The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (10 page)
Authors: Michael Paterniti
By this time, his family was completely implicated. His wife, Asun,
l
had invented a name: Páramo de Guzmán.
m
His sister-in-law, an artist, drew a simple sheep, and it became the first logo, painted on the side of the horse-stall laboratory. His father helped with the sheep; his mother, the coagulation process. His brothers invested money so Ambrosio could grow the operation into a business. Their little family cheese, which was sold in an idiosyncratic white tin (to which the children affixed the labels), started flying out the door.
One day a cheese buyer from Madrid appeared in the village, asking to speak to the person behind this curious cheese, and the villagers pointed him to the cave. The buyer found Ambrosio underground, turning his dear babies, an imposing figure with a broad face and happy-sad expression. The buyer talked to Ambrosio and realized that when the cheesemaker opened his mouth he spoke in lyrical poems about his family and these highlands and the purity of handmade foods, and how the best thing about being alive on this planet came from tasting that purity in this piece of
queso
. The buyer bought as much cheese as Ambrosio could part with and took it home with him.
Soon Ambrosio’s cheese was being sold in gourmet stores in the capital, pushed by enthusiastic cheesemongers on their customers. It went from Madrid to London, where it was sold at Harrods, among other shops.
n
It was heady stuff, and Ambrosio was rightly proud, but
not altogether surprised. His cheese had become a little prophet in a modern world that needed one. A man of the fields, Ambrosio Molinos began to star at agricultural fairs, where his
queso
kept winning awards, starting with second prize at the 1987 London International Cheese Show and then, in quick succession, the gold medal at the 1989 Expo Láctea, the gold Tarro at the first 1990 Spanish Cheese Challenge, and a first prize at the International Cheese Challenge. This was something a person could get used to. At the cheese show in England, a great Scottish cheesemaker, an older, heavyset lass—about his weight, actually—approached with a Scotch whisky in one hand and a lit cigar in the other and smothered him with a hug, saying, “Who could make such a beautiful thing?”
That was a kindred soul. That was a woman he could love.
And the cheese kept conquering the world. Back home, the story goes, the king of Spain, Juan Carlos himself, had occasion to try it, declared it one of the finest, and ordered more. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra, Queen Elizabeth and Mikhail Gorbachev and Julio Iglesias, all ate the cheese. After first tasting it, Fidel Castro ordered as much as the cheesemaker could spare.
People began to ask Ambrosio, How is this possible? Does it seem like a dream? And he made a show of considering, then answered, “No. When you put love and care and hundreds of years of history into a product like this one, you can taste all of it.”
As sublime as the cheese was, demand soon outstripped supply. Ambrosio needed more sheep, more equipment, more room, more cheesemakers. He wanted to find a way to make each wheel of cheese with the same amount of consideration as the first he’d given his father, for that was his gift to the world, but his family cheese was becoming big business and Ambrosio had no experience as a businessman. He had no interest in sitting at a desk, let alone scouring profit-and-loss sheets, cash flow summaries, ratio analyses. It was a waste of his time. He was a creator, wild and free. Let others organize the puzzle around him.
I
N THE YEARS THAT
followed the 1975 demise of Franco’s interminable dictatorship, Spain reentered the world like a sluggish, sightless mole. Having been cordoned off for so long, the country’s first taste of democracy was met by high inflation spurred by rising oil prices that left the economy in tatters until the mid-1980s, at which time the deficit was reduced, oil prices dropped, tourism picked up, and foreign investment crested. By the late 1980s the country was awash in nascent capitalists making scads of money—and spending it. The entrepreneurial spirit infected everyone from shop owners to investment bankers, tendriling to places like Guzmán.
One person busy capitalizing on new opportunities, building an empire of his own, was Ambrosio’s friend Julián. He lived in a nice house in Aranda, had a thriving law practice, owned a radio station, a car dealership, and a gas station. He seemed to have the Midas touch, or at least to Ambrosio. Raising families now, the two friends came and went through each other’s lives, sharing meals at the
bodega
, meeting in bars, singing at village fiestas arm in arm. At thirty-five they were still very much as they had been at fifteen. They spoke in the same low register, with the same intonations, burst out with the same ribald laughter, made the same gestures. Most of all, they were, and would always be, connected by the same principles: the decency and honesty of that ideal embodied in the figure of the Old Castilian.
