The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (39 page)

As we drove into the center of town, skirting the high, limestone wall of the old city, Ambrosio reminded me to watch for Julián’s tic, reaching to his neck to demonstrate again. Pinching the skin below his Adam’s apple, he made the sound—
Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh
. “That’s when you know he’s scared,” he said. “That’s the sound of betrayal.” We screeched to a halt before the courthouse, and Ambrosio said, “Wait here,” then stalked across the lot and through the glass doors.

I sat in the car, engine running, picturing Ambrosio’s expression, the odd mix of calm and grim anger, his strange disembodiment this day, and his hand reaching into his coat pocket for an object—perhaps a firearm? Was this how it promised to end, with a shooting at the courthouse and a headline on that evening news carried by Radio Cinco?

This was a little nuts. What was he going to do? Drag him out here by his ear?

Having lost his dear father, the only one he’d ever idolized, and the senior half of the entity known in Guzmán as “the Ambrosios,” Ambrosio Junior was now a rune. I’d seen him light and rambunctious, theatrical and scatological, at work and at play, but I’d never seen him like this: unraveling in grief. This state of mind, I imagined,
must have mirrored his disposition after losing the cheese, for the cheese had been made for his father. The two were twinned. So we were going backward again, prisoners of memory, even while beating forward. And I was thinking of Julián’s last name, Mateos, with its evocation of
matar
—“to kill”—and also of the sobriquet for that vineyard that always haunted me, Matajudío, or Jew Killer. I thought of these childhood images that haunted Ambrosio’s daughter, Asunita, who’d shared them with me over hours of conversation: old hunting dogs, past usefulness, hanged from trees; dead crows slung from antennas on the roofs over Guzmán to frighten off the flocks of other crows that descended on the village one summer like a plague; the innards of a rabbit gutted by something, or someone, in the fields. Suddenly, everything abounded with violence. I couldn’t tell whether Ambrosio was acting as an agent on my behalf, or for himself alone, searching out the confrontation he’d darkly dreamed of for fifteen years, to get his revenge at last.

Five minutes later Ambrosio reappeared in the windshield, making his way back to the idling car. It was cold outside, his breath crystallizing in clouds, as if he, too, gave off exhaust. The door flew open; he dropped into the driver’s seat, tilting the vehicle with his bulk. “Missed him,” he said, “by minutes.” He seemed beleaguered, as if someone had siphoned the air from his body, then he fumbled for a cigarette, lit it, shifted the car into reverse. “To his office, then.”

Ambrosio drove at a reasonable pace this time, no more breakneck theatrics, back through Aranda to a point near the city wall we’d passed earlier. He parked the car at a square. “Julián’s over there,” he said, gesturing across through the flat-topped
plantano
trees to a nondescript office building. “I’ll wait in here.” He pointed upward to a sign that read
BAR PEPE
. Then he took himself inside, leaving me on the sidewalk.

I gathered myself and went across to the copper-colored façade of Julián’s office building, moving through a bolt of sunlight between the other structures of the downtown. The portico lay in shadow, however, and my eyes needed to adjust before I could read Julián’s name
on the directory. And there it was.
Julián Mateos
. I rehearsed my lines: Friend of Ambrosio’s? Journalist on a story? Strange, obsessive
americano
with a funny thing for dying villages and slow-food relics? I have a few questions about the cheese, hombre.…
How could you?

I could feel Ambrosio’s eyes on my back. What was his play in all of this? To remain true to his word and facilitate my book in any way he could, be it giving me the key to his telling room, or showing me everything there was to show of his world, or delivering me here to the doorstep of Julián? This again was the curious thing about Ambrosio, his willingness to live fully inside the moment, whatever its virtue or folly, without regard for the future. I again remembered something Asunita had told me, how, as a kid, she’d been shielded from the details that surrounded the demise of Páramo de Guzmán, though later, when she was nineteen and had moved away from home, her parents explained everything.

