The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (33 page)

Short and busy, with a raspy contralto, Emilia smoked cigarettes automatically, with zeal. She made tea, brought out a plate of
pasteles
; her fine, feathered pet, a white parakeet, flew through the cramped rooms, eventually perching on my shoulder. Although at this point I could fumble a few questions in Spanish and understand some in return, I clicked on my tape recorder as backup. The parakeet muttered; Emilia lit a cigarette.

“Que tal, Miguel?”
she said. “Has it been a good summer?”

“Marvelous,” I said. “Magical.” She smiled and repeated
“Bien, bien.”
Sitting across from her now, I regarded her as one of my
majos
—if I had
majos
here.
^§
And I marveled at how similar she was
to Ambrosio in her energy, warmth, and decisiveness. Their alikeness made it easy to understand how they’d been friends, and why they might be enemies. The cause of their rift was, as Ambrosio’s daughter, Asunita, had told me, “forgotten,” but apparently unsolvable now. Had Emilia been behind the flyer campaign that drove Ambrosio from Guzmán? Had Ambrosio started the pernicious gossip that turned public opinion against Emilia’s mayoral doings, running his own shadow administration out of the bar? Who knew? But these were the chiseled narrative lines that their enmity ran on.

We started with chitchat, how the children were doing, the shortening days and cooler weather, how soon we would be leaving. She asked about my book; I told her it was going well.
Very
well. And super. I described our field trip to Covarrubias, mentioning that Ambrosio had been our tour guide. If the segue was ham-handed and Columbo-like, I didn’t care.

“Una pregunta,”
I said. “What do you remember about that time when Ambrosio wanted to move his cheesemaking operation into the
palacio
?”

“Hombre,” said Emilia, shaking her hand as if she’d just touched something very hot. “It was a long time ago.” It was hard for her to speak openly about anything, she said. Her job as mayor required impartiality, for she was often called upon to mediate various land disputes,
financial issues, or tensions between neighbors. But she admitted that she was tiring of attacks on her character, most of them related to her handling of the recent state-funded renovation of the
palacio
, which was still in process. If she’d indeed faced off with Ambrosio over possession of the building all those years ago, she’d won. At least temporarily. But it came with a cost. When I told her that I’d heard inferences that she had something to do with the flyer campaign that ran Ambrosio out of town, she looked sad. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

In the Guzmánian sense of time, Emilia had been an interloper, which made her a target, too. She’d moved here, to her husband’s village, almost thirty years ago, while in her early twenties. Together they had two children, a boy and a girl. They were like any other family here. They went to church. They became embroiled in town life, the town had elected her mayor, and now, after working so hard for her family and community, it seemed Emilia was wrung out, struggling to find herself. “I’ve tried for four years to bring a cultural life to this village,” she said, emitting an exasperated puff. “I have two more years left in my term. It’s lonely being mayor, hombre,” she said.

I could imagine it, especially for someone with her energy. The day we’d first met, she’d pointed out from our bell-tower perch all the improvements she hoped to bring to the village, from gussying up the trash-ridden playground and cemetery to the introduction of streetlights. But there was hardly money in the budget, and change didn’t strike everybody as a good thing, though it kept coming in small, personal ways: Someone died, someone went to a nursing home. Someone, like the bright young woman Rosa, moved back to care for her dad, Antonio, the Andalusian.

Rosa was an interesting case study. In her twenties, sweet and funny, she was a good friend of Asunita’s. Once she’d worked at Pinto’s bar and then at a hotel in Roa, where the gossip mill surrounding her and her possible suitors was always grinding. The rumors were so pervasive that she could barely converse with a boy before there were inventions of a torrid affair. This affliction, for that’s what it really was, seemed to place Rosa on the defensive, slowly removing her from
some life she might have dreamed for herself, for to have fallen in love, or even let herself go for a night, was to have fulfilled someone else’s pernicious prophecy of her, when quite the opposite was true. She seemed to be sacrificing life to be here, not living it.

