The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (21 page)
Authors: Michael Paterniti
Of course, as a junior in college, I knew none of this. It wasn’t until later that I found myself enthralled by Madrid—and more so by what I found beyond its frontier, in the Castilian
campo
. Here, the sun-stroked faces of the old men met the arrival of a stranger with mild curiosity, but they wanted nothing from you. They only wanted to make sure you weren’t invading, and once that was settled, you were tolerated, allowed, and over time, perhaps even accepted.
T
O MY GREAT RELIEF
, when our day-tripping family came upon Guzmán that first time in the spring of 2003, my wife leaned forward
on the dash, gazed up at the village, and said one word: “Whoa!” When she met Ambrosio and he bear-hugged her, singing her name in his rumbling baritone, she was smitten. When we walked the streets with our kids, the women approaching with candies, she’d felt so welcome she kept repeating, “Oh, they’re so nice.” And when she responded in not-so-bad Spanish, there were gales of giddy delight.
We ate
comida
with Ambrosio and Asun in the warmth of midafternoon at their telling room, and Sara seemed to fall more deeply in love with the cheesemaker and his wife. Meanwhile, Leo clambered up the hill above the
bodegas
. He had a stick that he wielded as a sword, and Ambrosio kept talking to him.
“Mira,”
said the giant, picking some thyme from the ground, crushing it in his hand, and holding it out for Leo to smell.
“Our son is mesmerized,” Sara said.
After six weeks in our cramped apartment in Salamanca, what a relief it was to find ourselves in open fields, orchards, and vineyards! And our kids—everyone kept doting over the kids. It was like inheriting eighty grandparents, this one holding hands with our son, this one pinching the cheek of our daughter. “Everything you said about this place is true,” said Sara, in near disbelief.
So at the end of May we left Salamanca and moved to a house on Calle Francisco Franco, living with the ghost of El Caudillo himself. Our neighbor was an eighty-year-old gentleman known as Don Honorato, who lived in a humble manse with an anomalous patch of green lawn that he watered constantly. From our perch on a cusp of land planted with olive trees, we felt like the giant cranes we’d seen nesting on the high church tower in Salamanca, surveying all of creation below.
Almost better, there was no TV, no house projects, fickle cellphone coverage, and it took forty-five minutes to reach an Internet café. Without all the distractions, we quickly became reacquainted with each other, taking long walks, lingering over meals, sharing observations or delighting in some little thing our kids did (May’s first step, Leo’s first loose tooth, May’s first birthday, Leo’s first ride on the
toilet). So it was that, if only briefly, we’d broken the cycle. We’d stuffed away our old life, jumped an ocean, and unpacked our bags, laying our clothes into dresser drawers belonging to others. We slept on their beds and piled our books on shelves of preexisting books written in Spanish. If it was a fool’s errand to chase Ambrosio and his cheese, so be it. I was here to suffer the consequences.
*
While I myself never left the country (except to go to Canada) until I was sixteen, Leo’s passport bore the stamps of more than a dozen countries by the time he was five, a true twenty-first-century kid.
†
Once, when we’d been young and broke, I’d devised a plan whereby various tourist boards would sponsor a trip of ours to Scandinavia, believing us to be a semi-connected writer/photographer team thanks to a noncommittal letter of introduction I’d begged from a friend at an outdoors magazine. Though Sara had misgivings, and no background in photography whatsoever, we were soon traipsing over glacier, tundra, and taiga, me wielding my notepad, she carrying the camera case she rarely remembered to open unless I reminded her. Which was not great for the relationship. The last straw came in the forests of northern Norway, when we met up at a rustic lodge with a real eight-person team from a glossy German magazine, including a chatty photographer and his two assistants who wanted to talk shop. She would never live down that moment when, before their boisterous crowd, she unzipped her small case to reveal one sad camera. “That’s it?” roared the photographer. “No filters, no lenses?”
“I’m a naturalist,” she’d said indignantly. “And I travel light.” Then, at bedtime: “I want to go home now.”
‡
The origins of this name are murky but may be partially rooted in the Latin for “land of bears,” to signify the abundance of bears when the Romans arrived. That and/or the equally abundant strawberry trees,
madroño
in Spanish.
§
In the melting pot of that school, known as Sampere, we befriended a Swiss stationmaster and a shy Swedish postman. We became fast friends with a couple of frat boys from Virginia, and clung to them as if drowning. We found a cozy (read: shoebox) apartment next to a wonderful park, and so began more adventures: One day in the park my wife met an old man and learned from him the precise Spanish for “Do you mind if I fondle your cantaloupes?” Meanwhile, on the soccer pitch with Leo, I approached a group of young boys, none of whom came to my waist, and, hoping they might include him, fumbled an opportunity at international diplomacy by blurting the first words that sprang to mind,
“¡Está bien, por favor!”
or “It’s good, please!” Also, we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find diapers. Another fine evening, after going on a two-hour manhunt for a can opener (
una lata-abrir
, I found out after much pantomime), I returned to our apartment, holding the device triumphantly aloft, to find the kitchen on fire (small blaze, eventually contained, set off by wife’s misreading of Spanish burner instructions).
