The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (2 page)

To my mind, such inquiry and excellence deserved me, and even if I was only going to build sandwiches, I would beam my own excellence in perfect slathers of mayo and mustard. After all, I needed a job, and the food and the karma were so good at Zingerman’s, it felt like a place I could make home for a while.

So one June day found me hiking up the steep stairs to the office above the deli and presenting myself as the answer to Zingerman’s problems, whatever its problems were. I came armed with my résumé bearing the proud monogram MFA, and within three minutes, two of them spent waiting, one of the deli mistresses set me straight.

“We don’t have anything right now,” she said, as seven phones rang at once, and turned back to business.

A few days later, the deli called. They wanted to see me regarding a special opportunity. I beelined back to the office and stood before the deli woman again. “I noticed you’ve done some proofreading,” she said casually, her eyes skimming my résumé to jog specifics. “Ari writes all the newsletters himself, and we could use someone to check it each month.” It wasn’t for sure, my new boss cautioned. And it might be four to six hours a month. We could try one first. To see how it went.

I thought I heard something like eight dollars an hour. “Done,” I said.

I left with a folder clutched tightly under my arm and a new
sproing
in my step. The newsletter, the monthly newsletter! It sat in stacks in the store. Everyone from the ebullient hard-core gourmands to the morose doctoral students read it while waiting in line, especially because it contained a menu and you couldn’t read the chalkboards from a mile away. But it was more than that: It was part foodie bible, part travelogue, in which Ari brought to stirring life his global search for goodies as he played out the thrilling Indiana Jones lead. From a business point of view, the newsletter had always been a bit of marketing genius, and now it had become Ari’s trademark, one his followers craved reading as much as their latest
New Yorker
issues.

The Ari in question was Ari Weinzweig, co-owner of the Zingerman
universe and a man of panache, chutzpah, and wide-roaming palate. Once he’d been a University of Michigan history major and collector of anarchist literature; now he was caught in a daily downpour of money from the clouds of patrons at his doorstep. Ari was tall, handsome, with dark ringlets of hair, the overeducated man’s Jeff Goldblum. Everybody seemed to want a word. He was ARI, gourmet argonaut, the Sherlock Holmes of nosh and niblets.
^‡
I’d seen him once or twice in the deli, wearing spandex shorts, just in from a run. He was always trailed by a gaggle of pretty people. Long, lean, hypnotic, the magic man of food—AHHHH-REEE.

And so, naturally, the newsletter was a revved-up reflection of Ari’s peregrinations, and as such was never meant to be literature. His was a breezy, conversational style, full of exclamations (
This is the best!
) and enthusiasms (
You gotta try it!
), a pleated high-school pep squad for his personal pantry. His greatest strength was a knack for making you hungry. Back at my apartment, even as I imagined Ari up in first class on a flight to St. Petersburg in search of the world’s best beluga caviar, I dug a couple of pencils from the drawer, then pulled the folder from my backpack, placed it on the desk, and began perusing the pages. On first read, it was good, if a bit rustic. There was the occasional clunker, but that was to be expected. I made some marks, deleted a few words, added a suggestion. I got up and fixed a grilled cheese. Sat back down. Made more notes. Were we being a little
too
effusive about the Jewish noodle kugel? Couldn’t we add a more savory detail re: the sour-cream coffee cake? What about expanding our adjective horizon beyond “tasty” and “delicious”?

By late afternoon, I’d completely rewritten the thing. Ari’s style was now more … 
Cheeveresque
. I couldn’t wait for him to return from St. Petersburg, or wherever, so I could entirely rewrite his next newsletter about beluga caviar. I put the folder aside, revisited it once more
late that night while eating cold noodles. Yes. Perfect. Bill Bonds came on: Boris Yeltsin was standing on top of a tank in front of the Kremlin; the Soviet regime had been toppled.

Things were looking up.

Back at the deli a few days later, reaction to the revolution—my first edit—was surprisingly muted. “I think we’re trying to keep Ari’s voice intact,” said my boss, handing back my edit.
Maybe we should let Ari be the judge of that
, I wanted to say. But really, I needed the job. So I gathered the pages into the folder again and, home at my desk, armed with a plump red eraser, brought him back to life. I added more exclamations. In the margins, I wrote: “Wouldn’t this be a good place for a ‘delicious’?” I reminded myself that I was thrilled not only to get paid for reading but also to be reading anything besides lit-crit books that quoted heavily from Lukács’s theory of reification.

During a time when microwave popcorn passed for dinner, the subject of fine food also offered a vicarious thrill. While I couldn’t afford to eat well, I could certainly
aspire
to. So I read with an enthusiasm that matched Ari’s on the page. I could taste the pickles and smoked fish. I could hear the cow moo and the butter churn. I was drawn deeper and deeper into his savory world, though I never forgot my place as foot servant. The truth is, Ari Weinzweig never would have recognized me if we’d smacked into each other before the loaves of rye.

That, however, didn’t dampen my enthusiasm about our next order of business together: the October newsletter, which was Zingerman’s second annual celebration of Spanish food. The deli was working in concert with the Spanish tourist board and artisanal food makers there, and sometime earlier that year, Ari had eaten his way across the country in search of delectables. Something about the evocation of warm sun, sangria, and gluttony just as the low ceiling of gray lake clouds closed over Michigan for the next half year struck a chord, and while
my
only visit to Spain had come on a chilly European jaunt during my junior year abroad in London—there were Uzi’d
policia
in the streets of Madrid ten years after Franco’s death
and an elaborate night trying to find Salvador Dalí on the Costa Brava
^§
—the country flashed back now through Ari’s prose.

