The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (14 page)

In explaining the cave’s former function as a storehouse, Ambrosio had conjured the Old Castilian again, the one who had planted and scythed wheat by hand, who had made the casks for carrying wine out of the hardened bodies of gutted goats. The goat-casks were, then, carried up to the caves on the shoulders of field hands, to the song of
jotas
, where a man sat in
el contador
, counting everything brought from the fields. In that day, the field hands had worked for the lord—the man named Guzmán who had lived in the palace and, one imagined, received the tallies of the day.

Meanwhile, there I sat in my attic, tallying—words on the page, hours until deadline, the age I would be made a grandfather if, optimistically, Leo had a child of his own at the age of thirty.
^†
I sat attached to my machines, typing to keep my editors at bay, staring at the photograph of Ambrosio, day after day.

What was it I saw in him? Freedom? Guidance? A simple life? He was a link to the past in a digitized time when the past had become somewhat irrelevant. Ambrosio had defined this phenomenon by a phrase. He called it “the disability of memory,” which he felt was the blight of modern man—and which I took to be the blight of
me
.

But what did it mean?

“Everyone is rushing forward,” he said, “so I must go back.”

That’s what the photograph was trying to say to me, too:
I must go back
.

S
O
I
DID
. I bought tickets, spending money that probably should have been set aside for Baby’s college fund. The mere act of purchasing those tickets, though, made me feel good, autonomous. And because
Carlos had classes to teach, I convinced another fluent friend, Jeff, to come along this time.
^‡

Thus began what would become the familiar act of return: the plane from Portland to Newark, the race to the gate (it was always a tight connection), the satisfactory push back—and then the overnight flight, the rental car, the drive up and over the Guadarrama, the buffeting wind, the Meseta stretched out below in its umber robes, the narrowing road beneath the wheel. I could feel my skin tighten in that cold, dry air. I became a drum, alive to the vibration.

I was going back three months after our first meeting, in November, to make sure Ambrosio Molinos had been, in fact, real. I packed my tape recorder and notepad, but why? For an eventual book or magazine story? Even as I first began to make my record of Ambrosio and Guzmán, I didn’t know. Or have a plan. Or care to hold myself to the normal journalistic standard, for I wasn’t entirely playing a journalist here. I was playing myself for once.

On the Meseta, you can drive for miles without signs of civilization, wondering if you’ve landed on the most lonesome patch of flash-baked clay in the world, and then from a far hill comes the outline of a church tower, the silhouette of a castle, the clustered homes. Exiting the national highway at Aranda, I scoured the horizon for my phantom village until, with a sigh of relief, we finally came upon the perched lookout of Guzmán again, driving the last of the serpentine road as if climbing to the sky. No longer awash in its summer
colors—the bright, brushed greens of grapevines against the orangy earth, the sunflowers in yellow bursts, the fiery wand of the sun—the village and its fields appeared in dull, vernal, nearly metallic bronzes, silvers, and grays, like a painting by Braque.

At the summit, as we looked back at the
coterro
, the land rolled away from the village, grapevines twining and tumbling to the foot of Ambrosio’s favorite mesa at Quintanamanvirgo. Across the fields to the southeast and rising on its own hill was the aforementioned metropolis of Roa (population 2,500). About twelve miles south, a couple of lonely settlements—Haza (pop. 28) and Fuentecén (pop. 249)—could be faintly seen at the edge of the Duero Valley, named for that same river that runs the length of Castile. Mimicking the lives here, the Duero’s waters meander and slice among the vineyards, picking up velocity in frothing gallons through a cut into Portugal, and eventually pour out into the Atlantic Ocean, carrying the silt of Iberia to the world beyond.
^§

Ambrosio was waiting for me on the steps of his parents’ house. If I’d had any misgivings about my perceptions of him, they were instantly erased by the boisterous way he approached our reacquaintance, crushing the space between us, growling hellos, clasping my hand, pulling me in, showing me around the house, reciting family history.
The house was beautiful inside, rough-hewn handmade beams, wide stairwells of limestone slabs smoothed by the tread of generations. It had been recently renovated by Ambrosio’s brother Angel, who was still living in Argentina—and had transformed a house on its way to dereliction into one that might have graced the pages of
This Old Castilian House
, if such a magazine existed. The first floor consisted of a tight galley kitchen, an eating room with a long table, a TV room, and a few stairs leading down to a half-cellar, which had been fashioned into a rathskeller. The second and third floors held bedrooms, including the one in which Ambrosio himself had been born—and the fourth floor was a bright, open space with a sitting area, an enormous, formal dinner table surrounded by perhaps a dozen wooden chairs, and a second, more spacious kitchen. On the walls hung Angel’s hunting trophies—an oryx, a hartebeest, wild boar—and there was a picture of him in Africa posing with a lion he’d killed. The top shot, however, was the skybox view out the east-facing windows that opened onto the vast Meseta below.

