The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (46 page)

It was vintage Ambrosio—told seemingly without pause to breathe, full of vivid details, even the shift in tenses, the subtle progression from “run” to “transport” to “fly”—and I could feel the goose bumps rise again. It was a story about transcendence, about the ancestors reaching from beyond and picking you up, giving you energy and peace. It was about burying the past once and for all, and doing the right thing when the universe had done you wrong. It was about these forgotten histories, about those forgotten by history, who heard the voices, and in them found their own final resolution.

It was a story that Ambrosio told us, but found necessary to tell to himself, too, for it was an allegory that pertained in part to the cheese. And, to my ears, it pertained in part to my book. (American takes a mystical walk in a Spanish village, sees a bunch of rabbits, gets swept away, lands, then has to figure out how to silence the voices and bury the bones.)

“Everyone in the village knows this story,” he said, “but some believe it and others say, ‘Yeah, Manuel’s been drinking again. It’s another one of his crazy things.’ ”

So which was it:

1 + 1 = 2? Or 1 + 1 = 1?

I knew Ambrosio’s answer, for every story he told was somehow meant to keep the village alive, and to keep himself alive in it. To send his voice echoing, so it might echo back over the ages. The beauty he saw, the ardor he felt for that disintegrating place, no matter what day or season, was so humbling and constant that it always caught me sideways, always left its stabbing pain. He kept adding magic to
Guzmán, as much as the vessel could reasonably hold. And although he loved the village as a parent, he always seemed to be seeing it for the first time, through the eyes of a child.

Perhaps this was his greatest accomplishment. He bent time until nothing was linear. So everything moved in circles, like the seasons. While clinging to the past, he always saw Guzmán as new and necessary. And he made you see it, too.

L
ET IT BE SUMMER
one last time, then. Ambrosio has a delivery to make in his truck, and I volunteer to go with him. Just him and me, up in the spacious cab. We wake early and drive three hours north, near Santander, on the Atlantic coast. Ambrosio talks the whole time, and I seem to understand every fascinating word (though who knows?), as he tells the histories and stories of the towns we pass.

We make the delivery, a load of seeds exchanged for over 400 wooden pallets. It’s very hot, tar-meltingly hot, and after reloading, Ambrosio’s shirt is soaked through. Winded, he says,
“¡Puta madre, comamos!”
We walk to a truckers’ restaurant nearby, a place with maybe eight tables, and he jokes with the waitress. He speaks to her in conspiratorial tones. “You go back and find the biggest container you can,” he says, “then fill it to the brim with ice-cold beer.”

Then we’re driving back through Castile,
^†
orange in the waning light, the moon over a bed of clouds, down past Burgos, Lerma, Aranda. He points out things on the Meseta, calling them by name, giving me yet another tutorial. Then we are off the highway, twisting through the villages of the Duero—Villafruela, Torresandino, Olmedillo—toward home. At Anguix, we take a right and climb up through Quintanamanvirgo until suddenly, at twilight, there it is: Guzmán, shining on its hill.

“¡Santos cojones!”
Ambrosio mumbles quietly. His eyes moisten
and fill with light.
Holy balls, it’s so beautiful!
We both gaze upon the vision of the church tower, the turrets of the
palacio
, the ocher houses cemented together against the world beyond. There are many different Guzmáns, but all I can see now is his. And so we ride, the Castilian and the
americano
, the storyteller and his apprentice, borne on some tide of our own. Add time and these stories repeat forever, never to end.

We enter the village just below Ambrosio’s telling room in the hill, then bank left past Pinto’s bar. We carry on past the stable where the cheese was first made (a sheep hand-painted on the wall, the words “Páramo de Guzmán” haloed overhead), past the house in which Ambrosio was born. We roll down a dirt track to the barn, and Ambrosio pulls the truck up alongside the barn that once held his sheep, facing out toward the
coterro
below and Mon Virgo, the fields and vineyards growing fat with their fruit, a sight that brings an overwhelming sense of peace and contentment. Ambrosio turns off the engine, playfully taps both hands on the wheel.

His eyes skitter over the rolling land, patchworked now in dabs of green, yellow, and crimson. He takes a deep breath. Then he smiles contentedly, saying nothing as he takes the notebook from my hand and scribbles:
acabar, terminar, finalizar, concluir
.

“Feen-eshed,” he says in English, handing it back.

“Finished,” I say, writing the word for him in my neatest hand—and then two more:

“The end.”

T
HE END, NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, WAS ANOTHER BEGINNING
.