That October newsletter was his aria, his masterpiece, his opus. The writing seemed to come from a different man. The passion was unbridled.
¡Vaya!
He sang the praises of Spanish olives and Rías Baixas wine, Salamancan ham and a host of cheeses that included Manchegos, Cabrales, Majoreros. I tightened and added a few “delicious”es. I padded an entry about sherry, lightened another about olive oil. I turned the page—and suddenly, from nowhere, came an entry that needed no intervention whatsoever. It was about a special cheese Ari had hunted down, and it appeared under the heading “New and Amazing,” three paragraphs buried among six type-packed, oversized pages—crammed between a primer on Sephardic Jewish cooking and an ad for a paella-making clinic.

“Though I’ve saved this one for last,” wrote Ari, “don’t let me mislead you. This is really an outstanding piece of cheese … so anonymous I discovered it by chance in London. It’s also the most expensive cheese we’ve ever sold. Makes me a little nervous just putting it on the counter.”

The item went on to describe how this piece of “sublime” cheese was made in Castile, in the north-central part of the country, and how, when Ari had visited the cheesemaker himself, the Spaniard had shared vivid memories of his grandmother making the very same cheese and imploring him to keep the tradition alive. When asked by Ari how he justified making such an expensive cheese, the man had said, “Because it’s made with love.”

But there was more: Each day this cheesemaker collected fresh
milk from “his flock of one hundred Churra sheep.” The milk was poured into vats, stirred, and after it had coagulated, the curd was hand-cut into tiny pieces “in order to expel as much liquid as possible.” Each wheel of the cheese was then pressed to rid it of any remaining moisture and transported to a nearby cave. After the first aging, the cheese was submerged in extra-virgin olive oil and aged again, for at least a year. The stuff of his job—the minutiae, the care, the importance of time—happened to sound a lot like the job of a writer.

“It’s rich, dense, intense,” sang Ari, “a bit like Manchego, but with its own distinct set of flavors and character.”

There was something about all of it, not just the perfection of Ari’s prose, but the story he told—the village cheesemaker, the ancient family recipe, the old-fashioned process by which the cheese was born, the idiosyncratic tin in which it was packaged—that I couldn’t stop thinking about, even as I went on to contend with misplaced modifiers in a passage about marzipan. It occurred to me that there we were, living through cursed 1991, in a crushing recession—when the national dialogue centered around whether Clarence Thomas had uttered the question “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?”—and along came this outrageous, overpriced, presumptuous little cheese, almost angelic in its naïveté, fabulist in character, seemingly made by an incorruptible artiste who, with an apparent straight face, had stated that its high price tag came because it was “made with love.”

Was this for real?

I went to the deli. At $22
^‖
a pound for the cheese, I had no intention of buying any. I’d come, however odd it sounds, to gaze upon it. Thus I timed my visit for in-between rushes. I picked up the finished newsletter at the door and stood for a while, reading as if the words were not only brand-new to me but the most fascinating thing I’d ever had occasion to trip over. I watched a few other nicely dressed
people—quilted jackets, colorful scarves—reading it, taking pleasure in their pleasure. Then I dove in, jostling through holes in the line, moving across the black-and-white-checked floor until I found myself face-to-face with the cheeses behind the nursery glass: There were the Manchego and Cabrales, Mahón and Garrotxa … and there was
my
cheese. It seemed to hover there, apart in its own mystical world. It came in its white tin with black etching that read
PÁRAMO DE GUZMÁN
. The package, which was almost oval in shape, bore the emblem of a gold medal for supreme excellence above all other cheeses, an honor from some agricultural fair, it appeared. And perched there in the display, before a pyramid of the tins, was a piece cut into three wedges. Unlike its paler Manchego and Mahón brethren, it possessed an overall caramel hue. It may sound strange to call a cheese soulful, but that’s what this cheese seemed to be, just by sight. It had traveled so far to be here, and from so long ago. I let myself fantasize about what it might taste like, as I could only fantasize about a gourmandizing, dandy’s life in which I might pen the words “… discovered it by chance in London.”

And this is when an odd shift occurred inside: That little handmade cheese in the tin, and its brash lack of cynicism in a rotten year, gave me a strange kind of hope. I sensed the presence of purity and transcendence. I felt I knew this cheese somehow, or would. It sat silently, hoarding its secrets. How long would it wait to speak?

A long time, as it turned out. But when it did, the cheese had a lot to say. Unlike that day in 1991, when I felt so pressed to leave the deli in order to put the finishing touches on another one of my overheated homing pigeons of prose, it became nearly impossible for me to walk away.

O
NCE UPON A TIME, IN THE VAST, EMPTY HIGHLANDS OF THE
Central Plateau of Spain … in the kingdom of Castile … in a village on a hill … on a bed in a house where the summer temperature hovered at one hundred degrees … a woman named Purificación lay writhing in labor. For hours the baby’s soon-to-be father had come and gone from the dark bedroom as the woman, sylphed in shadows, rode the wave of each contraction. “Anyone here yet?” said the man, smiling, sipping a cold drink. His wife, a woman of owlish beauty and a certain refinement, said to the midwife, “Get that donkey’s ass away from me!”

Eventually, the baby was born—in the same room, on the same bed, beneath the same roof as his great-grandfather—making him the youngest of three boys belonging to the husband and wife. He had almond-shaped eyes, a body as hefty as a bag of oats, and, even then, lungs that never quit, emitting a loud, gravelly cry. He was not to be overlooked. He ate more than his brothers; slept less. And he had inordinate passion. From the beginning, he endeared himself to his parents
by loving them as hard as he could, with an exquisite kind of ardor. When he learned to walk, he followed them everywhere; when he could speak, he spoke to them.