Ambrosio pointed out a stone pile across the way in Roa. “My factory,” he called it. He pointed to Mon Virgo, “the shitting spot.” “Beautiful,” he said. As alive as he’d been in my memory over the past three months, I’d forgotten how physically encompassing he was, how locked into his orbit one instantly became.

He wore one of those dress shirts again, unwrinkled with his initials on the pocket, his ample girth spilling over his beltline. After a stop in the downstairs kitchen where he searched out a stick of
morcilla
(blood sausage), he said he had something he wanted to show us, so we bundled ourselves up—he in a field jacket and big muddy boots—and trudged the sloping land to his barn, his broad back nearly blotting the sky, us tailing behind him like kids from the city in clean knickers, the ground crunching beneath our shoes.

The village receded, shuttered and nearly silent. Two dogs barked, almost yodeling at each other. Across the fallow fields nothing moved but a flock of birds that startled from their pecking near a glade of
trees. Ambrosio didn’t walk so much as stalk with such purpose that, when he approached the door to the barn, the padlock seemed to undo itself. “Follow,” he said.

The barn was not your red New England variety, but rather a long industrial storehouse made of corrugated metal. Dark, empty, and cold inside, it was three-quarters the size of a football field, with clumped sod on the floor and wooden pens portioned out on either side of an aisle running down the middle of the vast room. A diffused light filtered through dirty windows; the musty smell of dried animal poo wafted thickly. This was where the sheep had been kept. Ambrosio looked on the empty cavern as he might have surveyed the vacated rooms of a house where he’d once lived.

“We loved these sheep,” he said. “They were very special sheep, Churra sheep.”
^‖
From the end of May to September, when the land was in bloom, they ate the dry grass and herbs, the chamomile and sage, which created more protein in their milk as well as the perfect balance of fats and oils, and this, he said, was all fermented into the cheese. “You need to imagine this barn full of living, breathing sheep, and in the morning when I arrived, I said good morning to the sheep and they said good morning to me.”

Ambrosio assumed a glum countenance. “Of course, they were sold,” he said, then, for the first time that morning, he fell silent. It was Sasha, the hunting dog, who roused him again, appearing at his side, licking his hand, which made him smile. He crouched down, scratching
her ears. “How are you, dear?” he said. He held her snout in his hand, making eye contact, listening to her whine. “She wants to hunt rabbit,” he said. “Come this way.”

Ambrosio navigated a patch of detritus—old planks with rusted nails at weird angles and shatters of broken glass—and rounded a corner to a small tack room. In the darkness it was hard to make out much until three metal forms appeared, glowing like spaceships from an old movie. Ambrosio smiled. It was here where he made the family’s wine—1,200 bottles to carry them through a year
^a
—and he wanted to check his latest batch, which was nearly ready. “The grapes were very good this year,” he said. “We may have our best wine yet.” A long-stemmed glass appeared in one of his hands, and with the other he removed the lid from one tank and dipped the goblet in. He held it up to the light, admiring the wine’s color, which was actually many colors: There were carmine and amethyst and plum, worlds within worlds. Ambrosio poked his nose into the glass, inhaled, then took a long sip. He licked his lips, pressed them together, contemplating, then nodded … 
yes
. He swirled the goblet, watching as clear glycerin gripped the sides and slipped down as liquid plane settled upon plane, then repeated the whole thing, ending with a long, loud, gurgly sip.

“¡Puta madre, está bueno!”
he said. “Here, some lunch.” He filled a glass and pushed it toward me. I drank—and then again Ambrosio refilled our glasses.

