The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (11 page)

T
HE GIANT—WHICH IS WHAT
A
MBROSIO WAS IN THAT HOT
, cramped space—cleared his throat, fidgeted, looked down at his hands, and then met my gaze. He seemed to choke for a moment on a small skeleton, then swallowed hard.

“I don’t know why this little cheese conquered so many,” he said softly. “But if you asked me the secret, I’d say it was because we made it in our home, the old way, the way it had been made for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the United States you don’t know what it’s like to have old flavors, flavors from the past, from centuries before. But we live with them every day here. My children know these flavors. I don’t consider myself in the middle of this conflict between old and new—I’m clearly on the side of the old. I feel that there are two ways to create nourishment in food, and in the future, there’s only going to be one.” His big forefinger waggled. “My mission is to make sure we don’t forget the old way.”

Ambrosio was rolling again, inspired by the digression,
^*
or, as he
put it,
“mi grandísima filosofía de la vida.”
Anything, it seemed, to keep from having to tell the next part of the story about his cheese. But there we sat, Carlos and I, rapt as two unmoving cannonballs.

“Consider the chicken,” he said. “Today we have industrialized animals. A chicken needs to be cheap to be competitive in the marketplace. So the industrial chicken has a life that lasts forty-two days between its hatching and its sacrifice. They flood the chicken with twenty-three hours of light a day so that the chicken constantly feeds, and then they give it one hour of rest. They do this for six weeks, then the chickens are put on a conveyor belt and either gassed or have their heads chopped off and are immediately dumped in scalding water, after which the dead body is sent to market.

“On the other hand, the traditional chicken used to take one and a half years from hatching to sacrifice. You would see the chicken every day and speak to her, and you would share with her certain aspects of your own life. The chicken was your friend; she understood you. You loved each other. She knew she was going to have a happy life and tried to give you her best while you gave her yours. She knew her destiny, that eventually she would make a gift of her life to feed your family. But you honored each other. The chicken lived at home with you, and you ate her at home. It was divinity, not machines.”

He kept on easily in this vein for quite some time, until the heat relented a few degrees and the slightest of nighttime breezes pushed through the shutter, swishing so lazily it hardly guttered the flame he’d lit. This certainly wasn’t normal conversation, I knew that—or certainly not normal
American
conversation, from the country that blithely consumed nine billion chickens a year, most of them factory made and
McNuggetized.
^†
The more he spoke the more I appreciated the relative humanity of his vision. His grand philosophy wasn’t just idealistic, it was achievable, actionable, with intimations of beauty and epiphany. He was in dialogue with an inaccessible world I’d never had the occasion to live in, let alone lose touch with. Yet it was one we all felt some instinctual connection to, wasn’t it? As Ambrosio’s thin lips kept moving, as he boasted that he could spot a wild hare from two hundred meters, smell bad weather in the air before its arrival, discern mushrooms where there didn’t seem to be any, I felt buoyed, inspired, reinvigorated. He explained that this life in the fields was all part of being “an Old Castilian,” something that couldn’t be taught or learned, but was genetically transferred through generations. “Either this cycle of history admits you or it doesn’t,” he said. “Our cheese was an emblem of this.”

He allowed that, in the beginning, when the cheese was young and newly found, life had been “idyllic” and “full of great happiness.” All of his expectations had been met the day his father had slipped the
queso
in his mouth and momentarily become a boy again. But add time, and the plot thickens.
^‡

Ambrosio absently fiddled with a knife that he’d pried from the table where it had been stuck, the blade about six inches long and pewter
colored. In the overlay of darkness, he held open his empty hand, his white palm flashing in a gesture I took to be resignation—
What can I say?
—and began to recite from Páramo de Guzmán’s book of Genesis. He recounted in detail all the things he’d done to bring the cheese to fruition—milking the sheep, hauling the canisters, stirring and harping the boiling curds and whey (and such a hard cheese as his required a lot of stirring and harping to break down the protein globules). The amount of cheese at first—the number of wheels—had been just enough for an inner circle of relatives and friends. But it was true, the cheese had been too wonderful. Like its maker, it demanded an audience.