During my hiatus from Guzmán to finish the book, Ambrosio had been elected mayor, garnering over fifty votes and capping a miraculous comeback from the days twenty years earlier when he’d been run out of town. Among his first acts in that new position was to rename the streets, returning some of them to their nineteenth-century appellations: The Royal Road, The Castilian Way. Meanwhile, he’d moved again, to a house in the fields nearer the village. Both his sons had joined him full-time on the family lands, to make a life farming, while his daughter Asunita had moved to Egypt with a boyfriend, still making art.

By now it had been almost ten years since my own family had taken up residence in the concrete manse on Calle Francisco Franco, and I couldn’t imagine finishing the book without returning once more with everyone in tow, especially our youngest, Nicholas, who was so pained not to have been present the first time around. Perhaps it was more selfish than that, too. If Guzmán had become this timeless
kingdom on the hill in my mind, the place where Leo was forever three and May forever one, where everything was frozen (including my book) and no one could ever touch us, then it was important to add time to my own story to release it, to see my kids walking the streets, to break the false spell of everlastingness. I needed to acknowledge one certain reality—one I’d unconsciously worked hard to deny since becoming a father—primarily that my life would have its end, too. There was no magic Castilian village that could change that.

It was November 2012, and I flew over alone, for a last round of interviews before their arrival. I caught up with Julián at his office in Aranda. He’d just returned from a business trip to Brussels, and though it was a national holiday he wore a jacket, purple tie, and blue shirt. His practice was still thriving, with a busy schedule of arbitrations and trials. He had that same shy boyishness, despite a few added pounds. He’d been drinking wine with friends, and he reiterated his one regret: that he hadn’t called Ambrosio when everything went sour. Otherwise, he knew of nothing else to apologize for, though by now he’d resigned himself to the fact that there’d be no reconciliation. “It’s over. No chance,” he said. “In Castile, part of keeping a grudge is that you never change your position. But if it’s a real Castilian grudge, there should be blood. Ambrosio had a dozen chances to kill me. But I know him as a good man, and his bark was always worse than his bite.”

All of this was history now, said Julián, but what made it particularly hard were the friends they shared in common. His wife was very close to Asun’s brothers, while Julián’s best friend was Nacho, Ambrosio’s cousin. “Nacho has gone through a hard time recently, and normally, I’d just pick up the phone and talk to Ambrosio about him, but I can’t. And that hurts.”

Afterward, Julián wanted to go for a drink at a bar around the corner, gin and tonics served in huge goblets. Now he seemed to have all night, smoking his Gauloises, his phone silent, but I’d arranged to meet Ambrosio for
cena
. And there was nothing I could say that
might console him. I’m not sure why but I found myself apologizing. “No,” he said, “don’t feel guilty. It’s not necessary. This is very Castilian, these grudges and silences.”

He took it as a matter of course, and yet there was something so lugubrious in his demeanor that it made leaving him all the more difficult. Crossing the street for the car, I spotted a liquor-store window display for Páramo de Guzmán wine in the window,
^*
and I thought of Julián passing it each day on his way to work, another reminder of his losses.

Soon enough I was perched again at the cheesemaker’s table. It felt as if I’d never been gone. A crackle of lines radiated from Ambrosio’s eyes, his cough came and went with his cigarettes, sounding slightly more terminal. He was fifty-seven years old now. In conversation he would later say, “Though my childhood is always with me, I’m beginning to prepare for my death.”

It no longer being necessary to tiptoe around the topic of Páramo de Guzmán, I asked Ambrosio where he stood on it these days, and he surprised me yet again. “It’s been twenty years since I lost the cheese, and I think I’ve mellowed,” he said. “In the beginning, I was crazy. The whole thing ate at my brain. First I was two hundred fifty pounds and strong as an ox; then I was two hundred fifty pounds, weak and bloated. I lost everything except the will to kill Julián.” With Asun listening attentively, Ambrosio fell into another violent fantasy.

“I’d devised a machine that would break rocks,” he started, “with very sharp rotors.” He detailed a scenario in which he’d planned to
douse Julián in gasoline, and while smoking, carry on “a transcendental conversation” with him. In this case, he didn’t want Julián to suffer in death, so eventually he’d light him on fire.

“Why not a gun?” said Asun.

“I wanted to torture him psychologically,” Ambrosio said. And then mash the body in the machine. “Nobody would have ever known what happened because the burnt bone would have mixed with the rocks,” he said. Then he told about the revelatory moment, the one in which he’d decided not to kill Julián, this time describing how he went to his son, who’d awakened from a nightmare and needed his father, which was different from the way he’d described the moment as one in which he’d gazed upon his daughter’s angelic, sleeping face. Regardless, “I closed my mind door,” he said, “and tried not to think about it again. After a while, the violence went away. I came to be more calm and meditative.”
^†