The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (20 page)

As I spoke, my editor’s face bloomed with the most quizzical expression, and she said, “Wait—what you’re saying is that you want to write a book about
a piece of cheese
?” To which I replied, “No—
Ambrosio’s
cheese!” To which she replied in genuine mystification: “Ambrosio
who
?”

That lunch precipitated a number of calls between my editor and agent. In the suddenly fraught and dangerous world of 2002, there were so many important things to write about—why this? But now that I’d said it out loud, I knew there was nothing
but
“this,” because “this” was all I ever thought about. Every time I’d been to Guzmán I’d run my tape recorder—
mi grabadora
—for hours and scribbled notes. A random dive into my backpack at any given moment would have revealed a cache of arcane Iberian-themed books—
The Bible in Spain
(1843),
Spanish Raggle-Taggle
(1934),
Tales of the Alhambra
(1831). Ambrosio had told me that he longed for the cheese he’d once made; I longed for something to make, too. Out of words, on a page.

And I kept wondering: Would it be possible to tell a tale so powerful,
so fantastic and true, so ridiculous and redemptive, that it would in one fell swoop resurrect the cheese, stop a murder, lionize this cheesemaker Ambrosio Molinos, exact revenge on the
puta
Julián, and memorialize a waning way of life, all the while giving someone like me an excuse for sinking deeper into the soil of Guzmán—i.e., drinking copious amounts of fresh red wine in the telling room while listening to stories, or breaking free of my current life, which left me feeling trapped, distracted, and a little depressed?

I wrote up a thirty-page book proposal in which I described the story of the cheese, as well as my attempts to convince my wife that “we should move to Guzmán for a while, in order to find more time. Time for family. Time for conversation. Time to eat.” The conclusion read, “Whether it’s all a foolish romantic dream or the only true path to happiness on earth, I hope to be able to tell you.”

And then I waited, like an expectant father. When I heard the book idea had been accepted, I couldn’t quite process the news. Did this mean someone else believed in Ambrosio, too? The advance gave us money to make the move to Guzmán a reality. To top it off, a British publisher had bought the book, too, providing a little more cushion. Now, late at night as I tried to fall asleep, Sara sat with a legal notepad, scribbling the master plan:

“I think we should take language courses in a city before going to Guzmán,” she said.

“Time away: less than a year, more than six months,” she said.

“We need to nail down lodging,” she said.

Then she started moving mountains. The to-do list never quit. There was mail to be forwarded, an old dog to be cared for in our absence, a house to be readied for renters. We packed ourselves into four oversized bags loaded with, among other items, diapers in two sizes (6’s and 2’s), a Spanish-English dictionary, a corkscrew (for all the Duero wine in our future!), winter jackets and summer shorts, a dozen Binky/pacifiers of similar brand, an army of Playmobil figurines, baseball mitts, swimsuits. We were a ridiculous circus of car seats and strollers, luggage and diaper bags, missing only the bearded
lady and her husband, the sword swallower. “Wow” was the last word out of my father-in-law’s mouth when he dropped us curbside at Logan Airport, watching our wagon train lumber under gray, still-wintry skies into the warm, amber twilight of the terminal. It wasn’t “Wow, good luck on your wild adventure, you intrepid kids!” It was “Wow, do you
really
need to be doing this?”

Flying overnight through London and Munich (thanks to frequent-flyer-mile routing), we landed in Madrid midmorning and were forced by the sheer scale of our impedimenta to take two taxis to a hotel on Campomanes Street, a few blocks from the palace and its lawns and gardens. We changed diapers, ate ravenously, drew heavy curtains over the floor-to-ceiling windows, and fell asleep. When I awoke some hours later to the pleasing music of slumbering kids, under the low-cost grandeur of fifteen-foot rococo ceilings, it occurred to me that we’d done it, the four of us. Exactly as I’d dreamed it, back among the sunflowers, up in my office with all the pinging and ringing—we’d reached mach speed and broken free of our American life. But then again—why? So that I could be closer to a man I half knew, with the hope that I still might come face-to-face with a world-famous piece of cheese I’d seen in a deli cooler nearly fifteen years earlier? Or so I might restore that man to power, and in so doing reunite him with his destiny?

