The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (40 page)

I’d once seen faded pictures in a photo album at Ambrosio’s house, and in frame after frame, Ambrosio and Julián appeared as they were in those years, best friends. They were seated against a wall mugging for the camera, maybe twenty at the time, Ambrosio tall and thin, in a work shirt and black beret, hunched and making a silly demonic face, while Julián sat upright, in a heavy wool jacket, holding his beret as if it were a steering wheel, that head of thick, curly hair, the two more identical than Ambrosio and his own brother Angel, who sits to his left, short by comparison, less instigator than neutral musketeer.

In another from that era, the camera captures the people closest to Ambrosio. Taken in someone’s telling room, Ambrosio’s mother,
Puri, appears to the left in profile, abstemious, nibbling on bread, ever regal with a thick swirl of dark hair, wearing earrings and a bracelet. Then comes Asun, Ambrosio’s wife-to-be, a kid with long black hair, holding a cigarette between tapered fingers, looking fresh-faced and coltish. Next is Ambrosio, his wavy hair worn over his ears, that imperial profile, the strong nose and the heavy brow. A Herculean mass, he sits with one hand in his lap and the other casually holding a cigarette. To his left is, of course, Julián, affecting nearly the same pose as Ambrosio, elbows on knees, one hand holding a half-eaten apple—even the point of his collar is the same as Ambrosio’s, as if each acts as a reflection of the other. And finally, there’s Angel again, in too-tight white shirt and blazer,
porrón
set before him as he looks somewhat lugubriously at a pot apparently empty of its stew. What’s noteworthy is how they listen—especially Ambrosio, who seems more intent than the rest—to someone just out of the frame, and here I imagine Ambrosio’s father stage right, telling a story.

A last photograph, my favorite, features the familiar three—Angel, Ambrosio, and Julián, plus a friend, Pepe—all four in a man-hug on the streets of a fiesta somewhere, clad in white shirts and black berets. In a strange way, however, this feels like a photograph meant only for Ambrosio and Julián, with the other two added as an afterthought on the left of the frame. In fact, Pepe is caught sidelong, gazing adoringly as the best friends look directly into the camera, big and unafraid, at the height of their physical powers. Ambrosio wears an unruly, Fidel Castro beard, his white shirt unbuttoned to just above his belly button, revealing a spray of chest hair, while Julián, clean shaven, with his lantern jaw and good looks, has his shirt unbuttoned half the distance but with a thicker mat of chest hair and what appears to be an expensive watch on his wrist. Ambrosio’s arm is draped lazily over Julián’s shoulder, his paw of a left hand hanging there, and Julián’s left hand, clutching what seems to be a cigar, reaches up to it. Whether he’s about to grasp it or already holds it isn’t clear, but what’s most arresting isn’t their physical comfort with each other, which is very Spanish, but rather the way the two possess the world together, how they form
a locus, or sun—one hydrogen, the other helium, locked in their magnetic sphere—that seems to propel other planets around.

In the café now, Ambrosio was talking about those old times once more. “I loved him like a brother,” he said. Family: It was hard to imagine it had come to this. Then a tear sploshed on the tabletop—and another. Ambrosio wanted to know:
What had he said again?
I told him: Anyplace, anytime.
What does he want?
To make it right, I said—to mend this rift, to stitch back the lost eras until everything becomes whole again.

Ambrosio pondered. He looked beyond me out the café window, across the street to the front door of Julián’s office building, doing some internal calculation. His face reflected a deeper spasm of pain. Then he let out a sigh.

“¡Venga!”
he said, clasping my shoulder, “let’s go home.”

O
F COURSE
, I
WASN
’
T THE FIRST
. T
HERE
’
D BEEN A
D
UTCH GUY
who’d come to Guzmán for a number of months—but no one ever quite figured out why. They thought he might have been studying agriculture—writing a dissertation?—yet he never asked any questions. Then disappeared. There were the Basque brothers who came, settled, and were still here. And there’d been some other guy everyone remembered from the eighties, a cultured, city personage, a Spaniard who’d renounced his privileged life and declared himself a shepherd. He bought six sheep and gave them full human names. “People shit themselves laughing,” Honorato’s daughter, María, told me one day. “I remember taking in the laundry and I could hear him over the wall, talking to the sheep: ‘Hey, Little Fred, get your nose out of the tomatoes.’ ”

People said that his transformation had been a capricious stunt, but María disagreed. “He was very poetic, and very nice to the children,” she said. “He was having an experience. Until winter came, and he realized the house had no heat. So he left.”

