The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (32 page)

By the time Ambrosio came down to the vineyard on the third day, the weather was sunny and warm again, back to the furnace of everlasting summer on the Meseta. We’d returned from our trip up north, having heard about the storm. Ambrosio was already sweating through his shirt as he made his way through the vines, boots sinking deep in the embankment of loose dirt. I followed as he walked with his sons, then bent down to inspect the damage. He picked a grape, holding it between his first finger and thumb. The skin was punctured and slit, and he grimaced. He picked more murdered grapes, making his way along one row. He broke loose a cluster and held it up
in the sun, then laid it down gently. He put his hands on his hips, exhaled.

“It’s the way of the field,” he said, as much to himself as to the rest of us. “When the harvest is good, you enter the temple. When it goes like this, you’re fucked, and must live with it.

“This is what it means to be an Old Castilian,” he said, looking out toward Mon Virgo, which levitated above us. “The weight of Old Castile falls on your back in moments like these, and you either have the strongest, widest back or you need to get out of here.”

He turned and trudged toward the road, the boys following.

When he came to the tractor, he glanced back at the vineyard, pressing his lips together. That evening he would be up at the bar, in the
bodega
, drinking, laughing, telling stories, singing—the most boisterous of them all, trying to forget—but now he looked once more on the wreckage.

“Honor the grapes,” he said in a hoarse voice to his sons, “because they were once whole like you.”

B
EYOND MY POSSIBLY NAÏVE BELIEF THAT AGRARIAN LIFE MIGHT
solve all of our problems, what rooted me first and foremost to Guzmán was Ambrosio’s story of the cheese. It had begun with my original deli fantasies, leading to the intensity of that first meeting with the cheesemaker—during which, like the greatest of tellers, he’d drawn me in and ensnared me—and leaving off with this sort of stalemate. There was something lurking behind Ambrosio’s tale that I felt compelled to know/not-know, and that hindered its full unfolding. What was it, though? What revelation could ever undo the spell, or undermine the Storyteller with a beautiful-terrible story to tell?

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Our summer was vanishing, in seemingly uneventful fashion, discounting the fact that everything felt eventful. Carlos had returned home with his family to get ready for the upcoming school year. My mother arrived for a visit,
^*
and left as
transfixed by Guzmán as we were. We began our own countdown—four, three, two weeks left—even as my page count in the telling room slowed to a dribble and then, to my alarm, started running backward with some ruthless self-editing: sixty-seven pages … seventy-three … seventy-five … fifty-eight … 
forty-nine
(!) …

Normally I would have fumed and fretted about this, but according to my book contract, I had more than a year left to finish a draft. More than enough time. We began to pack the plates, lamps, and knickknacks we’d acquired, and took them in two boxes to Ambrosio’s garage. We tried to milk our last moments of escape: in the fields and telling room with Ambrosio, at the
pantano
and pool on family outings, at night in the bar
^†
or streets. We’d celebrated May’s first birthday at the
fuente
above town, beneath the shade of huge oaks, the town bakers—Marcos and Ilena—arriving with their three-year-old daughter, Lucia, and a gorgeous vanilla-and-strawberry cake. We’d taken a bunch of family excursions with Ambrosio as our tour guide.

One, to a town called Covarrubias, transported us to a picturesque valley in the mountains about forty miles east of Guzmán. Famous for its black pudding, the town seemed to be a perpetual medieval fair and tourist attraction. Ambrosio led us through a crowd of lute players and costumed dancers, jesters and knights, chicken grilling over open flames, to a small chapel at the end of town. Inside, musicians were
playing ballads with antiquated instruments to a large crowd. The music filled the church, the voices and strings intermingling with clarity and feeling in that space. I had no idea what they were singing, but it was transfixing—and Ambrosio allowed himself to be transfixed by it. He stood for a long time in thought, then, when the concert ended, gestured for me to follow. He lumbered down a side aisle to two stones by the altar, etched with a name, Fernán González, the eighth-century count who ruled Castile, and that of his wife, Sancha.

Ambrosio knelt by the stones and ran his hand over them. “These are my ghosts,” he said. “The ghosts who made me. These are my ancestors. And this is one of my holy spots, where I feel most alive.”

In the waning days we made our farewells, with last dinners and visits. Fernando the Mute shimmered beneath his tree across from the church; Clemente still ambushed us with advice; the sheep floated up through town, then out to the
barcos
. There was a legendary afternoon when Leo and I were led down into a series of half-collapsed
bodegas
—was it a test of our mettle or a friendly gesture?—led there by loquacious Carlos the farmer and his small son Alvaro. It didn’t seem like a great idea, but we scrambled down into the earth, rump-sliding into the breach behind Carlos, slipping on scree and loose dirt until we were emboweled in guana-filled caverns, convinced that one sneeze would bring it all down on our heads, or that a wolf might come charging. Leo suddenly burst into tears, unloosing an orphan wail, and Carlos, who held a small candle as he led us deeper into complete claustrophobia, brushed his dirty hand over my boy’s head in reassurance, an act that startled Leo out of his fear while we plunged deeper.

Carlos was an intriguing figure, hyperindustrious, intelligent, and one of the hardest-working farmers in the village. He was an innovator, too, the only one at that time who had turned to organic farming, as much because he believed in its environmental benefits as because he realized there was a ripe global market, and profit, in it. I was often met by Carlos’s smiling face, up at his barn, as I returned from an early-morning run. He would begin telling stories even before I’d
slowed to a stop, and with my poor Spanish I strained for meaning while using my refined method of serious head nods and the repetition of the word
vale
—a Spanish version of okay—to convey understanding.