“My father has tried every kind of thing,” she’d told me, “driving lorries, working in agriculture, making wine, having chickens. There’s a saying: He has a lot of ‘forest and stream’ to do things, a lot of resources and power, but the main thing is to have the spirit to do it. The worst of what happened to my father when he lost the cheese was that his spirit was stolen away.” Could her father have started again, made the same cheese or one that was similar, one with that same care, one that when tested against the “soulless” cheese might have reminded the world of a higher way of eating—and being? “I think he’s run out of time,” she’d said.

On the street, I pressed the buzzer, and a woman’s voice said hello.

“Ta’ lo,”
I responded. Then, in English, “Is Julián in?” There was some confusion on her part.
“Soy americano,”
I said. A few excruciating moments passed, Ambrosio somewhere back through the light and shadow at the café, and then the door buzzed open.

Upstairs, I was shown in by Julián’s secretary, seated, and abandoned when she disappeared through a door. The office suite had that typical, antiseptic nondescriptness of hushed law offices everywhere, binders and briefs, bound collections of the Law on shelves. There
was some muttering through the wall, and then after an interval she returned and said, “Julián will see you now.”

In retrospect, Julián must have thought I was an opportunity of some sort, and his curiosity must have been piqued. Otherwise, how would I have made it through that door? Perhaps that was one of the pleasures of the job: You never knew what problem or proposition might blow in on the day’s breeze. A real estate deal? A new company needing incorporation? At the very least, it wasn’t often that a foreigner showed up in Aranda. I could count on two fingers the Americans I’d heard about in town (one was a veterinarian; the other ran Aranda’s English-language school); most expats could be found in the warmer, more sybaritic climes of Spain, attending language schools or taking advantage of tax havens like Gibraltar, living on the beach or partying in Seville, where the sangria and good cheer were always flowing and hibiscus and hyacinth filled the air with sweet scent. As it was, in the old days of unforgiving Guzmán, foreigners—meaning anyone not from the village, not just those from abroad—were taken up to the fountain and dropped in the stone basin. They got their asses kicked. And an element of that Castilian wariness persisted. Strangers were sometimes still greeted not with “Who are you?” but “
Whose
are you?” As in: To which family do you belong?

Julián was a tall man with a full head of hair and firm handshake. His handsomeness was disarming, for even in that symmetrical face with its square jaw, small, tilted ears, and shy brown eyes, there was a boyishness that came through, someone capable of friendship and enjoyment. He was neatly dressed, in white collar and red tie, dark slacks, a verdant blazer. The office was a large room with a window full of sky. His black lawyer robes hung in the corner. A colorful poster commemorating Old Havana hung on the wall behind his desk. He held a piece of paper in his hand and at first affected a sort of distraction, as if still drawn to whatever was on the page.

I apologized for arriving unannounced and thanked him for his time. He was, as Pascual Llopis had said, impressive, commanding. And he was curious now, gazing intently at me as he sat in a green
swivel chair. I realized almost instantly that my anger toward him was really just Ambrosio’s anger, that I harbored this tumor of hate on his behalf, and yet not knowing Julián but face-to-face with him now, I bore him no ill will. How could I? He was just a lawyer in a tie. Besides, Llopis’s words played again in my mind—
He was tricked, too
—and a sort of pity anesthetized me.

“What brings you in?” he said, smiling.

I told Julián I was visiting the region for a book project. “It’s set in Guzmán,” I said, and then I added that I’d become good friends with Ambrosio Molinos, and at those words Julián seemed to recede. Literally seemed to roll back in his chair. Or had I imagined it? His smile reflected a cocked curiosity, but his fingers didn’t grab for his throat and no strange sounds came out, no whimper for mercy. Did he think I’d come to kill him? If so, he never reached for his supposed gun, either.

“I’m writing a book,” I said, “about Páramo de Guzmán. Of course, there are many stories about this cheese, and I thought I’d better come and hear yours.”