I remember having had a good, unself-conscious laugh with María about Little Fred. God—what a goof! I saw no connection whatsoever between me and this man who talked to sheep, whose innocent belief had led him to seek a simpler way of life even if it had also led him astray. My blindness to this seems all the more absurd in retrospect, given what I had up my sleeve. I’d harbored a secret idea, a self-initiation, that I knew must be performed to enter that exalted circle of Old Castilians.

And so I waited—and waited.

And then my body said it was time.

I’d just left Ambrosio in Abel’s barn, where the two were working on a new invention, a tractor attachment of some sort. Ambrosio had sketched it on a bar napkin, and now they were sawing, soldering, and hammering huge pieces of metal. Outside, the day was cold and gray, wind scraping bits of earth. I drove east out of the village, past the bar, hairpinning below all the hillside
bodegas
with their telling rooms—smoke from a single chimney the only sign of life. The
coterro
settled below, traces of snow blown beneath the bare grapevines, like bone-colored shadows.

Driving on days like this, I was hollowed by the seeming nothingness of the place, by the wordless silence and grandeur of that nothingness. I was carried over that limestone-strewn pitch back to a world that predated language. In that season, there was an isolation one might have felt on the lava flats of interior Iceland or the empty veldts of southern Sudan. That feeling of utter windswept aloneness. But never had I felt more resolved.

As I traveled deeper into the fields, the nothingness filled with silhouettes and signs of life. There was an improbable owl perched on a rock pile, the same dark color as the stones, with the same dapples of white. Rabbits bolted from the scrub brush and retreated back again. There were ruins, too: an old shepherd station, called a
choza
, half collapsed, and the piled
majanos
marking out the field boundaries. The dirt tracks on either side of the road split into more tracks,
veining to more piles of stones and fallow fields. This was a landscape constantly touched not only by human hands, but by happenings. Had the earth a voice, the murmur rising from it now to tell all the stories would have been deafening.

I drove past the field that had once held all those bright sunflowers from that summer long ago. Now, ragged stalks stood in their place—wrinkled and brown, tattered paupers in sad rags—and I drove on to the town of Quintanamanvirgo, past the bar there, which was shuttered and closed, down past the
frontón
, where there was a dirt turnoff. The car accelerated over a rocky track that slowly began to climb. With one more sharp right, the road canted to a steep incline. The tires spun to find purchase, and I was shot out onto the mesa, up over the world, into space.

Up here, the wind was something fierce, an exhalation of anger. I got out of the car, sucking in the cold, and walked the circumference of Mon Virgo, hands stuffed in my pockets, tottering against the icy gusts like a penguin. You could see it all from this vantage, the towns and villages of this world, including La Aguilera, where Ambrosio’s mother had been born. I remembered Ambrosio’s stories of arriving here in the dark of night, in the time after losing the cheese, playing Lear on his heath, swearing an oath of revenge on Julián. Mon Virgo was the kind of platform that invited the dramatic, a long fall of land dropping away, rocks piling to make a treacherous downward staircase. Out to the west, Guzmán was a pile of limestone on a hill, and the other villages, down on the flats, seemed like fragments of the same broken rock. No cars or bodies moved below.

I’
D BEEN WAITING FOR
this—the perfect confluence of bowel readiness and free time—since first meeting Ambrosio years earlier, to prove that I could be as Castilian as the next Mr.-Take-a-Shit-on-a-Mesa.
In this moment
, Ambrosio had said,
it’s as if you’re seeing God
. The wind was a battering ram, and there was no scent of the highland herbs,
just the mineral smell of winter. I looked around, but everything was open and exposed. Where were you supposed to do your business up here anyway?

My chosen spot was slightly protected, down off the lip of Mon Virgo. I’d done some backcountry camping, but this was rock and hard ground—steep, too—and it didn’t even occur to me to try to dig a hole. I glanced behind to make sure a shepherd wasn’t creeping up on me, and then I just crouched and fumbled with my belt. Almost immediately, it was all wrong: My fingers were numb from the cold, and as I tried to lever my pants off my hips, I began sliding down the hill, picking up speed, until I self-arrested.
¡Puta madre!
I re-set myself and resumed pulling my pants down. With my jeans now bunched at my ankles, I hunkered into a crouching position … and began sliding again, a ski jumper accelerating down a track, unpeeled from the waist down.

