The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (13 page)

We swooped down the hill, along the same winding road we’d earlier climbed, descending to the
coterro
’s floor with the windows open, cooler air gushing now. I crouched over the wheel in an alert stupor, trying to register everything that appeared in the headlights—stones
in the road, stray grapevines, pellets of sheep shit—when suddenly came a silent, yellow explosion, like flashbulbs firing. Sunflowers! We were immersed in a sea of them. Perhaps it was the hour, or the giddy sense of freedom I felt after having sat for so long cooped inside a cave, but the car guided itself to the side of the road, and before Carlos had time to question I shot out and waded into them with palms open, as if expecting low fives.

A light wind rustled the flowers, and I zigzagged about ten rows deep, until I was more or less hidden. My feet sank into the loose, granular dirt that filled my sandals, itchy and still warm. The flowers wafted a mild, leafy smell, the sky cathedraled overhead. I could see the car from where I stood, its headlights in a sodium pool on the road, and Carlos blearily struggling to release himself from the seat belt. They were amazing creatures, these sunflowers, unthreatening, listing toward me as if to get a look.

I could hear the hum of stars, and I could locate the sound of myself thinking.
^*
How long had it been since I’d had the clarity, or peace, to hear the gears engage or the rustle of watery thoughts flowing toward some deeper pool? And, standing there,
^†
I had, well—call it what you will—a fibrillation of insight, or a crumb-sized epiphany.

The intervening voice was simple, almost corny, for it felt so good:
Belong to this
. But to what—a sunflower patch? Or the silence of the Old World? And did I
already
belong, or was I
supposed
to belong, aspire to belong, change my life to belong? There was a problem: If I belonged
right here
, then I didn’t belong
back there
, with my wife and son, in the noise of the New World.

The impulse out in the sunflowers
^‡
that early morning was to stay absolutely still for a moment, sucking in fresh air, immersed and drawn under by a deep and powerful silence. Looming before me was the mesa known as Mon Virgo, looking every bit as much a landing pad for extraterrestrials as it was Ambrosio’s heaven of bodily evacuation. It called up Ambrosio’s earlier phrase, when he’d described the way they gently and soulfully offed their chickens here, but really had been describing their underlying ethos of life.

“Divinity, not machines,” he’d said.

It could have been the cheesemaker’s slow-food manifesto, silk-screened on a thousand farmers’ market T-shirts, his utopian ideal writ large, inked on the sandaled-shaggy-man’s placard in Times Square.

Divinity, not machines
.

Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity. I was thinking about how Ambrosio had said he spoke to animals, as if they were close friends, confiding in them. What so moved me about this notion? Not just that I wanted to talk to animals like that—though I did—but more: I wanted to live in a realm where I
could
talk to animals, where all the generations of my family had once resided, where I might take daily strength in them, and where I’d live a life antlered by meaning and mysticism. Instead, I’d grown up in suburbia, with
our nearest family relations six hours by car, and a scattered sense of my own heritage. Standing among sunflowers, I suddenly felt an urge to reverse the ships, play history in rewind, spur an inverse diaspora so that I might return to the ur-village, become a cobbler or farmer, working shoulder to shoulder with my brethren.

Those, as far as I could tell, were my brethren: farmers on my mother’s English-Irish-Scots side, tradespeople on my father’s Italian side. Certainly every family possesses its creation myth, and one of mine revolved around my grandfather, Gaetano of Sicily, who, upon entering the waters of lower Manhattan aboard the
Giuseppi Verdi
in 1920—and passing through Ellis Island—became Thomas of America, an Italian immigrant, an opera-loving barber (and barber’s son), a peaceable man who liked nothing more than to make wine.

The story went that during World War I he’d been captured by Central Powers troops and hauled to a prison camp in Romania, where he was left to molder and starve. Until he hatched an escape plan, one that resulted in the killing of a guard, the traversing of icy ravines, the loss of a companion along the way. He traveled this enemy landscape until he came upon railroad tracks, following them to trains. He hid by day and rode the trains by night, holding himself underneath the cars until he snuck back into Italy on foot.

I’ve often imagined my grandfather beneath those trains, and questions spark to mind: Is this physically possible? And assuming it is, what sustains and gives him the strength to undertake such a harrowing journey? The answer, I imagine, is the village of his origin, Tortorici, where everything that matters most to him resides. Can he taste the ripe peaches of home, the sweet water? Can he picture his own father, in the barbershop, waiting for him now? News from the front has been bleak. There are already four dead Paternitis from the village, but his son Gaetano has not yet been listed among them. The father, Antonino, stands there, his astral face reflecting in the mirrors, and he, the son, who is beneath the train, imagines reaching up to kiss his father good morning—
buona mattina, papa
—then
readying the hot towels and combs, sharpening the scissors and straight razors, and finally taking his place beside the old man, waiting for the day’s first customer.