When Ambrosio went looking for someone with business and legal acumen to help with his cheese, he looked no further than Julián. His friend seemed to love the cheese and its symbolism almost as much as Ambrosio. Meanwhile, Julián had what no one else had: Ambrosio’s everlasting trust. At first what was merely the advice of a friend over food and wine became the invaluable insight of a trusted adviser. When Ambrosio expressed concern over how he could pay for more expansion—the demand kept growing—Julián formulated a business plan. He courted investors, wrote up contracts, and, over time, brought several parties to the table that pledged nearly $2 million. When the operation outgrew its stable and
bodega
in Guzmán—and an attempt to procure the derelict palace with the idea of converting
it into a factory was thwarted—Ambrosio moved the company across the fields to the edge of Roa, to an ancient stone building, which was promptly renovated. On the property they added a warehouse and hired a number of cheesemakers. They built a tasting room for visitors to sample their cheese. Every morning a truck arrived with the milk of Ambrosio’s sheep—the flock of a dozen had become a hundred, and they had to supplement their milk with more from other sources—which was poured into huge vats and induced to coagulate, beginning again a cycle that would lead to the distinctive cheese known as Páramo de Guzmán, maker of memories. Trucks came and went, the cheese fluttered to all corners of the globe. The division of labor was nearly perfect: Julián helped to handle the big-picture financial logistics, while Ambrosio made sure the family cheese continued to live up to its chosen name.
Sometimes at the end of the day’s work, from the top windows of his parents’ villa in Guzmán, Ambrosio would gaze eight miles across the fields and see the new cheese factory. It was an enormous source of pride, that factory. And that pastoral vision, with its brushstrokes of gold-white wheat in the foreground and blue sky above, of gray stone and red-tile roof in the distance, made a beautiful painting, too.
*
In truth, Ambrosio was a variety of heretic, and historically, heretics did not fare well in Spain. Or at least that’s how the story went: From the carnage of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Inquisition, during which thousands upon thousands of alleged unbelievers were tortured and burned at the stake, rose what was known as the Black Legend—an exaggerated mash-up of horror stories that pinned the Spanish, and in particular the Castilians, with a nasty reputation that endured for centuries. One British writer of the time described them as “a filthie heape of the most loathsome, infected, and slavish people that ever yet lived on earth.” He then went on to itemize “theyr filthy, monstrous and abominable luxurie, theyr lustfull and inhumaine deflouring of theyr wives and daughters, matchless and sodomiticall ravishing of young boys.” Maybe it was a bit of Protestant-on-Catholic vengeance by the British, thought largely to be the primary propagators of the Black Legend, or maybe the legend did reflect the actual fervor of the faithful, partly played out in the grand pageantry of the auto-da-fé, a religious rite in which unrepentant heretics were flame-broiled before huge crowds in village squares. Perhaps, though, this was merely a sign of routinely barbarous times, with two religious superpowers in a heated global land grab: England was in the throes of its own brutal religious reformation, and more generally none of Europe’s seafaring imperialists—the French in Senegal, the Portuguese in Brazil, and so on—were winning humanitarian awards for good deeds on distant shores. In defense of the Spaniards, many scholars believe that, comparatively speaking at that time, Spain possessed the most equitable colonial legal system in Europe, and at least theoretically operated under a royal decree, issued by Isabella I, calling for native peoples to be treated with dignity.
Interestingly, a couple of centuries later, during the Civil War of the 1930s, as Franco’s Nationalists did battle against the Republicans, the Black Legend was invoked again—as a narrative tool used to blackball the pro-Franco Castilians as having been born of conniving and bloodthirsty stock. However, this time, the Nationalists caught on to the effect of a good story, especially a tawdry one, firing back with their own bit of narrative rehab known to Spanish historians as the White Legend, which lauded the virtues of the Inquisition, reglorified the honor and courage that brought the Spanish to the New World, and in the process fanned the ferocious brand of regional pride that continues to this day.