“Yes,” he said, gathering himself. He stood up, removed his jacket, draping it over the chair. He seemed quite thin, and I noticed a blotch of dry skin, eczema or something, on the side of his face, the back of his hand. “Yes, Ambrosio is an old friend. Or
was
. There’s been a misunderstanding. Are you—do you speak with him often?”

I assumed he was trying to gauge the depth of my friendship with Ambrosio, but here my cynicism was met again with surprise. “We were best friends,” he said. His hand tremored almost imperceptibly. “And I’ve been hoping to have a conversation with him for years.” He asked me if I’d be seeing Ambrosio soon.

I looked toward the window, knowing that down below sat the man himself at Bar Pepe, that we could have easily gone down and had that conversation right here and now, if Ambrosio wouldn’t tear him limb from limb first.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll be seeing him tonight.”

“Would you convey a message, then?” he asked. His voice was
soft, polite, cordial, but almost pleading underneath. “Anytime he has time, I’d love to meet—at his
bodega
, in the telling room, in a bar—to try to mend our friendship.” He reiterated that there’d been a mix-up in the past, a confusion, and that it was time to set it right.

As for his side of the story, Julián said it would have to wait. He gestured to the piles on his desk. “There are pressing matters that need attending to today,” he said. And with this, his air became a hint more officious. Underneath this initial exchange, I detected something else at play: He wanted me out of his office so he could regain his footing.

“But I’m not at all averse to meeting and talking to you,” he said, adding that he’d welcome the opportunity. No, this week was bad—but later, yes, absolutely. Could I meet him in Madrid, in a month’s time? He was there often, in court. There was a bar he liked. He consulted a calendar: 5:00
P.M.
on a Tuesday?

I said I’d be there, affecting nonchalance, making the unspoken point, I thought, that I cared only tangentially about his version of events, that he should be worried not for any physical threat I posed (zero), but for those “myths of observation” that I might carry away from this place to employ in the making of my own story. That his would have to be the mother of all closing arguments.

But there was suddenly something more. In the coliseum of the adversary who didn’t seem much like an adversary, this was no longer about Ambrosio, or Julián for that matter, about versions of events that had transpired fifteen or twenty years earlier. This, I now realized, was about
me
, my version, wasn’t it—and why I’d thrown over everything for it. No, this wasn’t Ambrosio’s book after all. It
was
mine. And I was gathering my breath to say something. But what?

“I’d like to hear your side,” I said.

He came around his desk and we shook hands.
“Vale,”
he said. He averted his eyes briefly, his vulnerability making him sheepish again. Then he scratched the dry patch at the side of his face.

A
CROSS THE STREET, BENEATH
the
plantano
trees in the square, and then through the glass door of the café, sat Ambrosio, smoking, drumming fingers on the red tabletop. I wondered as I walked whether Julián’s eyes were now on my back, gazing down from above. These oscillations between poles left me feeling like Boutros Boutros-Ghali trying to solve some intractable diplomatic crisis. About cheese.

How had this happened?

“Hombre,” Ambrosio said. “Sit down.
Una caña?
” We’d been apart for twenty minutes, max. He ordered me a beer.
“Dime,”
he said. Tell me.

What was there to tell? “He misses your friendship,” I said. “He wants to meet, at your
bodega
, whenever you say the word.”

Ambrosio fell back in his seat, ran a hand over his whiskers. “Did you ask about the cheese?”

“Yes,” I said, “we’re going to meet again to go over all of that. But the main thing is that he’d like to talk with
you
.”

Ambrosio descended into thought for a moment. Gazing upon his face, I noticed something. It looked as if he’d been crying again, or, at the least, as if his eyes had been irritated by emotion. Was I imagining this, too? I didn’t think so. Somewhere out there, the church bells sounded, seeming to ring for Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras. And now this—an old friend reaching from the past. For a moment he reached back, to that protected, idealized place of their early friendship.