“We put so much into the cheese,” said Ambrosio, “but it gave so much more.”

The decision to sell and market the cheese, an idea that seemed to marry so many good things (a sublime product, a sustainable way of life, a dream realized), was, in retrospect, perhaps the biggest mistake of Ambrosio’s life.
^§
Once it had been made, there was no turning back. “The real trouble,” he said, “started with the new factory.”

For the new factory, he needed Julián most of all. “Julián’s role was to advise me on financial matters and to handle all the contracts,” said Ambrosio, “and being a businessman, he had relationships that, of course, I didn’t.” At the very least, Ambrosio realized that growing the cheese operation would require something of a quantum leap. And that leap required another infusion of cash. Friend that he was, Julián promised Ambrosio that he’d find the right investors, ones who understood and appreciated Ambrosio’s philosophy, who would respect and love the cheese, too—and keep its best interests in mind. And apparently that’s just what Julián did.

“The factory in Roa was housed in a very old building, maybe four hundred years old, with a perfect cellar for aging the cheese,” Ambrosio said. “Julián brought in the investors and we signed the contracts to form a conglomerate. We invested in state-of-the-art equipment, like stainless-steel industrial vats for the milk. We hired more cheesemakers.” Watching it all unfold, as the orders continued to pour in, Ambrosio said that he felt the “cleansing obligation of work.”

A typical day at the factory might have found Ambrosio arriving early to meet with his cheesemakers, standing out by the front gate to receive canisters of milk, driving to the fields to check up on the shepherds. There he was, overseeing the boiling and harping, helping to press and cut the cheese, molding it and carrying it to the dark, cool basement. He tested new batches of “the product,” acting as final quality control. He helped load the cheese into boxes, onto pallets, into trucks. He met with potential buyers, and in this act of public relations he truly excelled, because he was completely himself, the Castilian man of the earth.

There was the doing side of things, the making side, the enacting of the grand philosophy, and then there were the intricacies of the profit-and-loss sheet, of price points and wage rigidity, the nitty-gritty business of selling the cheese in a way that left the company profitable. How many times had he been thankful to have Julián there, and never more so than in the new factory? It was a blessing to worry only
about making the best cheese in the world. And a blessing to be surrounded by family and friends: his wife, Asun, who now worked on the books; his aunt, who was the secretary. His drinking buddies, the shepherds of Guzmán, still brought the milk. He couldn’t have dreamed it better.

In Ambrosio’s telling, the story of the cheese sounded more and more like a fable, not just because he communicated with animals and food products—and not because the tableau of little elves working by candlelight to manufacture the charmed family treasure was roughly true—but because it was the kind of fable in which everything, especially the hero, is bigger than life and thus takes on the quality of legend. Ambrosio described being at the factory one day during renovations when a cellar beam groaned and cracked, and the ceiling began to rain down. One worker was hit by a beam; another barely escaped the cave-in with his life. Without thinking, Ambrosio threw himself at the emergency, dragging a water hose in order to make the concrete needed to stabilize the beam, which he held in place over his head for an hour while others rushed to reinforce the ceiling. “It wasn’t an act of courage,” he said. “I just had to.”

As someone given to tilting the most quotidian events into a Viking epic, I couldn’t get enough. I’d spent years traveling the world for my job, hoping to meet someone like this Ambrosio, someone who happened to speak in a fascinating spool of sentences, in compelling layers of stories—someone who actually
had
a grand philosophy of life. Who was profane and holy. Who had staked his life on a code that seemed to be going the way of the most endangered animals: the loggerhead turtle, the numbat, the jackass penguin.
^‖

In his cameo in Ari’s newsletter at Zingerman’s, Ambrosio had been nothing but a two-dimensional figure, an archetype—the Rustic Cheesemaker—but here, in person, he burst, popped, and exploded
into three dimensions, burnished and blazing, Ambro the Beneficent, engaged in chivalrous acts of purity.