Emilia’s enervation, meanwhile, was the kind that settled into the bones over time. Sameness was Guzmán’s charm and curse: Pinto sat behind the bar, grumpy or happy, ignoring or doing his job. The same farmers came and went from the fields, sometimes in a new shirt or with a haircut, sometimes shaven or hung over. The old men gathered for cards and the old women swept out their houses. The sun rose and set. Opinions ossified, never to change. Spring came, followed by summer, the hail, the gathering cumuli of autumn, the crippling blast of winter wind. People were friendly and remote. Grudges were frozen in blue ice. Was this glory or closed-minded obstinacy?

Because Guzmán was so strictly bound by the codes and rituals of its past, because someone in that tight circle of eighty people was always naysaying your actions, it seemed inevitable that defeatism would set in—and Emilia’s seemed to reside in the unrealized visions she’d had for Guzmán as a tourist destination. When validation wasn’t forthcoming, when the hordes didn’t arrive (Castile was never
ever
going to break the grip of Provence or Tuscany) and her efforts at refurbishing the castle were second-guessed, something in her seemed to have broken. And now she echoed what Pelayo had observed.

“Little villages like this have a way of squelching your dreams,” she said. In that moment, she could have been speaking for both herself and Ambrosio.

It put me in mind of a story I’d heard about the man who owned our summer rental. He’d retired to Guzmán, his birth village, with his wife. Then he built his dream house, not fancy or perhaps even attractive from the outside, but its virtues were its amazing views, light, and space. When it was finished, they moved in, but his wife was soon diagnosed with cancer and died quickly. In the aftermath, the man—I’ll call him Consuelo—appeared to let himself go, didn’t
wash, developed a host of mysterious physical ailments. The village worried for him in his grieving. They felt they would soon lose him, too. But then something amazing happened, something that should happen to all lonely old people: He fell in love.

The woman was from a town in a different region, but she came to live with him in that house on the hill. And, oh, how they carried on, kissing in public (unheard of!), dancing in the street (
escándalo!
), and, most shocking of all, sunbathing nude on the rooftop patio. Consuelo would go down to the bar with his pals and share certain intimate details of the boudoir. People were titillated, incensed.

The shock of the residents—and worse, his children—wasn’t something that concerned Consuelo. Yet he must have been worried for his paramour, for she was the one suddenly branded with a scarlet letter. Guzmán wasn’t a stage set for the scene in a movie where two lovers trip over each other in a trance of self-referential adoration, then make out in a fountain. The priest spoke from the pulpit about modesty, restraint. The woman was shunned. Eventually the lovebirds took wing to her town and were rarely seen in Guzmán again, which was cause for some relief, for had they continued with their liberal ways, who knew how it would have ended?

“Gossip is the only activity here besides television,” Asunita once told me, “especially in the winter.”

“You can count on your enemies,” said Emilia now, “but sometimes it’s the one who smiles who keeps you up at night.”

There she sat, a crucifix on the wall behind her, framed photos all around: the children, a wedding shot, Emilia with her young family at the beach. She looked like a kid, tanned and full of life.

“Someday,” she said, sighing, poised with a cup of tea in one hand and cigarette in the other, parakeet fluttering in the air behind her head, “I may move somewhere far away from here.” But something in her face in that sallow light made me think that it was almost certain she wouldn’t.

N
EAR THE END
of our stay, in the first days of September, Ambrosio invited us up to his
bodega
for a
merienda
. Though the invitation came as a matter of course, spoiled as we were by him, he informed us that he was also gathering some friends, which added a hint of uncharacteristic formality. What friends—and for what occasion?

When Sara and I arrived, towing Leo in his Real Madrid jersey and May in a red dress and hat that described a big triangle below and a smaller one on top (as if she’d arrived directly from some Paris of one-year-old sophisticates), we found a covey of Ambrosio’s best
majos
, all of them in various aspects of enjoyment and inebriation. There were the bloodshot eyes and crooked-tooth smiles, the togetherness that comes from elbow-to-elbow eating and drinking, from conversation that forms a bridge connecting human landmasses, all of it the trademark of Ambrosio’s telling room. Even before we were halfway up the hill we could hear throaty laughter pouring over the village.