Oddly, the answer to both questions seemed to be yes.

M
ADRID
^‡
WAS
L
EO CHASING
pigeons in the Plaza Mayor—and an orchestra playing Mahler there at midnight as May screamed and cooed. It was getting mealtimes all wrong, searching at noon for lunch only to find that the restaurants opened at two for
comida
. It was going to see the paintings of Goya at the Prado—“that small container overflowing
with good things,” as Mavis Gallant once had it—and Leo nearly smudging a Velázquez with fingers of melted chocolate.

Enthralled, we could have made ourselves quite comfortable in the big city, down the alleys of Chueca, out in its squares—my favorite the touristy Plaza de Santa Ana, with its old bullfighting hotel,
chuleta
restaurants, and cafés—but soon enough we found ourselves riding a bus to Salamanca, one of the great Renaissance cities of Europe, where we settled in for a six-week intensive course in Spanish at a small private language school teeming with foreigners like ourselves.
^§

On the western edge of Castile, near the Portuguese border, Salamanca
^‖
happened to be only a few hours from Guzmán, and one Friday after class we rented a car and drove up through Valladolid,
^a
and then east toward Guzmán, through a green landscape soon to be desiccated by heat. When night fell, we laid up in the picturesque town of Peñafiel, in a hotel housed in a former flour mill. Out our window hovered a lit medieval castle.

The next morning we drove to Guzmán, running the low road to
Roa, which was socked in by mist, over the Duero River, which flowed a sluggish gray-green, then skirting Roa itself, passing by in the shadow of the cheese factory, and eventually rising through the vineyards to Guzmán. The children were bandoliered in their booster seats, chirping obliviously. I could see Sara’s expression soften, eyes following the script of the landscape—the grapevines and sunflowers—and the absent finger-twirling of hair that signaled growing curiosity. I felt oddly anxious. We were about to enter my dream world. What if it really was just a bunch of crumbling buildings on a hill?

“A
FRICA
,” A
LEXANDRE
D
UMAS WAS
alleged to have said, “begins at the Pyrenees.” What he seemed to be saying was that Spain, located to the south of that granite range and tagged like an alien remora to the underbelly of Europe, was not European at all. It was a rough, bastard land full of warriors, misfits, and half-breeds; slackers, dreamers, and bandits. (And rabbits as well: The word “Spain” derives from the Latin
Hispania
, which in turn probably derives from the Phoenician
i-shephan-im
, meaning “island or coast of rabbits.”)
^b
Next to the cultural refinements of London and Paris, the voluptuous living of Rome and Venice, the supposed homogeneity of the Viking north, Spain was the Other, a chaos of violent, fiery people in a place down under that the Greeks, after coming upon Gibraltar sometime around the tenth century
B.C.
, mistook for the gates of Hell.
^c

Observing the Spanish in the first century, the Greek geographer Strabo felt that certain commonalities existed between tribes: unstinting hospitality, chivalrous manners, brimming arrogance, an acute indifference to hardship, and a particular aversion to outsiders telling them what to do.
^d
The character of the land—from the African south to the alpine north, from the rainy, almost English west to the balmy, Alabaman east—shapes the character of the people here. The Basques are thought to be a moody, unconquerable race of inscrutable tongue clinging to their cloudy mountain valleys; the Catalans are considered industrious if a bit cold behind sunny smiles, after aeons of protecting and exacting their interests against foreign powers who have washed up on their gentle coast; the Andalusians are notoriously breezy and fun loving, some say too lazy in the heat to finish even their half-swallowed sentences; and, by contrast, in the rough-hewn interior, the Castilians are somber, intense, and wary until they suddenly burst with laughter, generosity, road directions. Castilians love to give road directions.

