The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (27 page)

T
HE KEY TO THE TELLING ROOM WAS A CONICAL PIECE OF METAL
, an artifact, it seemed, from Middle Earth. Because of its weight, I had to steer it with two hands into the lock and then crank it counterclockwise, whereupon the crosshatched wooden door floated open. Up five steps was the telling room itself, with its white stucco walls, benches and table, and the musty smell of hay and wet clay. When I threw open the shutters, the sun and warmth surged, bringing it to life.

Ambrosio had urged me to write here, on the plank table beneath the blue china plate of saints and a poster of Spanish cheeses, with the last precious tin of Páramo de Guzmán thirty feet below in the cave. As often as I could, I came here and spread out my notes, set up my laptop, and then sat staring at the
porrón
full of Ambrosio’s homemade wine, so fresh it had a little fizz to it. It glittered scarlet, working its hypnotic effect. Here I was in Castile, trying to live by the old code, and the computer and the
porrón
were at war with each other. My modern gizmo versus the time-honored decanter of the Old Castilian.

A thousand words and then a sip, I told myself. It’d be my reward. Make it five hundred and then it … okay, call it two-fifty. Eventually I gave in, wooing the
porrón
as if were my Juliet—“
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear
 .…” I tipped it high in the air and drank in big, satisfying gulps.
^*
So many gulps that I soon found myself giddy, singing, mawkish. I banged on the keyboard, amazing myself with verbiage, sometimes writing out the lyrics to old Who songs as if they were just occurring to me. This is how I quickly became disabused of the notion that the writer—your Hemingways and Faulkners, your Dylan Thomases and Tennessee Williamses, indulging in smoky spirits, writing legless and bladdered—could somehow, under the influence, muster grandiloquent prose, let alone
any
prose. I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance—and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs.

Admittedly, it was slow going. I had ten, then twenty pages … then twenty-five. Another few weeks, and I had thirty-five. I threw it all out and started again. It wasn’t just the wine. I found myself struggling with how to capture Ambrosio, who somehow remained just out of reach when I went to render him on the page. His mild recalcitrance to revisiting his loss made it more difficult.
“Hombre,”
he said in response to any question about the cheese, “why would you want to ruin a perfectly good day talking about all
that
again?”

His reluctance extended to the court cases, too, which were still in progress. He allowed that they were proceeding in a variety of courts, in Burgos and Madrid, that there’d been victories and setbacks, but I never was privy to details—and never asked to speak with Ambrosio’s lawyer because … well, something stopped me short. It was the same
thing that stopped me from going to see Julián, something I knew I’d eventually have to do, and filled me with growing dread. Why? I was a journalist used to getting in and out, asking tough questions, checking off my sources with ruthless efficiency. Here, Ambrosio Molinos was my only source, and for some reason, I kept it that way. Maybe I thought if I started asking around about the cheese it would violate an important trust we’d established, that it might suggest that I didn’t take him at his word. And that’s all an Old Castilian had in this world: his word.

A
NOTHER HINDRANCE TO
widening my circle of sources was that I spent almost all of my time with Ambrosio. He became the dominating force, operating under the assumption that I wanted to do whatever he had on the agenda. He showed up early in the morning, and ended each day with “What’s our plan for tomorrow?” And although I’d encouraged and invited such intimacy, it took the occasional day off for me to realize how completely I’d fused myself to his world.

One Sunday when Ambrosio was on the road, Carlos and I arranged to visit the cheese factory. We drove from Guzmán to Roa, parked before a chain-link gate topped by spools of barbed wire, and waited. I felt exposed on that roadside, preparing to visit the “dead cheese.” As if committing my own betrayal of Ambrosio.

Eventually a man drove up in a clattery car and disembarked, squinting, hand outstretched. He wore a T-shirt under an off-white sport coat that bagged over his thin, wiry frame. He had a scar that ran from the middle of his neck to a spot below the lobe of one ear, and he rubbed his index finger against his thumb as if working a grain of sand. This was José, the alleged turncoat and the last one remaining from the old days, who agreed to see us despite the fact that Páramo de Guzmán was shut down for the weekend.

