Authors: Michael Paterniti
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (31 page)
Given the immensity of the task, the emotion it undammed, and the strenuous, at times threatening, condemnation it evoked in certain pro-Franco quarters, Cristóbal seemed outwardly stoic.
a
He was compiling a report that would be released through the University of Burgos itemizing his findings, identifying the dead and describing their last moments. He planned to deliver his results in a public forum in Aranda, but he admitted that, judging by his encounters so far with families of the deceased, it would be difficult bringing them back to the precise moment their worlds exploded. And yet nothing could
stop him now. He had the righteousness of a storyteller, recovering time, reanimating the ancestors, telling the most difficult story, based on forensic truth, in order to set it free, once and for all.
“It’s the most important work,” he said, “finding the voice of the dead.”
*
Raúl González Blanco, the all-time leading goal scorer for Real Madrid: Handsome, speedy, prolific, he represented a fluency that Leo now found his three-year-old self aspiring to. The game’s geometry and constant teamwork, its action and its postgoal celebrations, all coalesced in his mind as something greater than the New York Yankees. When we procured tickets to see a game at Bernabeu, Real Madrid’s 85,000-capacity home stadium, his conversion was complete. Before his eyes on that emerald pitch came the new knights of Spain, and Raúl had a true, alert, generous playing style, scoring two goals that night. I only wished that Leo would follow Raúl’s muted postgoal ritual of kissing his wedding ring, but soon at the
frontón
, there was Leo after scoring, shucking his shirt, waving it like the more flamboyant megalomaniacs of European soccer as the tractors passed.
†
This mule-headedness had otherwise served Castile well at its inception. According to a Library of Congress study of Spain, Castile was born as a loose collection of strongholds in the tenth century, when the kingdom of León looked to create a buffer between the Christian north and the rest of Spain, which was Muslim. Castile not only had the blessings of the kings of León but was granted
fueros
, which were special dispensations that left it virtually autonomous. “Castile developed a distinct society with its own dialect, values, and customs shaped by the hard conditions of the frontier,” reads the study. “Castile also created a caste of hereditary warriors whom the frontier ‘democratized’: all warriors were equal, and all men were warriors.”
When it came to the
palacio
, the sense among the townspeople was the opposite: that all men weren’t created equal, that
“los Ambrosios”
were trying to take what they saw as theirs, and this gave rise to an atavistic fury.
‡
Depending on the source, fatalities would total more than 350,000, including tens of thousands of “enemies of the state” who were murdered after the cessation of hostilities, and tens of thousands who withered of starvation. In addition, some number of children (sources claim anywhere from “hundreds” to 30,000) were forcibly separated from their leftist parents. Atrocities by the Nationalists, known as the White Terror, outnumbered those by the Republicans. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe on April 26, 1937—an incident that claimed up to 1,000 lives and was immortalized by Pablo Picasso—became perhaps the most famous, but a brutal incident at Badajoz on August 14, 1936, was more typical: a massacre in which civilian “prisoners” were gathered in the town’s bullring and then systematically slaughtered by firing squad, leaving between 2,000 and 4,000 dead, some tortured and mutilated by
bandillero
lances. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ response—known as the Red Terror—featured attacks on the Spanish clergy, including a parish priest in central Spain who was forced to reenact a parody of Christ’s crucifixion and was finally shot, and the Bishop of Jaén and his sister, who were allegedly paraded before thousands of ecstatic spectators and put to death by a female executioner nicknamed
La Pecosa
, the freckled one.
§
Cliché until it wasn’t: During this same time, in 2003, NASA had programmed the Hubble telescope to photograph what appeared from Earth as a thumbnail of empty, black sky. But what emerged when four hundred images were superimposed as “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field” astonished even the astronomers: Out of that nothing patch came ten thousand galaxies and a thousand trillion stars just like our sun.