For all the tensions between regions, the modern Spanish state still maintains an instinctual if at times blustery consensus against the world. Which is ironic, given how much of the world has passed through the peninsula. From Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon to the cave dwellers of 15,000
B.C.
who drew on rock walls at Altamira, in Cantabria, from the Phoenicians who established their first colonies at Málaga in 775
B.C.
to the Carthaginians who occupied southeast Spain and exploited its material wealth, from the vanquishing Romans who
brought roads and a legal system between the years 218
B.C.
and
A.D.
476 to the Visigoths who gave way to the Moors in
A.D.
711, Spain has been a crossroads for the three major religions of the world (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), a hotly contested land bridge between Europe and Africa, and a living museum to all the cultures who have come and been vanquished on its barren field.

This, too, is a source of pride for the tribes of Spain: their ability to withstand, everlast, and overcome.
Si Dios no fuese Dios, seria rey de España, y el de Francia su cocinero
goes the old Castilian saying, which means: If God were not God, he would make himself the king of Spain, with the king of France as his cook. As the Duke of Wellington once put it, boasting of Spain’s strength is the national weakness.

My first vision of Spain, however, suggested postapocalyptic desolation rather than any show of strength. It came on the overnight train from Paris while I was backpacking Europe in the mid-1980s during my junior year abroad. Sometime after dawn, I remember waking high in the Pyrenees when the train jerked to an abrupt halt. There was a long wait at the break of gauge on a lonely mountain pass, then the train lumbered forth again, entrance to the kingdom granted. Somewhere on the scree-draped slopes a single shepherd appeared with his flock. He bore a crook in one hand and a goatskin bag in another. This was ten years after the death of Franco but it could have been a hundred years ago.

The train had descended from the Pyrenees in a rush, as if we were a procession of maurading Celts or Gauls, Vandals or Visigoths. The mountains gave way to the Meseta, what was thought to have once been a single, Paleozoic volcano until it blew up and left this tableland of limestone covering about 40 percent of the country’s interior. At one time it had been thicketed with oaks, junipers, and evergreens, but deforestation beginning with the Romans left behind this desolation.

Atop these high plains we rode, sighting faraway villages and their silhouetted castles (hence the name Castile), then climbed over the Guadarrama and slid down into Madrid, a city that left a hard, jittery
first impression: the thin, pale light washing the buildings of their dimensions, the bellicose expressions of the heavily armed
guardia civil
provoking fear. After the cafés of Paris with their exquisite wines and creamy fromages, crepes and steak tartare—screaming
Adore me!
—Madrid was these store-bought hunks of unyielding cheese and brick-hard baguettes, consumed in leafless Buen Retiro Park.

Yet there was still something about the city, though I couldn’t say what at the time, something that grew on me later as I came and went, sometimes as a tourist, sometimes on assignment. It was Madrid’s authenticity, its unwillingness to bend, a naked trueness of self perched high on the central plains of Spain that, say, the whole Moulin Rouge show of Paris couldn’t claim. Madrid, dressed as it was, tasting as it did, prideful as hell, didn’t care what you thought about it on your junior-year backpacking trip. That was your problem.
^e

Perhaps some of that indifference epitomized the Castilian character. While Americans are quick to cast themselves as rugged individualists, the Castilians have a much longer history of going it alone against the world and, when need be, against each other. Before its rise as the lone global superpower in the fifteenth century, Castile was born a weakling, bereft of natural riches and defenses. For centuries the region between the Tagus and Duero rivers remained mostly uninhabitable
due to the pillagings of other kingdoms. For those who staked their lives there, the water was so fetid they were forced to brush their teeth with urine. It’s said that Sancho III of Navarre (d. 1035), whose son became the first king of Castile, slept with a horse in the royal bedchamber, always at the ready to ride against invaders. The mind-set persists.
^f

This life of danger and action, this prerogative to defend one’s precarious hold at all costs, is perhaps what gives such weight to the communal rituals of Castilian life, in particular the planting and harvesting of food, the fiestas, and even
los toros
, the bullfights, which belong to all of Spain. The bullfight is said to have had its origins in the mysterious Mithra religion, which took as its divine figure a young man killing a bull. One rite called for soldiers to be drenched in the blood of slaughtered bulls so they would be invincible in battle. And Castile especially prides itself on the invincibility of its legendary warriors, from the eleventh-century knight El Cid to the footballers of Real Madrid today.