“When you put something alive in your mouth,” he said, “it makes
you
more alive. The people who produce wine are mostly pedantic and stupid,” he continued, jabbing the air with his glass, sloshing the dregs. “They don’t make wine; wine makes itself, God makes wine.
They may keep things clean and in good order, but the grapes make the wine. Whenever I serve my wine, not only is it cold, but there’s an aroma that invades the whole table. You have to listen for what the wine itself says, not the people who make it. And worse are the people who buy the expensive stuff. They don’t know shit! They couldn’t care less about the aroma and finer nuances of drinking wine. They don’t hear a thing the wine is saying.”

We lingered in the tack room until we were feeling mighty and powerful. Then Ambrosio led us out of the storehouse, tromping along a footpath that transected a fallow field below the town, circumventing the village itself. He pointed up to the mesa, Mon Virgo, by way of reminder. Again we were off somewhere, boots squishing in the mud. We passed a cluster of trees bowed by the wind and, nearby, a fenced garden with raised beds that were fruitless mounds now, with an open cistern full of dark water. “It’s my secret spot,” he said. “If we need the perfect ripe tomato or green pepper or head of lettuce, I come here. When the wheat is up and the leaves are on the trees, the garden is invisible. I could write a book just about my relationship to this spot.”

We walked on, crossing the road, climbing a short hill to an old granary. The doors were huge slabs of metal, and out front sat a big granite sculpture, a phallic slab chiseled into the face of a woman. Ambrosio went to a stone wall that snaked around the granary, counted off seven rocks, then removed the eighth, grabbing a hidden key. “This place belongs to my friend Cristian,” Ambrosio said. “He’s an artist, my age.”

He fumbled with the padlock until it fell open, then he muscled the doors and we were inside another lightless room with a strong scent of fermenting straw and clay. Ambrosio climbed a short set of stairs and threw open the shutters, illuminating everything. What appeared were a dozen sculptures in various states of completion, each one a naked woman. There were pale shoulder blades and voluptuous breasts, long arms and soft netherworlds. Bundled and cold, we’d intruded on some equatorial expression of desire locked behind metal doors in this opaque village. Ambrosio nodded. “Incredible, isn’t it?”

Indeed—especially in a village of old people, a profound tradition of conservative Catholicism, and an abiding prevalence of Franquistas, or Franco supporters, still up on two feet. Incredible it was for its honesty and audacity, its rustic realization, its bald transgression among the devout. Incredible it was for the secret it kept right under their noses, all these naked women cavorting in a warehouse garden.

“This is what your friend does?” I asked.

“No, in the village he’s a stonemason,” said Ambrosio, surveying the bodies, light gathering to hips and breasts, the long plane of a neck. “There are geezers here who would die of cardiac arrest if they saw this.”

“But why women, as opposed to anything else?”

“Because his wife left him,” he said. “And there are no women left for him here.”

We stood for a while among the unsheathed damsels. Clearly, there was something in each expression of stone that moved Ambrosio—or held him enthralled. Here was a woman with her arms unselfconsciously overhead; here was one gazing down upon her smooth thigh. For him, the half-finished damsels seemed to convey desire, but not of the erotic sort. Rather it was artistic desire, the impulse that drove his friend to hammer rock into objects of beauty. Ambrosio’s voice rose, heavy and ragged, evoking the cheese again like an old lover.

“Cristian makes the thing he longs for,” he said, “and I long for the thing I made.”

B
ETWEEN 2000 AND THE END OF 2002
, I returned a handful of times to Guzmán, in each season of the year, and each brief visit felt like stepping into a gilded text, zooming from the liquid-crystal speed and madness of America—the sudden decimation of two skyscrapers, then two wars abroad—to this moon-dusted Castilian world hovering out of time, a peaceful place that seemed ennobled with integrity. I had a need to believe in this place, and each visit drew me more
emphatically into Ambrosio’s circle: at the
bodega
with his brother Angel and often his father, the older Ambrosio, and a rolling cast of friends. On excursions to meet more friends. At Ambrosio’s house, where an invitation to join his nuclear family for
comida
turned into an open chair for me at the table. At these meals his wife, Asun, appeared from the kitchen with a cornucopia—salads drenched in olive oil, deviled eggs, tasty chorizo, a potato soup, a good piece of meat or fish, a bottle or two (or three) of homemade wine, brandy, some flan—while Ambrosio sat expectantly, rubbing his prodigious belly, joined by whichever of the now almost-adult Molinos children
^b
happened to rotate through that day.