He unlocked the barbed-wire gate, and we entered.

The cheese factory had recently been robbed. That was José’s first declaration after the niceties. Thieves had jimmied the lock on the
gate, then backed a large truck up to a corrugated metal building under cover of darkness. After disabling the alarm system, they had broken two bolted locks on the door and then loaded the truck with crates of cheese. José estimated that the heist had cost the operation somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000. “This stuff is gold,” he said. When I asked if there were any suspects, he shook his head. When I asked if anyone might have it in for him, he cocked his head, looked suspiciously at me for a moment, and then said, “No one that I can think of.”

José led us through the first outbuilding, explaining things as we went in a most accommodating manner. A recent storm had flooded the workroom: every day a new challenge, it seemed. The cheese, he said, took at least fourteen months from the first boiling vat of milk to the dense wedges that went out into the world. Sometimes it was aged for up to eighteen months before being sealed in tins of olive oil. That’s what it took, he said, to make an award-winning cheese like this.

Did he see in Carlos and myself prospective cheese buyers or big-time businessmen? I can’t imagine we gave off the scent of success, but nonetheless, he meant to put his company’s best foot forward, and I felt both an irrational dislike for him born of a protectiveness for Ambrosio and a tinge of pity, as if we were in the act of ambushing him somehow.

“Who founded this business?” I asked him, playing the calculating naïf.

“Ambrosio Molinos,” he said, with no hint of malice. “He’s originally from Guzmán, but he left town to earn a living in transportation. He still has farms in Guzmán, though. In May and June he’s practically living there, planting and harvesting cereal and grains.” José continued without encouragement, rubbing his fingers, blinking sleepily. “He was in his thirties when he started, and I was very young, nineteen, when I began here.”

“And you’re still very young,” I offered, though not without a liminal note of sarcasm, for in my mind’s eye I could see Ambrosio, a vibrant man full of warmth and good humor who had suddenly aged
before my eyes when describing what had happened to his beloved cheese.

“It’s my birthday,” he said.

His birthday … 
today
? What was he doing showing a high-school Spanish teacher and a journalist around a cheese factory? He was, it appeared, guileless, incapable of diabolical plot, another cog in the machine. He was someone with parents, secret wishes, a cake with candles, name smeared in frosting. He was someone proud to have a job, who took pride in the product he made. José filled the vacuum created by my sudden silence with a description of how the milk was heated from 4 to 32 degrees Celsius, until it became cottage-cheesy. “We grind it down into little curds,” he said. “If you want a liter of cheese, you need to start with five liters of milk. And the leftover liquid becomes a waste management issue: You can’t just throw it in the river, because it has high acidity.”

He showed us long tanks of coagulating milk, boiled until the surface thickened, when cheese harps were employed to separate the curds and whey. He showed us presses where the curds were molded and forced into blocks. There were drum strainers and cookers and hoops. And the overwhelming impression inside that warehouse was that this was no mom-and-pop outfit but one of gleaming technology and an antiseptic cleanliness, of hairnets and silver tanks. There was no straw on the ground. No stable across the street from the house in which the cheesemaker had been born. No “Eurekas” and the joy of discovering a new world. There weren’t even sheep to milk here; instead, tank trucks drove up to the gates bearing thousands of gallons of milk from whoever offered the best price.

It became clear that José had no filter, would say almost anything. He told us that Harrods, the famous London department store, had carried, then recently dropped, the cheese. “Our problem is that we have short supply because it takes so long to produce this cheese. They got angry with us and canceled their order.” When I asked if he remembered the first time he’d tried the cheese, he said, “When I tasted it, the only thing I wanted to do was cry. I didn’t like it at all. It has a
very strong taste. It’s a very radical cheese. It tastes like the land here. Select clients prefer this type of cheese because it’s made the traditional way, the way it’s always been made in Castile.”

