The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (19 page)
Authors: Michael Paterniti
With debts to pay, he found work driving a truck—or rather, his brother Angel bought a truck for him to drive—and on long hauls through Europe, at border crossings or waiting to deliver a load of melons, or crates of juice, or olive oil, he foraged through the past to
try to find the clues and incongruities that might have led to the betrayal. Search as he might, there was so little to be found. That’s what felt most disturbing: either he’d completely missed the signs, or there hadn’t been any. Which moment was it that had turned Julián? It was true that in recent years Julián had seemed more distracted and rarely visited the
bodega
anymore. Ambrosio’s wife had pointed that out, and Ambrosio had said, No, he has some family issues. It’s not personal.
Wasn’t that how the closest friendships worked? Three days, three months, three years—you came and went, eclipsed and effaced, taking care of the stuff of your life with the full trust that your
majo amigo
would always come around again, on a Sunday afternoon, for some wine and
chuletas
up at the
bodega
.
In the months after his departure, he heard rumors about the company: They were skimping on quality, buying inferior milk. The company was sold—and sold again. The reputation of the cheese waned. For anyone who asked why, he had an answer, the same one he’d given all those years ago to those enthralled by his cheese: In order to make a magical cheese, you have to pour in your love and goodness. The cheese is an obligation, a referendum on you as a person, your purity and rectitude. What they were doing now was production-line stuff, making soulless cheese from soulless milk. Taste buds never lied: Scallywags and
“putas,”
as Ambrosio put it—businessmen and robots, too—made horrible cheese.
The desecration was complete.
It was one thing to steal the cheese, and another to ruin it, though of course they were one and the same. For Ambrosio the question remained: To kill or not to kill? “If you listen, nature tells you everything,” he was fond of saying. So it was only fitting that when Christmas Eve arrived and the whole family had gathered in Guzmán, nature spoke.
Angel was there, Roberto, Ambrosio Senior. They were sitting around the table, and Angel said, “Why don’t we go check on the cheese?”
He was not speaking of a midnight run to the factory but to the family
bodega
where Ambrosio had stored a couple tins of the original cheese, from the very beginning, all that was left. The mere mention of it struck fear in Ambrosio, for the tins had taken on great importance—like icons.
“Let’s just leave it to God,” he said, but then his father rose abruptly and put on his coat. And then everyone put on their coats, and briskly followed the old man out into the cold night, under the stars-upon-stars you see there, the bold Spanish sky that started Columbus to the New World. In silence they walked down through the shuttered town and up to the
bodega
, where they unlocked the door, descended the thirteen steps into the cave, and lit candles. Someone uncorked a magnum—the Grand Reserve 1989 from the Pedrosa vineyard, given as a gift by Ambrosio’s friend Manuel.
‖
There they sat in a circle, passing the
porrón
. Ambrosio unclasped the wooden box that held the tins of cheese and unwrapped one from a purple chamois cloth. His hands trembled as he put the can opener to it. Could it ever live up? And why ask it to? If it was a cheese of memories, then best to remember it alive in its heyday. He dawdled and stalled, cutting the lid as slowly as possible while talking about the price of grain … the prospects for spring … the drivers he’d met while traversing Europe.
“¡Puta madre!”
his father burst out. “Let’s go, open the damn thing! Before I die.”
Ambrosio was thinking,
Shit. Okay. There are no guarantees. It will be what it is
.
When he slid back the serrated metal top and candlelight fell on the cheese, he spied a white frosting of calcium over its surface. He pushed gently on it with his finger. It gave—and gave back.
With the tip of his pocketknife, he stabbed one of the two wedges and removed it from the olive oil. He cleaned the wedge with a paper napkin and smelled the knife, then cut away the rind and went inside and realized that it was dry and hard and very good, almost flaking. He parceled pieces out to his father and brothers, who couldn’t believe it either. For so hard a cheese, it melted so readily, releasing the chamomiles and herbs of the
páramo
. And as strong as the wine was, the cheese, in full bloom, was stronger.
That
amazed Ambrosio.