It’s rare indeed when one’s highest opinion of oneself is greeted by others as the truth, but that’s exactly the mirror that reflected back on Ambrosio Molinos and his cheese. As he traveled from fair to fair, manning his booth with brio, he joked with the future president of Spain, José María Aznar, a short man Ambrosio liked immensely. When they met again, he greeted him by saying, “José María, you’re
still
short!” He also met Camilo José Cela, the Nobel Prize–winning Spanish writer, a not altogether pleasant experience, as it turned out.
^a
And with each new honor that accrued to his
queso
, more enthusiasts and gourmands were drawn to the cheese and its maker.
^b

But more important than praise was the fact that Ambrosio found
himself at the forefront of a minor movement. In England, Spanish food products had mostly been ignored, but by the late eighties a Spanish renaissance was afoot, led by importers such as Monika Linton, whose company, Brindisa, was housed in a warehouse next to Southwark Cathedral on the south bank of the Thames. “One of her first products was a cheese in a tin,” reads a 1994 article from
The Independent
, “which she lit upon at the Food Fair. The brainchild of Ambrosio Molinos, it was a rich cheese rather like Parmesan, packed in olive oil in a beautiful tin.”

The article went on to quote Linton. “ ‘Because it was such an eccentric cheese, it opened quite a few doors for me. There were a couple of important restaurants and department stores in London prepared to try it. But no one really managed to sell it, partly because it was expensive,’ she says. It failed to make any money but worked as a marketing experiment, because it opened doors.”

It opened doors—that’s all Ambrosio cared about. Doors to past memories, to one’s parents, friends, and children. Yes—it was a globalizing force pushing backward against a world on the verge of globalization. But also, it was a visionary’s cheese: It cut to the heart of how he felt a human being should eat. “I’d much rather drink wine made by somebody who’s serving it to me, because I’m drinking that
person,” said Ambrosio. “I’m becoming impregnated by that person’s being, their love.”
^c

Thus he saw his mission as one of disseminating that cheese-love far and wide, and, perhaps blinded by all the fine, glorious things that redounded from the cheese, he happened to miss certain business realities, reflected by the line in the article that said,
partly because it was expensive.… It failed to make any money
.

The year was now 1991. One day the secretary, his aunt, took him aside. We have money problems, she said bluntly.
^d

Money problems?
It seemed preposterous. Here they were, making one of the most coveted cheeses in the world. For every order that went out, three more came back over the transom. And now there were … 
money problems?

It was hard to calculate the meaning of this news, but after the disbelief, Ambrosio claimed his body was seized with an unsettling sensation—a need to move. He propelled his large frame three steps at a time straight up to the office, where, in his telling, he began pawing through order forms and receipts, bank statements and contracts, reviewing for the first time all the deals and numbers he’d left to others.

“And then something terrible dawned on me,” said Ambrosio. His voice trailed into silence that first night in the telling room. He pressed his lips together, and Carlos and I sat listening to him breathe for a while. All of this was so unexpected—the turns of the story, the
imposing stranger who now sat bereft before us, shoulders rounding in grief, his secrets spilling forth on the table, shimmering like a catch of fish. “The cheese didn’t belong to me anymore,” he said at last. “It belonged to
him
. It was in
his
name, or the names of those with whom he was collaborating. Because he was very clever.”

Who
was very clever? I asked.

“Julián,”
said Ambrosio. “There was no question in my mind that we would have laid our lives down for each other, but he’s the one who ruined me. He stole the cheese. He put the contracts before me, knowing that I would sign them without reading.”

“Julián duped you into signing your company away?” I asked.

Yes, said Ambrosio, waving a hand. “And, worse, I’d signed it away two years before.”

He continued: “At first it was impossible to believe. It all went rushing through my head, all those happy years, right back to my father lying sick in bed. I fell into shock. And denial.” Despite the looping evidence of his scrawled signature on paper, he thought he could merely put everything back together again, as if the wind-shorn branches on the ground could be picked up and reattached to the trees in order to create the illusion that there’d never been a storm at all. He would go see Julián and undo everything.