One of those clients, as I already knew, was the king of Spain, Juan Carlos. “Not only does the king love it, but there’s an official distributor to the royal family who distributes our cheese,” he said. He turned to continue our tour, pointing to a saltwater bath. “After the cheese is pressed, you have to drop it in here so it gets some salt.” He showed us to a room full of metallic coffinlike cylinders in which the cheese was aged in order to prevent mold and bacteria from growing. And finally we entered a huge, temperature-controlled space where the cheese, stacked in wheels thirty high, was further aged in temperatures between 7 and 9 degrees Celsius, at 77 percent humidity. In all, José claimed, there was more than 120,000 pounds of cheese currently in storage, waiting to fully ripen and then be shipped out.

Eventually he led us to the back of the warehouse, where we found wooden pallets piled high with those distinctive white-and-gold tins. For a moment I wanted to give that cheese a chance, wanted to believe that it wasn’t a satanic cheese at all, or a lame one that hadn’t won an award in more than a decade. I wanted to believe that this cheese still embodied the values that Ambrosio had conferred upon it, the ones that had first brought it such attention and acclaim. The abundance seemed nearly perverse, like a garage full of shiny vintage cars or shelves lined with Fabergé eggs. We flitted before those tins, then José conducted us outside, across an expanse of loose dirt, to show off the girders of a new structure, a winery that would soon house an impressive operation to rival, he promised, some of the best vineyards in the area.

Of course, Ambrosio felt ever present here. I could almost see him counting canisters of sheep milk or checking on the inventory of rennet. I could see him hulking across the parking lot, falling into his vehicle, heading out to check up on the local shepherds. I could imagine those former halcyon days, the burst of hivelike activity after Ambrosio had first purchased the factory, when everything must have
seemed possible, and when the operation had been limited to the old stone building, well before the warehouses had been built. I imagined Ambrosio arriving early and leaving late, perhaps alone in the factory at the end of the day—gazing on the tins waiting to go out into the world to transmit his love, to bring back memory—and for one moment confessing that here he’d left some sort of mark, every day making the king’s cheese. But then an Old Castilian knew better than to count his good fortune.

At the end of the tour José took us into the stone building, said to be five hundred years old, the original cheese factory with its underground cellar. He led us down a long stone ramp to the basement, empty now, with cobwebs garlanding the rafters, where Ambrosio had risked his life when that beam broke, had held it in place with his bare hands until they were able to stabilize the structure. That’s how far he was willing to go: life and limb, everything for his dear cheese. In the name of Páramo de Guzmán, he was capable of superhuman effort.

Upstairs, in a tasting room, José poured a red wine for us, then reached below an oak counter, retrieving a tin of Páramo de Guzmán. He worked a can opener,
una lata-abrir
, until the lid came free. Inside, bathed in olive oil, were two wedges of rich, amber color. It didn’t look like dead cheese at all. José offered a piece and I took it, stealing a glance at Carlos, who took another, attaching little ceremony to what otherwise might have been momentous had Ambrosio been our guide.

I took a halfhearted bite.

I’ll admit it: It was good cheese. It was really good cheese. But it was all wrong. José watched me closely, gauging my reaction as if a substantial sale depended on it. Under the full force of his attention—his fingers rubbing that grain of sand—I slurped wine and masticated without thought, nodding politely. It was sharp, that much I can say, but had I tasted centuries of love and care, of generosity and perfection, as defined by the Molinos family? Had some mystical transference occurred between this substance and my tongue—and then spread through my body and out the top of my head?

Nah.

I faked it pretty well, though, as did Carlos, and we bought a couple of tins by way of thanking José, the birthday boy, for his time. With that ersatz, soulless cheese stashed in our trunk (hidden there because I didn’t want Ambrosio to know I’d met the enemy and paid cash for his contraband), we made our way back to Guzmán, wondering what a tin of the original Molinos cheese might taste like—and if one could really taste a difference at all.

J
UST WHEN IT COULDN’T
get any hotter, it did—until we felt as if we were living life on a griddle, oil spitting and stinging, our bodies crisping like duck skin. The grapes curled deeper into their vines, and now came that pall of midsummer death moving in wisps and bony fingers, turning the land brown, and the pavement to goo. It drove us toward shade and cool water. In the absence of any discussion about his cheese—any late-breaking murder bulletins or court case updates—we retired again and again to the shadows of the telling room, where, between long pours from the
porrón
, Ambrosio spoke.