The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (38 page)

In literature, however, the hidalgo was also a figure who had somehow squandered his family wealth while holding weakly to the title of his nobility, the prototype being Don Quixote, whose delusional meanderings in attempts to fulfill his dream of being a knight-errant also made him a subject of ridicule. (“Finally, from so little
sleeping and so much reading,” writes Cervantes, “his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”)

“It’s true,” said Llopis, “Ambrosio was blinded by this micro-cosmic vision of himself in this world that’s disappearing. But hold on! He didn’t
become
Don Quixote. Don’t forget that principally behind this is his best friend.”

Finally—Julián! But when I asked him to describe Julián, Señor Llopis surprised me again. He praised Julián for being “a very smart attorney,” for having a “magnificient” reputation. “One thing is what Ambrosio supposes happened, and another is what the evidence is,” he said. “And we never had anything to go after Julián.” Llopis spoke of certain “coincidences” that might look dubious from a certain point of view. Yes, the
accionistas
had been conniving and clumsy, for once they’d fired Ambrosio, once they’d removed him from the company’s board, and sold Páramo de Guzmán, they weren’t done. Llopis alleged that they’d sold it to other friendly investors, who resold it among this growing group of
accionistas
, and in this way, it was passed on, creating iteration after iteration of Páramo de Guzmán, to distance it from the legal obligations and debts of the first company. One matter of suspicion for Ambrosio—one bit of evidence of an unholy alliance between Julián and the
accionistas
that he substituted as proof of a setup—had been the fact that Julián’s name had appeared on documents associated with one of these later companies, as someone who’d been paid for services. But even here Llopis held a contrary point of view.

“It’s a small world up there, so the fact that Julián might have ended up representing or being in business with some people implicated in these complicated sales of Ambrosio’s former company isn’t so far-fetched. You know, a lawyer in Aranda has access to only a small pool of clientele, and so ultimately you have those kind of coincidences a lot, much more so than in a city like Madrid or Barcelona.

“Here’s how I see it,” said Llopis. “There were these guys who saw this cheese business as a way to make a lot of money by putting only a little down. They were businessmen, outside investors, and Julián
maybe knew these guys and presented them to Ambrosio. They started doing their thing on Ambrosio. There are a series of coincidences later on, when you connect the dots in hindsight. Did these guys trick Ambrosio? Yes. And did they scramble over a series of years to get themselves out of this jam by creating one company after another, and transferring the assets? Yes, they did it badly, they got caught to a certain degree, they were convicted of fraud. But to say that there was something totally planned from the beginning? Against Ambrosio? It’s highly unlikely.”

It took another moment for these words to register.
Highly unlikely
. What I heard seemed to raise the issue of Julián’s actual culpability, the question of percentage, the exact pie wedge of his guilt. If Julián’s blame was minimal, or even if he had allowed for a contract that disadvantaged a friend—and this too now seemed in question because it was a bit unclear how events unfolded, how carried away Ambrosio found himself with the idea of the new factory, how integral Julián really was to the negotiations—Llopis suggested that instead of being an act of intent, his might have been a mistake.

That, too, seemed impossible at first, but if so, then why hadn’t Julián gone straightaway to Ambrosio with an apology? Wouldn’t honesty and supplication have solved the matter between dear friends? “It’s one thing making a mistake, and another making amends,” said Llopis. “Remember, this guy’s got his balls, too.” Llopis started making a series of gruff, snorting noises meant to characterize a certain Castilian machismo.

“Admitting the mistake in front of Ambrosio would’ve been hard,” he explained, “admitting the mistake within that society, too, as a lawyer who’d royally fucked up, would’ve been even worse in terms of his career, his credibility, his honor, his dignity, his pocket-book, his
everything
. If you never admit to having done anything wrong, people eventually forget. Julián got out of it by admitting nothing. The other guys got the company, and Ambrosio got screwed.”

Yet wasn’t this Castile, I insisted, still clinging to some petrified notion of honor, the land where all threats were to be taken seriously,
and justice, however it was meted (or metered, in those epic poems), must prevail? Ambrosio, for one, hadn’t forgotten any of it. And what about his plot to murder Julián, then? Llopis nodded with sagacity. “Julián took that into account, this physical threat against him, and he was very prudent. According to what people say, he carried a gun.”

By now the light in the room had shifted, lifting off the floor and oriental rugs, bathing the walls in clean pools of luminescence, the faint scent of tobacco lifting, too, though the lawyer did not light the pipe that sat on the desk. Llopis wanted to rephrase the story one last time, to put a final fine point on it, for it seemed apparent that I didn’t understand. “At the end of the day,” he said, staring at me intently, bringing his knuckles down on the documents before him, “these two guys pulled a fast one on Ambrosio—and in a sense they pulled a fast one on Julián, too, knowing that he was Ambrosio’s friend and lawyer. Essentially they duped both of them.”

He stroked his beard, shook out his tie, sighed one last time. “Ambrosio had it all,” he said. “He had a great design, an extremely well appreciated product in the marketplace. It was all going beautifully for him, but it was like caviar—and not everyone eats caviar.”

Ambrosio, he said, was more like a caballero, a gentleman on horseback. “Here in Castile,” he said conclusively, “we’re all gentleman riders, but somewhere along the way we lost our horses.”