‖
Signed two years after Franco’s death, the 1977 Pacto de la Moncloa, known as “the pact of forgetting,” offered amnesty to those who might have been implicated in atrocities. While the pact ensured the transition from dictatorship to democracy, it also had the adverse effect of silencing history. When the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory began its work, editorials decried the exhumations, and vocal critics lined up to warn about the dangers of going back to the chaotic days when both Republicans and Nationalists alike had committed atrocities. If people started digging, the argument went, who knew where it all might end? What the new generation didn’t understand, according to the older one, was that everybody—
everybody
—was implicated.
a
Later, when I spoke to another association member in Madrid, the researcher José Ignacio Casado, he described the pressure this reclamation work had put on his marriage. His wife’s family had been Nationalists, and were displeased with his investigations. His wife’s feeling was that for every victim, you pulled up a killer. Which hadn’t stopped Ignacio Casado. In another grave near Aranda, fifty bodies had been buried by street sweepers. One man heard that his grandfather had not been properly executed and was found alive near the ditch; the story went that, when he claimed to be thirsty, his attackers urinated on him, then finished him off. Later, some of these killers were seen walking through town in the clothes of the dead. “My wife and I almost split,” said Ignacio Casado, “because she knows that I’m a very thorough person, and that if I’m going to do this, I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
HONOR THE GRAPES
“There was something in the air above the village.… And then it fell.”
T
HE WEATHER OF
C
ASTILE OWES ITS PARTICULARS TO A DYNAMIC
known as the North Atlantic oscillation, which is defined by an atmospheric low that hovers near Iceland and a high that does the same near the Azores. The fluctuations in differences between these—in the various collisions of Arctic chill and warm southern air—define the intensity of the winds and storms buffeting Galicia, the piling clouds that gain momentum as they race across the Meseta to Guzmán, sometimes hurling lightning and rock. The seemingly endless, heat-battered days of summer can change to mayhem within minutes, which is why the Old Castilian always watches the sky for signs—and never more so than when the grapes go from being hard pellets to fleshy baubles, when they first come into their nubile own and ripen with juicy guts, and the countdown to harvest begins.
That summer, there’d been little chatter about what kind of grapes the vineyards might yield. Perhaps it was superstition not to
talk about them before their time. But the weather had been scorching and dry, perfect for the vines. Under Ambrosio’s direction, Josué, of the flowing locks, and Kiké, of the Mohawk and many piercings, had lavished care and attention on the vines. They’d clipped and fed and sprayed. And the closer we came to September and the harvest, the more vulnerable it all seemed. In the dead heat of those long summer days, time crawled. The suspense became unbearable.
It was during this time that Sara and I loaded up the kids and headed north to Cantabria for a brief getaway. One evening while we were gone, Ambrosio found himself in the barn, putting up bales of hay, when he first heard a soft pinging over his head, and he thought,
Good, it’s going to rain, it’s going to rain and clean off the leaves and moisten the dirt a little. It’s going to water the vines and the worms and the earth
.
In this moment, he had no inkling that anything might be amiss. He’d spent the day with his sons. There’d been some minor repairs on one of the tractors, which Kiké had handled. Josué was irrigating, adjusting the huge sprinklers that arced water over the dry fields in a thick, cool spray. Another day full of hours to add to the thousands they’d spent already. After stacking the hay, Ambrosio planned to go up and say goodnight to his parents, maybe have a quick drink at the bar, and then be home for
cena
.
Later, when Ambrosio spoke to Kiké, trying to trace the origin of the disaster, Kiké described a strange occurrence. He’d been up on the
páramo
at about 8:30
P.M.
, when clouds began to gather and a wind picked up, a very dry, hot wind. What surprised Kiké was that behind the wind came a sudden blast of cold air, as if it were pouring from above or from all sides, frigid and directionless. The cab of his tractor was buffeted; branches came loose from the trees, and the dust swirled.
There was no inkling of this in the barn sheltering Ambrosio and the bales of hay, just the benevolent ping-pinging on the roof. With the passing moments, however, the hits became louder, more
insistent and tinnier, picking up in frequency. Ambrosio listened in the dark to the tumult of what soon sounded like pots and pans smashing against each other. He frowned and drew air through his nostrils, but all he could smell was the hay, piled high in the open bay. It was a remarkable shade of gold, bright and burnt pale enough to give off a glow in the murk. And when freshly cut like this, it flooded the barn with the scent of Castilian earth. Ambrosio paused and breathed in again, almost tentatively. It was just as he thought: Through an eddy came the smell of ice. The time between realization and physical reaction was a matter of seconds, and sluicing through those seconds were other bitternesses, a lifetime of them, revisited. His voice rose reflexively.