†
Only about a half-century behind the times, however.
‡
Hail, locusts, lack of rain—these were the main culprits in the Duero region, named for the river just south of Guzmán. From the time of the earliest records, in the late medieval period, fully a quarter of the harvests were significantly affected by
granizo
, or hail, alone. The severity of storms and droughts, plagues and unforeseen events such as frost, flood, and fire, could also be seen in church records detailing
rogativas
, the religious processions tied to agricultural life that were brought to Spain by the Romans. One can picture these medieval moments as they are related for us: thousands bearing statues of the Virgin marching into the fields, kneeling and beating the dusty earth while frantically calling out to God for rain. In fact the rituals remain, though they’re limited now to holidays and fiestas: In Guzmán a statue of the Virgin Mary is taken from the hermitage and processed through town while the villagers sing and dance, conjuring the same mania of faith their forebears displayed in calling on their Creator for a bountiful harvest.
§
And, as with their wine, the families argued in a good-natured way about whose cheese tasted best. In fact, in addition to the cleanliness of one’s home, the quality of one’s homemade food was a Castilian bragging right. In the past, it had been even more than that. For instance, when the Molinos family had owned huge tracts of land and commanded a small army of labor, up to sixty people during the harvest, they were responsible for feeding their hired hands with a steady supply of wine and cheese. Often the delectability of that fare became a deciding factor in the quality of your workforce: that is, everyone wanted to work for good food, and if your food was really good, you had your pick of the best workers.
‖
In Guzmán, however, homemade rockets were often fired into hovering clouds with the hope of disrupting an approaching rain.
a
For her family, church also could be counted as an occupational hazard: Her other grandfather was thrown thirty feet to the ground while in the act of ringing the bells one day before Mass. He survived the fall.
b
If any supernatural trait could be assigned to members of the Molinos family (or if Ambrosio assigned it to them), it may well have been this: Their senses of both taste and smell were acute. Once, on a trip to Argentina to visit his brother Angel, Ambrosio walked into an old silo, one unused for decades, and, inhaling, proceeded to give a history of everything that had been stored there over the course of a century, to the dumbfounded amazement of the owner: wheat, garbanzos, cheese.… As for that faraway look on Ambrosio’s face when he was sipping a good wine, I came to realize that it was less theater than a secondary gaze down through the portal of time, at the end of which was another visage, his own, in the rapture of that first time drinking and tasting beautiful wine. And so the Ambrosio of the Present sat, wine in hand, considering the Ambrosio of the Past, trying to find affinities between two moments connected by taste, as if memory were the conduit between sucks of wine.
c
The first human encounter with cheese may have occurred between 8000 and 3000
B.C.
with the domestication of sheep, when an Arab trader, carrying milk in a pouch made from calf’s stomach, tarried through the hot day, slept through the night, and, when craving a drink the next morning, discovered that by some mysterious chemical reaction his milk had transformed into cheese curds, which he ate, and found salty and delicious. Later, the Romans made hard, molded cheese to feed their legionnaires, called
formaticum
, a word that gave birth to offshoots in other languages:
fromage, fromaggio, formatge, fourmaj
, and
furmo
. The original Latin for cheese,
caseus
, in turn, gave rise to the Spanish
queso
and the English
cheese
.
d
Sheep’s milk, being slightly sweeter than cow’s milk, lends its cheeses a nuttiness, as well as a burnt caramel undertone. Often sheep’s milk cheeses smell of lanolin or wet wool.
e
Writes Clifton Fadiman: “A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.”
f
In a famous quip attributed to Charles de Gaulle, the former president of France said of his nation, “One can’t impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.”
