smooth glass
porrón
—the device from which wine was drunk here—on the grooved wooden table, the oversize man sitting in his shadow, occasionally revealed at angles or by the rumble or ragged passion in his voice.