Eventually I clawed to a stop. Before my gentlemanly giblets could take on the pallor of hoarfrost, I had to admit this was preposterous. Whatever auspicious internal conditions had led to this moment were now frozen by inhospitable external conditions and a case of unmitigated stage fright. Before I knew it, I was fully down and sliding again, my naked butt on cold stone, tugging at my pants as I went, trying to maintain some shred of dignity in this fraudulent moment meant to be my coronation as a Castilian. Ambrosio’s voice returned:
Look where we are! Look at how incredible this is! Look how happy!

I came to rest on the scree thirty feet from where I’d begun and, looking up at the sky half-clad, I had a thought:
What the hell am I doing here?

My kids were back at home, and my wife, and there were bills to pay, and I owed England a bunch of money. And then I had another thought:
I’m really not Castilian, am I?
Sara had said as much, but I hadn’t believed her—hadn’t wanted to—for in that moment, I’d felt myself so close to a breakthrough. I’d desperately needed a breakthrough. Why couldn’t I be the guy in the poncho, herding my family to a slower way of living? Why couldn’t I settle in here and embrace the
simple life, its quietude and old-world charms? What was so wrong about wanting to sit by the fire with your family, telling stories?

But no. It was like the boy raised by wolves, who realizes he likes raw rabbit innards less than pepperoni pizza, and begins to ask some hard questions. I heard a voice in my head singing my lonely hallelujah—and it now seemed as plain as deep-fried sheep ears when it spoke:
You’re an American, dude
. I had long ago pledged my allegiance to Starbucks and microbrews, to stupid TV shows and those fluorescent Slurpees. I liked to order food without always hearing,
“Como?”
I couldn’t invent attachment-apparatuses for a tractor, let alone drive one. When I was away from home, I missed vegetables and the phone ringing with some new assignment to somewhere I’d never heard of. Or a friend around the corner who wanted to grab a beer. I pledged allegiance to the ideals of our oft-flawed political system, for, at our best, we seemed less haunted than other countries, more protean, less grudge holding, even if the world seemed more so toward us (and sometimes for good reason). As much as I loved that vision of Guzmán on its hill, I don’t think my heart had ever soared higher than the first time I drove cross-country and, in an adrenalized rush, saw the Rockies, carved in indigo, before my eyes—nor was I ever more taken aback by pure, random friendliness than, when first walking into a Waffle House after hours of driving, I was greeted by the woman behind the counter with, “Hey, shug-ah, anything I can get you?”

Yes, American life was messy and maddening, overwhelming and aggressive, supersaturated and plaque plagued, but it was deeply comforting, too. In the blur of our digital times, we may not have been as in touch with our inner Daniel Boones as Ambrosio was in touch with his El Cid, but this America was who I was.

As I lay there, no longer able to feel anything below my waist, I realized that whatever legacy I gave my kids, I wanted them to know what it meant to be close to the land, close to history, close to the song of stars at night. I wanted them to feel close to me, too, and to Sara, by finding unfettered time that was so hard to find unless you flew far
away from the madness. But it hadn’t occurred to me to try to tame that madness rather than escape it, to bring the lessons of Castile back to my American life.

I tugged up my pants and clambered as best I could back to the top of Mon Virgo. When I found the summit again, I assumed the attitude of conquering mountaineer, as if none of what had just happened had happened at all. I again peered at the sweeping vista below, just to make sure I was still alone in this desolate world, while I rebuckled for good.

The clouds piled gray in the west; the wind buffeted. The land was pocked with its settlements and histories, its vineyards and rivers, but I left no impression there “in the cold country,” as the poet Machado had it, “more moon than earth.” Her indifference was palpable: Castile didn’t care what road I took, or what nonsense I might be getting myself up to on a winter Thursday afternoon. In her hinterland, I was another gypsy, a gadabout, a hobbledehoy. To enter eternity here, you had to let Castile break you and put you back together. For years and decades. Like, really—for life.