g
Bought in a little village near Santander, Ambrosio’s rennet was the kind often used in artisanal cheeses, pure and organic, harvested from the inner mucosa of the fourth stomach chamber of suckling calves, dried, cleaned, cut into small pieces, and soaked in wine before being deployed in the coagulation process, which turned the milk into a moist gel.
h
Some of these dated back to the horror of the Civil War, when friends and acquaintances in the village found each other on opposite sides of the fray, a fact that led to one of Guzmán’s most unsettling and closely guarded secrets, a story that would take me years to uncover and try to sort out.
i
Rhetorical question, but the kingdom of Castile dates to the ninth century. Modern-day Spain is said to have begun its germination on the day—October 19, 1469—when the nineteen-year-old Isabella of Castile, clad in ermine and white brocade, married her eighteen-year-old first cousin, Fernando of Aragón, in the castle at Valladolid. Soon began the thirty-five-year reign of Los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Monarchs. After presiding over a string of military victories, a minor cultural renaissance, and Colombus’s expedition to the New World, the monarchs adroitly, if tenuously, unified the lands that comprise Spain today.
j
And what he can’t foresee in that moment of innocence is how much of himself he is about to lose by having succeeded. Flash forward to the end: After three additional voyages, after dotting the Caribbean and mainland with temporary Spanish settlements, after subduing his enemies (in part by committing savage acts of enslavement and cruelty against the native people and hanging some of his own crew members), he is arrested, manacled, and conveyed in chains back to Spain, where he is imprisoned. No longer the boy dreamer but a broken and arthritic fifty-three-year-old man, eyes blotted by chronic conjunctivitis, he seethes with a feeling that he has been badly betrayed, and in a letter to a friend at court that details his accomplishments in the name of the crown—including laying claim to a landmass equal to that of Africa—asks him to consider “how I at the end of my days have been despoiled of my honor and my property without cause, wherein is neither justice nor mercy.”
k
In a time before artisanal cheeses, this one benefited from what the renowned British cheesemonger Patricia Michelson later told me were the hallmarks of great small-batch cheeses: “The cheesemaker goes twenty feet rather than twenty miles for his milk,” she said. “The milk gets made into cheese quickly after milking because it retains its best qualities. Cheeses made on the farm with their own milk, and milking parlor, and cheesemaking area close by can be done in two hours. Then put away for aging. That’s what makes the perfect artisanal cheese.”
l
The two met at twenty-one when Ambrosio saw her on the street in Aranda and shouted, “Hey,
morena
, we’re going to get married, so you need to be my girlfriend.” The next time he saw her, he offered her half of a wild boar he’d just killed. Nevertheless, they’d married in 1978 and had a daughter, Asunción (known as Asunita, or little Asun), in 1979, and then two sons: Josué in 1982 and Enrique, or Kiké (pronounced
key-KAY
), in 1985. Asun, the wife and mother, was quick to laugh, with a gentle spirit and intelligent brown eyes. She was also the heart and soul of the family, a great cook, a calm presence, and yet full of paradox: strong and soft, wary and brave, nurturing and isolated, supportive and at times, by necessity, gently critical of her husband, the dreamer. Ambrosio’s stories, his constant irreverence, and the force of his creativity—all of these things kept her close. And the beauty of village life deepened for her over time, though she often admitted to missing the bustle of Aranda. To counter Ambrosio’s bohemian flair, she became the practical sorter of bills, the left brain to her husband’s right, the protector of his more vulnerable soul.
m
The
páramo
in this case being the highland plain above the village where the sheep often grazed, also known in local parlance as
arriba
. At an elevation of approximately three thousand feet and with somewhat murky boundaries, that table of land was divided into numerous zones according to the closest village, so the
páramo
of Páramo de Guzmán might also have been known as the Páramo de Villaescusa or the Páramo de Tórtoles, and so on.
n
At one of those shops, an American gourmand and deli owner named Ari was cut a piece, and, letting it melt on his tongue, declared: “This is really an outstanding piece of cheese … rich, dense, intense.” He took it back to Michigan, where a slightly fuzzy, idealistic part-time employee didn’t just hear the clarion call, he proofread it.