T
HE NEWS FROM
E
NGLAND WAS, WELL, BOLLOCKS
—but, I supposed, inevitable. “The manuscript is already almost six years overdue,” read the e-mail to my agent from the British publisher. “So sadly, we must terminate our agreement and request repayment of the advance already received.” That was 18,000 pounds sterling, which I didn’t exactly have buried in a jar in the backyard. So the cheese had racked up more debt that was going to be hard to repay. Meanwhile, here in America, the publisher kept cranking out riders on my contract, establishing new due dates that I kept missing, submitted as evidence here:

It was no longer eccentrically charming, this tangle I found myself in. I had a family, college educations to fund. Part of the problem was that I’d used up whatever resources, time, and gemütlichkeit granted to me as a book writer, and I was again bog-hopping full-time between magazine stories—Cambodia, China, India—with hopes of stealing back to Guzmán, which became harder and harder to do. If I was honest, the book was dying a slow death. But as dire as things seemed, the more resolved I felt. A voice from the ether said, “Miguel Ricardo, it’s your time to kick some ass!”

My next trip back to Guzmán came four months after my meeting with Llopis, just after Ambrosio’s father, Ambrosio Senior, passed away. It’d been a long, slow decline, and he’d told stories until the end—funny, bawdy, outrageous. No one was more entranced, no one laughed harder, than Ambrosio himself, forever the child at his father’s knee. At the funeral, the villagers turned out to pay their respects and listened to the priest usher him to an afterlife that one hoped was less a matter of fluttering angel wings than wild rivers
flowing with red wine. In the cemetery, where the bodies were buried east to west, Ambrosio had his father buried with his head facing south and feet north, so the old man could keep an eye on the family bodega, and all the wine being drunk there.

I found Ambrosio in the house he was renting in Roa (or perhaps, in his financial ruin, his brother rented it for him). The property abutted the Duero River, a silver thread through his backyard. Ambrosio seemed older, hunched ever so slightly by the mantle that had been passed to him in his father’s absence; his eyes, already mournful, seemed to flicker with a new awareness, as if he spied his own mortality approaching with sharpened sickle. There was a brittleness, too, that I’d never seen in him before, a hollowness in the cheeks, a wattle at the neck. If he’d once played the role of Falstaff, willing to make a comic figure of himself, to pass his hours with wine and song, he now seemed preoccupied by some bigger, cosmic account settling. Which is how we ended up in his Pathfinder, hurtling toward Aranda.

We’d been talking, talking about everything: his dad, our kids, the news from Guzmán. To the horror of some, the new streetlights had been installed, and, predictably, Ambrosio said, “I liked it better when the stars and moon were our lights.” He pulled out some pictures of his father as a young boy in the streets of Guzmán, in the army in Morocco, on his wedding day. He seemed lost in thought, the photographs fanned over his lap, grazing his fingers over his father’s face, then began to weep. So I waited to bring up my conversation with Llopis.

In many respects I was still confused by it. How was it that ninety minutes in Madrid with Ambrosio’s lawyer had jumbled the story I’d spent years writing, or should I say, gilding? I believed in Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, for he, as much as Spain, or Castile, or Guzmán, was both the real person, and abstract idea, to which I felt most committed. To see him so vulnerable, so diminished now, made me want to believe in him again twice as much.

Finally, after Ambrosio had put the photos away—and clapped his hands, saying, “
¡Venga!
What’s our plan?”—I blurted out that I’d
met with Llopis during my last visit, on my way home through Madrid, and had been struck by one thing Llopis had said: that there wasn’t evidence to prove any wrongdoing on Julián’s part. Therefore he hadn’t been named in the lawsuits against Páramo de Guzmán. If Julián were guilty of fraud, I asked Ambrosio, wouldn’t he have been front and center in a civil, or even criminal, prosecution?

And with that little push, we were talking about Julián again, after a multiyear boycott. Ambrosio stared at his hands, speaking in his low gravel but without the venom I was accustomed to when his archenemy was invoked. It seemed to fatigue him to have to sort through all of it again, but Julián was still a dissembler, according to Ambrosio—and had played the whole thing so brilliantly that his name was hidden from any illegality. But this time he wasn’t a
puta
, exactly.

I swallowed hard and said, “I’d like to speak to him.”

Ambrosio took a moment to respond. There was no swearing, or crashing of fists on table, no drawing of knife from sheath, no telling me to get out. He exhaled deeply, and after what felt like years of resistance, he said, “Fine. Let’s go find him, then.”

W
ITHIN MINUTES, WE WERE
speeding across the Meseta—“sad and noble high plains, wastelands and stone,” wrote the poet Machado—in Ambrosio’s Pathfinder, Ambrosio gripping the wheel, his mouth set in a grimace. He made a phone call as he drove, speaking quickly with stentorian authority. “Julián’s at the courthouse,” he reported when he hung up. “But not for long.”

This struck me as astounding. The two men had studiously avoided each other for fifteen years, and with one quick call to a random source, Ambrosio had zeroed in on him with pinpoint precision and was hurtling toward him, like a black bat or punched-up drone. We rocketed through Quintanamanvirgo, Anguix, Olmedillo, then turned at Torresandino, passed a couple of big winemaking operations, and came to the industrial quarter on the outskirts of Aranda.
It was 1:50
P.M.
, approaching the time for
comida
, and Ambrosio was certain Julián would leave the courthouse by 2:00
P.M.
He called again. Still there. This was our best shot, for who knew where Julián would go afterward, or whether we could reach him?

Ambrosio passed slower vehicles, maniacally accelerating. The car leaped and swerved. Who was doing the ambushing here, him or me? And what was I supposed to say to Julián if we did find him? After all, he was a bugaboo, a foil, not a person. To my mind he had no heft, threw no shadow, was a noxious vapor. Despite the firing of certain journalistic synapses, I hadn’t exactly prepared for how an interview might go, how we might move past his inevitable denials to something scratching the truth. That I wanted to talk to him didn’t mean that I was prepared to talk to him.