That’s how I imagine it, at least: the village on the mountain, the narrow streets, the barbershop—all of it giving him more strength than he has. That’s how he rides home half alive, and how he feels the first mists of lower Manhattan from the deck of the
Giuseppe Verdi
, borne by that one dream of home. After him, the rest of us are scatterlings.

So perhaps I envied a man like Ambrosio, whose strength seemed to derive from the pulse of the earth in this place, from being an Old Castilian who accepted the violence and vicissitudes of nature. And yet he’d found the key to his universe in the multitudes contained by a piece of cheese, by its absolute grandeur.

In my mild delirium, I eventually found it hard to think, or easier not to; I just allowed myself to register the feeling of existing there among the sunflowers. And the longer I stood, and the deeper I settled into that loose dirt, the more I became part of it, resolved to it.
^§

With the approach of dawn a few hours off, the air turned a little sweet, carrying with it a trace of chamomile. My limbs, so tired and sore from so much sitting, felt light and loose; my whole body lifted. What I felt then was an all-consuming peace, or perhaps that lack of bodily awareness. It was, I suppose, a feeling of oneness, though I would label it the cessation of an anxiety caused by the speed and decibels of every day. I breathed in one last time to remember it by.

By now Carlos had trudged out into the field, where we exchanged delirious words. “A different planet, huh?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Carlos. “Incredible.”

And then I took a picture of him, and he took one of me crouched
among the sunflowers, as if they were celebrities we’d met at a barbecue, photos being proof that we’d met them.

When we left that petaled forest to go back to the car, and then subsequently left the country to go back home, I already had it in mind to return. I already had it in mind that the cheese was now part of my legacy, too—and my young family’s. After I’d followed it here, Ambrosio had conveyed me into his telling room and, summoning ghosts, told me a story of a terrible betrayal, one so cruel and monstrous that it fired not only my own sense of empathy and justice, but invoked every betrayal visited upon
every other human who ever lived
.
^‖

At the same time, Ambrosio had given me a brief glimpse of a different, compelling sort of life, a life in which there seemed to be
more
time for family and conversation, for stories and food, a life I was desperate to lead now as an antidote to my own. It was okay to squander a day, a week, a year, sitting in that telling room, summoning ghosts, because no one saw it as squandering.

No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.

U
PON MY RETURN HOME
, I
PINNED A PHOTOGRAPH TO THE WALL
by my desk in the attic and then carried on again, living in clips, in the interstices, on the go, on the run, on the flyover, in rental cars, on takeout, during commercial breaks, between appointments and dirty diapers and ringing phones, adrenaline begetting adrenaline, packing bags and passport, on hold because of bad weather, de-icing, taking off, gathering speed on the cloverleaf, missing connections, missing my wife and son, checking in and out, mentally filibustering until the deadline had passed and it was time to pull an all-nighter to get something done.

Why was one always
behind
? And how did one get
ahead
?

Of course, the photograph was of Ambrosio, though it could have been from a hundred years ago. During our visit, he’d led me down the thirteen steps beneath the telling room, and I recalled Ari’s line from that old Zingerman’s newsletter, “The cheese is taken and
aged in a cave
,” one that stuck because it seemed most folkloric of all. I’d had visions of a gaping maw surrounded by boulders, wafting
forth fragrant cheese—or perhaps cathedrals of cobwebs, bats hanging upside down from stalactites, albino salamanders, the echoing drip-drop of an underground pool. Instead, it was a close, tight space, maybe thirty by fifteen feet, clean, dry, and well ventilated, with PVC pipe running to the surface for air. The floor and walls were stone, and several electric bulbs hung from the ceiling. After that oppressive summer heat it had been surprisingly cool down there, too, “air-conditioned by nature,” as Ambrosio had it.

Along one wall was makeshift wooden shelving where the cheese had once been kept. Now the planks sat empty. Back in the left corner was a cubby with more rickety shelves where the family stored its homemade wine in unlabeled green bottles.
^*
Even as Ambrosio talked on and on, he ducked into the corner, rummaged a little, and returned with an old wooden box. He unclasped its hook, reached in, and lifted out something wrapped in chamois—one white tin emblazoned with the black script and gold medal of the original Páramo de Guzmán, all that remained of Ambrosio’s grand experiment.
One tin
.

I asked if he’d let me take a picture. He pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the empty cave and sat, holding the tin in one hand and the oversized key to the
bodega
in the other. Framed by the rock walls, he gazed directly into the camera, conveying measures of pride and mournfulness, nonchalance and seriousness. But there was no doubt: Here was a human being concentrated in the moment, with an elemental kind of weight and grace.