Later, in the months and years to come, they would talk about this night as a kind of miracle. It was yet another story they told, the cheese in all its power and glory, coming back from exile, coming back, despite Julián’s betrayal, from the dead.
Ambrosio had been waiting for a sign. Gazing upon his cheese again, he felt flooded with wonder. How could it be? He saw it as young and vibrant, and he said to the cheese,
Damn, what tolerance you have! What stamina!
And the cheese said,
I’m here for you
.
When it came time for the last morsel and Ambrosio took the piece from the plate before him, when he held the cheese up in the flicker of candlelight like a wafer, he listened for its voice again, for the wisdom of ages to speak.
To kill or not to kill?
Get that son of a bitch
, said the cheese.
*
Wrote Richard Ford of nineteenth-century Spanish bread and cheese: “The Spanish loaf has not that mysterious sympathy with butter and cheese as it has in our verdurous Old England, probably because in these torrid regions pasture is rare, butter bad, and cheese worse, albeit they suited the iron digestion of Sancho, who knew of nothing better: none, however, who have ever tasted Stilton or Parmesan will join in his eulogies of Castilian
queso
, the poorness of which will be estimated by the distinguished consideration in which a round cannonball Dutch cheese is held throughout the Peninsula. The traveler, nevertheless, should take one of them, for bad here is the best …”
†
The Slow Food Movement, led by Italian gourmand and food writer Carlo Petrini, sprang from two incidents: the 1986 deaths of nineteen people from cheap wine cut with methanol in Petrini’s home region of Piedmont, coupled with protests against the building of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a Parisian theater in 1989, Petrini codified the movement’s manifesto, along with “delegates” from fifteen other countries, calling for the protection of the old ways of agriculture and cuisine that, according to Petrini and his compadres, were under attack by the multinational food companies. The tenets of the movement were in part identical to those that Ambrosio and other small producers had been espousing for years: the preservation and promotion of local products and their lore, the creation of an “ark” of heirloom seeds, the celebration and privileging of local cuisine, all to stave off, as Petrini’s manifesto put it, “the universal madness of the Fast Life.”
In its place, the movement advocated the conviviality of past customs. So read the manifesto: “Against those, and there are many of them, who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of a sufficient portion of assured sensual pleasure, to be practiced in slow and prolonged enjoyment.” To have joined Ambrosio at the
bodega
for a Sunday meal would have been the living proof of such tenets—and his cheese, then, as much as any editorial that could be written, became
his
manifesto.
‡
To wound an Old Castilian was to invoke a kind of biblical wrath. Even in the recent past, when the reach of the Spanish legal system fell short of the countryside, the formation of makeshift citizen tribunals known as “Seven-Man Justice” was meant to keep matters from turning violent. But when the verdict didn’t satisfy the aggrieved party, a primal drama was often quick to unfold. The danger was real: In Castile, the distance between the seed of thought and the deed itself was a very short gunpowder line indeed.
§
His mother, on the other hand, would never drive by the factory, for if she did, she was stricken with acute stomach pains.
‖
The significance of that wine, on this night, wasn’t lost on the assembled, for at that very moment the pope, John Paul II, was celebrating Midnight Mass at the Vatican with the same Grand Reserve. It had been a point of pride for Spaniards everywhere that the Holy See had chosen this Castilian wine over Oremos, the Polish one he usually drank on Christmas Eve—the first time a Spanish wine had been picked for the occasion. It was an extremely strong wine that erased all taste, until you became the wine itself. Though he’d had the bottle for years, Ambrosio had promised himself that he wouldn’t open it until the pope celebrated Mass with a chaliceful.
THE QUEST
“Whoa!”
T
HE DIAPER-SWADDLED CHILDREN WERE ASLEEP FOR A BLESSED
moment, and Sara was in bed, febrile with fatigue, cuddled around her book, a tome so harrowing it seemed to emanate a radioactive glow. Since the time we’d met at Storytelling School in our tender twenties, we’d come to live overlapping lives. She had written a book, and bounced around the globe chasing stories for magazines, too. Even with our growing family, every assignment presented an opportunity. If the timing was right, if the faraway place seemed benevolent enough, if we had enough frequent flyer miles or we could combine our work, we made a pact to try to travel together as much as possible.