One time, as Carlos spoke of the logistics of keeping falcons in his attic, one of his mousing cats was run over in the road by a friend, who slowed his car to a stop while shaking his head, disappointed in himself. Carlos kept on with his story while his friend backed up past the cat, writhing and bleeding in the road, to offer an apology.

“Nahhh, hombre, no es problema,”
Carlos said. His friend insisted on his sorryness, and Carlos leaned on his car, took up some tertiary matter with him that had nothing to do with the cat, and sent him on his way, beaming goodbye. Then he walked back, grabbed a shovel, and picked up another story—this about an unprecedented event, a four-mile road race held one year in Guzmán, the town innovators thinking this might attract some kind of crowd, or at least a human being who could actually
run
four miles. Regarding himself as the fittest person in Guzmán, Carlos entered the race, but riding in a tractor all day is different from physical activity, and he realized after sprinting the first quarter mile that he’d greatly overestimated his cardiovascular fitness and now found himself on the verge of dying. True to the Spanish character, this fight with death led Carlos to vow that he would finish the race no matter what. In the end, the record would show him finishing in last place among the five runners who had entered, but he still reigned as town champ, given that no one from Guzmán had entered the contest. “Would I do it again?” he mused. “I might.” Then, with the shovel, he buried the cat.

On another late-summer evening Don Honorato invited us to his
bodega
, a neatly kept cave halfway up the hill. It was a perfect night, temperate and clear, and Don Honorato, regal with his carefully parted silver hair, told us a bit of his own fascinating story. His mother had disappeared when he was very young (that was the verb he used—
desaparecer
—but he didn’t specify whether she’d died), and his
father was a delivery man who often went to the pine forests in the mountains of Soria in his mule-drawn cart to sell cattle feed, hay, and cereals harvested from the fields near Guzmán. This left behind Honorato, who at the age of six became a seller of spirits—
aguardiente
, to be specific. He was charged with riding his horse to fill huge jugs with the stuff at a nearby still run by women, who often took pity on him and fed him breakfast. Then he carried on to the fields, sometimes riding ten miles out and ten back, this diminutive child with big ears, selling liquor to the field hands. The teachers at school understood young Honorato’s situation and were lenient as he came and went. But Don Honorato acknowledged that he grew up with a tight ball in his belly and a chip on his shoulder.

He remembered once visiting a teacher who played cards with the priest. Honorato had committed some youthful transgression, and for his punishment the men made him kneel, arms outstretched with a book in either hand, holding them aloft. Honorato held the books as best he could, body beginning to tremble uncontrollably, and when both men started to giggle, the boy grew furious, rose, and with his right hand threw one book at the priest and with his left threw the other at the teacher, then sprinted away. He would have been in big trouble, probably beaten badly with a stick, as happened in those days, had the men not, as he put it, “shit themselves laughing.”

As with so many instances in the village, I found myself surprised by this excavated history. Here all summer I’d spoken to Don Honorato daily as he stood watering his lawn in two pairs of pants. I’d thought of him as almost erudite, admired his paternal manner and his considered words of wisdom, especially in regard to keeping grass green beneath the Castilian sun. His fixation was almost comical, and at the same time deeply sentimental, for his wife had loved the lawn. I realized I’d come to depend on him for those pleasant conversations without really knowing the first thing about him. My projection of him—faithful—stood in for everything he might have actually been, or wasn’t at all. The truth was, I didn’t have a clue.

Now Don Honorato broke into song, conjuring the lyrics of his youth with ease. His voice was tinged with phlegm, but his was a sweet, in-tune tenor. The words filled the twilight:

It was a song that the men of Guzmán once sang to their women, at fiestas, the bar, the
bodega
, to celebrate their beauty. Don Honorato said he’d been asked to sing it by friends and acquaintances from Bilbao to Madrid, everywhere really. It brought people back to another time. He couldn’t remember exactly who had written it, but it was indicative of the way small villages self-mythologized, of how they reminded themselves that theirs was the charmed life, that theirs—and ours—right here and now was the magic moment. That was what we’d begun to find out for ourselves, grounding ourselves among the grounded, two feet on this lawn, water glubbing its nourishment.

A
S PART OF OUR
goodbye tour I went to see Emilia, the mayor of Guzmán, in her modest home directly across from the palace. Her front door opened onto the road, and the downstairs was dark, with low ceilings, which made it feel burrowlike.

“Hombre, venga!”
she said, motioning me in. Though by now most people might have seen me as Ambrosio’s lapdog—and perhaps rightly so—and though that fact should have meant the poisoning of any relationship between Emilia and me, the truth is that I was fond of the mayor. I’d first encountered her during an early visit to Guzmán, when I’d attended Mass one Sunday. Afterward she’d approached with a big smile, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Would you like to see our bells?” We passed through a door at the back of the church, and spiraled up to the bell tower above. Suspended from open arches were four bells, made of bronze. They’d been crafted by a reputable German bell maker, Emilia said, and were rung only on special occasions: before Mass, to start the fiesta, or when someone died. Back during the war, the bells would sound a warning when bombing sorties flew overhead, and people took shelter in their
bodegas
and basements.