Inside, the windows were thrown open and a breeze stirred the smoky room. Mon Virgo loomed to the east, and through the casement the roofs seemed lit on fire with their glowing red
tejas
, or tiles. On the table a minor feast awaited: clay pots covered with foil, plates of chorizo, the
porrón
and
aguardiente
going around, bread and olives. We were met by the scent of some sort of consommé—and then Ambrosio, with his great blast of welcome. “AMIIIIIGOS!!” he boomed, drawing out the word, singing it. He pinched May’s cheeks and lifted Leo from the ground, swung him, and placed him down gently again, his feet finding purchase in slow motion, like an astronaut first touching the moon.

Ambrosio introduced the men at the table, many of whom I’d met during the summer. Ambrosio Senior was there, ears jutting, that smile on his face, working the
porrón
when conscious, provoking his son to make a familiar joke about how, after years of avid tippling, after thousands of gallons of wine waterfalling from spout to mouth, his father had notched a groove on his front tooth where the liquid pooled before flowing down his gullet. Don Ambrosio nodded at that
and slurred something that everyone laughed at—and then, in the moment’s diversion, snuck another lengthy pull from the
porrón
.

We were told that there was stew in one pot, and in another,
orejas de las ovejas
. OH-
RAY
-HAS DE LAS O-
VAY
-HAS. Because the words were so sonically similar, this sounded like “sheep of sheep,” or “ear of ear.” When we asked for clarification, we were told it was deep-fried sheep ears, and that seemed very funny to us, the way Old Castilians might prank unknowing visitors. We assumed appropriately shocked expressions, then moved to the no-but-seriously.
Seriously
—it was deep-fried sheeps’ ears. And since they’d only been waiting on our arrival to eat, the foil was unpeeled from the pots, plates appeared from a basket, and then the deep-fried collection of ears—two, three dozen in all?—were divvied up and the sweet-smelling glop was ladled. Before her serving even became a possibility, Sara demurred. She said she didn’t eat mutton, then mumbled “
Ears
, mutton ears.” Meanwhile, outwardly I showed no fear, affected an expression of joy and anticipation.
Venga! Dame!
I was trying hard to prove I’d passed my summer audition, that I was one of them. I wished I could say something appropriately Ambrosio-like, for instance boom out:
Joder, hombres, I shit in the milk, for it’s been three weeks since my last chewy ear
. And then slap someone on the back—or something. Ear of sheep, I imagined, was probably going to be like leather tongue of shoe (potentially manageable) … or deep-fried frog (less get-throughable) … and then my mind went blank.

I was not drunk enough for this, hadn’t had a drop yet, but at the table a place was opened for me, a parting of flesh, and I squeezed between two of the smoke-stained men, where a plate sat with four sheep ears. I smiled broadly, trying to convey assurance. In other travels I’d been occasionally called upon to eat strange food: blood pancakes; rotted, urine-infused shark meat; whale steak. I’d had ants and crickets once in the Burmese jungle, and while not ready for Zingerman’s prime time, they were enjoyably crunchy. There was a whole raft of food I took for granted—foie gras, hot dogs, even eggs—food
you couldn’t think too hard about. So what if back home animal ears were used as dog chews? The Old Castilian recognized a delicacy when it was laid out before him.

Except it was so
chewy
, and it gave a luxury of time for thought. What in the name of Zeus were sheep ears made of, anyway? Ligament? Cartilage?
^‖
They didn’t really look like ears but like thick, oversized potato chips. And they fought back in your mouth, like a flexed muscle. As I chewed, I began nodding my pleasure.
Wow, this is something … something
else.
DO … NOT … BARF
. After some time, I swallowed hard and started on a second (two left on the plate now, until the pot came around again, and one of the burlies graciously scooped three more on). There was much ribald conversation, but I hardly paid attention. Chewing, chewing, chewing.
Do not … do not … do not …!