*
And the pleasures were immense: Sara wandering the streets of Havana with Leo, dawdling before street musicians playing
son
as I tried to arrange a meeting with Fidel Castro, then all of us joining forces for a tasty meal at a
parador
; or Leo and I riding an elephant
in a Phnom Penh park while Sara reported a story about baby laundering, to return by day’s end for a meal by the Mekong. These blurred divisions had always made perfect sense to us because they’d always led to the greatest serendipities.
On this night Sara was researching an article about toxicity—and what she read was riveting. It turned out that everything in our house was toxic, from water bottles to baby formula, and these items could, would, and
were
poisoning us. The book’s title was something like
Total Cancer
or
We’re All Toast
. Lying there beneath her cloud of infiltrating phthalates, my wife wore an expression of intense concentration.
“Been thinking about Ambrosio and Guzmán,” I said, settling on my side with a bowl of popcorn, munching.
She nestled deeper.
Why is he talking to me?
“What would you say to moving?” I continued.
She turned a page so slowly it made a creaking sound. “Move to Spain,” I said. “Ambrosio says there’s a place we could rent in the village. He says no one’s living there, so we’d get it cheap.”
Sara had long ago learned to ride these hypotheticals out—but she also realized their danger.
†
And once it dawned on her that I might be gaining momentum, she reluctantly lifted her head, shaped
a quick mountain of pillows, and fell back with her arms crossed. She wore a faded college T-shirt that read “Spring Party Weekend,” and her hair was mussed. She emitted a sigh of exasperation. I had the feeling that husbands sometimes have in the presence of wives roused from near sleep: a certain awe at her unself-conscious beauty and a sinking sense that I was yet one more child in her life.
“We need to find a new shower curtain,” she said.
“But what about Spain?” I said.
“It might be safer,” she said. “The EU bans more than a thousand chemicals that the FDA won’t.”
“Really?” I said, and then she told me about the essential changes in human DNA caused by the chemicals in everyday items. As she spoke, I was thinking about the glories of snuggling with the kids in the morning, spending time with them that wasn’t borrowed or stolen, reading to them for hours at night, living off the grid for a while, just the four of us.
“I haven’t written a piece in almost six months,” she said. She averted her eyes to her book and its itemizations of our slow, painful dying by chemicals. After childbirth, she was aching to reenter the same journalistic fray that I was now eager to exit. Then she turned back to me and said, “The kids are so small.”
What remained unspoken was a laundry list of reasons that we both knew made a move impractical: We had—and needed—jobs, for one. It would be expensive, for two. We didn’t speak the language, and out on the Meseta we’d be miles from medical help, let alone supermarkets or a Starbucks. In truth, we’d most likely be living in a dark hovel, in a village of mostly elderly people and a bunch of half-feral dogs.
“It would only be for a while,” I said.
“Like how long?” she said.
“A year maybe?”
And so began the negotiation, me painting a picture for Sara of a young, vibrant family that drops out of the American rat race and finds more time for each other in a small Spanish village. Children
become instantly bilingual, wear black berets and Continental shoes. Husband and wife dance in the village square. When Sara retreated to her book that night, I knew the adventurer in her had been stirred.
“We’d have a lot to work out,” she said, “but I’m not opposed.”
A
MONTH LATER
, I flew down to Manhattan to meet with my book editor. We sat in a nice restaurant with white tablecloths and rectangles of flavorful fish topped with capers and “confettis of herbs.” The clientele wore suits and ties, and the murmur of gravitas, of business being done, was unmistakable. Meanwhile, I was an interloper in jeans, trying to fake seriousness. There was some talk again about doing a war book. Ideas were batted around—and nixed. Finally, my editor asked if there was a story I was dying to tell.
I hesitated for a moment. “Well,” I said, and it came pouring out: the small Spanish village, the cheesemaker and his family recipe, his best friend, a revenge plot …