“Me cago en la leche de Dios,”
he said out loud. I shit in the milk of God. “I … SHIT … IN … THE … MILK!” The hunting dogs looked up from their bed in one of the stalls.
There was something in the air above the village, above the atmospheric layers of dream-ghost-metaphor that already hovered over the village (the flung birds were revenge; the flying leaves, ancestors). And then it fell:
el granizo
, hail. From the cold ceiling of a massive cloud, the ice guillotined, gathering rime as it hurtled earthward.
The cloud covered a mile and a half, and moved whichever way the wind blew it. Ambrosio followed the hail’s pattern across the roof, intuitively marking its path. Following that line, and at that speed, it would strike the family vineyards within minutes. This was something that couldn’t be undone. The clouds didn’t tally all the hours a father and his sons spent in the fields. The wind didn’t know that wine was a religion to these people, as precious as any family heirloom. (Ambrosio used to say that his father always perked up at Mass whenever the wine was being blessed, that he would literally spring from a deep sleep for that promise of a holy swig.) And the hail, the hail struck only what stood between it and the ground. When it hit the grapes—halfway to being ripe,
not young enough to heal magically—it ripped and slashed and ruined.
*
To Ambrosio, the grapes were alive, and helpless, and being slaughtered. To think about it was nearly too much, even for a man who’d seen it all, who when he’d returned to his village at nineteen—the now tender age of his boy Kiké—had vowed to live his life as an Old Castilian, burdened and set free by the land and its harsh vicissitudes. His pact had been simple: He’d accept what the earth and sky gave.
But why did he have to accept this? Just to consider the intricacies of the vine, especially the older ones, was to confront the intelligence of grapes. The leaves acted as solar panels, tilting toward the sun in the cool of morning, allowing light into the plant, and then creating an altogether impenetrable canopy to survive the heat of midday. Drought was often the vine’s moment of reckoning, and the plant would do everything it could for the grape. A stressed vine curtailed its growth and underwent hormonal changes to survive the rest of the hot summer. It became tough and focused, and the oldest were the most tough and focused. As a result, its fruit became more concentrated and flavorful, something to revere.
The cloud crept across the barn, taking the noise with it, then knifed for the field just below, picking up the road and following it to the vineyard. It sprayed hail in indiscriminate patterns, sometimes ceasing for hundreds of yards, only to begin again. Now, it came in rapid fire. The vines and grapes took the blows like bodies at a massacre.
Ambrosio sat in the barn, smoking cigarettes. Twenty minutes passed. He climbed into his tractor, drove to his mother’s house, and gave her a kiss. His mother didn’t say anything to him. She knew what had happened, she knew how her son was. How could you not consider yourself damned, to lose your grapes to hail after all that work? He said good night and drove home in the tractor. The headlights shone on the damage, branches and leaves in the road, trees down at the edge of the fields. And yet by the time he’d made it to his own home and had some food, when it came time to sleep, he slept soundly. He couldn’t visit the vineyard until three days after the storm because the thought of it turned his stomach, but that night he remembered the worst and most difficult things done to him—including the cheese—and that perspective allowed him to sleep.
The days after the storm were cool and cloudy, the skies low and leaden: sweater weather. The villagers assessed the damage and once again marveled at how the cloud had left a patchwork of destruction. The vast Pedrosa vineyards, which occupied the rising lands southwest of the village, had remained untouched, but not more than a mile away, there were vineyards that had lost 90 percent of their grapes. Some quietly rejoiced; others, like Ambrosio’s sons, took to the fields in green rain slickers, spraying the broken-skinned grapes with fungicide, leaving what looked to be green paint on the wreckage in hopes of stanching disease, in hopes that something might be saved.