‖
Salamanca is famous for its black ham, as well as for having the oldest university in Spain, founded circa 1218 by King Alfonso IX of León just over a hundred years after the death of El Cid.
a
Valladolid: Once the capital of Spain, pronounced
Vaya-do-leed
. Among its pleasures are the house in which Columbus died, and another in which Miguel de Cervantes wrote part of
Don Quixote
.
b
Rabbits were endemic to the Iberian Peninsula but they weren’t commonly found elsewhere until the Phoenicians began exporting them from Spain on their travels around the Mediterranean. The proof of Spain as Europe’s first rabbit hutch was solidified when a 2.5-million-year-old fossil of a rabbit was found near Granada. (However, a 55-million-year-old proto-rabbit has been found in Mongolia.)
c
Geologists guess that approximately 5.5 million years ago Africa rammed into Spain, sealing shut the Straits of Gibraltar. Then, over the next 2,000 years, the Mediterranean evaporated, until the Atlantic Ocean breached the elevated isthmus between today’s Spain and Morocco, creating a “mega-fall,” a waterfall thought to be twenty times higher than Niagara and up to six miles long, that replenished the Mediterranean over the next hundred years.
d
History is rife with stories about Spanish intransigence. In roughly 134
B.C.
, as the Romans continued their drive to subdue Iberia, the Roman general Scipio Africanus the Younger laid siege to a town called Numantia (near present-day Soria) by establishing a blockade in hopes of starving the Iberians inside. After nine months, realizing the hopelessness of their predicament, the Numantians got drunk, lit the town on fire, and died in their self-made pyre rather than surrender to the Romans, a version of events later immortalized by Cervantes in his play
The Siege of Numantia
. In Cantabria, people shouted and sang victory slogans while being crucified; mothers would kill their children rather than let them be taken prisoner by the enemy.
e
By contrast, enter Barcelona: On the overnight train to the City of Counts during that same trip, a family with whom I shared a sleeping car invited me to stay in their apartment for
as long as I pleased
. They were as innocent as the turtles of Galápagos, warm and open and willing. And soon there I was, crashed in their guest room, playing with their kids, Sunday walking at Gaudi’s Park Güell and out on the Ramblas, the famous boulevard leading to the Mediterranean, the night Barcelona exploded for some soccer victory or something I could never quite determine. Bottles of wine were passed in the squares, the people spontaneously broke into song and then suddenly dance—dancing dances so beautiful in those golden-lit city squares, all of these Catalans wearing their buoyancy so colorfully that one couldn’t help but feel momentarily blinded. Soon pure joy turned to something deeper and more considered. Everyone stood for a moment in silence, the eighty-year-old couple hand-in-hand with long-haired teenagers, waiting for the music again. As the evening wore on, they seemed to be dancing less for Spain than for themselves, their own history, their tribe.
f
Writes Américo Castro in
The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History
, the Castilians “did not bother to foment culture; they cultivated the art of being ‘lords’ rather than exercise the faculties of the intellect or imagination. They did not develop a philosophy or science of their own, but they did create personal ways of being that would, in the future, make possible imperial enterprises and literary forms of expression still admired and studied throughout the world.”
REVENGE AND OTHER TRIVIALITIES
“Here is the Lord of Vizcaya you acclaimed.”
T
HE FIRST-EVER AMPUTATION WAS RECALLED BY THE
R
OMAN
Aulus Cornelius Celsus in
A.D.
1, a case of trying to stanch gangrene. His advice was simple: Never cut through a joint. Minimize blood loss. Leave enough skin to cover the nub. The early amputations—the ones before anesthesia in the nineteenth century—relied on speed. You made your incision quickly, in a circular motion, slicing muscle, tendon, nerve, and vessel, then hacked the bone. The burst of blood was controlled and coaxed to hemostasis by hot pitch or oil. The great amputator in the field, Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, who plied his trade in the 1800s, was world famous for being able to dispatch a leg in twenty-five seconds.
*
It gave Ambrosio an idea, in a beam of clotted light at his desk, as
he studied an old military manual. The page looked something like this:
He obsessed and mulled, paged deeper, and slowly a thought dawned on him: He could kill Julián while keeping him alive. After all, there were things he felt he needed to share with him. The scenario he imagined was simple. A rope, knife, and candle in the car; a distant cave. He craved revenge that could last, in terms that were final: blood, snot, ligament, bone.
He took to the roads in the winter after he’d lost the cheese, skimming
through the vineyards like a vapor. There were nights when he turned off the headlights and drove by the moon’s luster. How many times had he found comfort in the undulating land here, in every bend of rural highway? But in his stricken state, the scene brought him unbearable sadness: a tree with a fallen limb, a gutted car in a field, the old factory with dark windows. The force of projection was too great, and gravity too weak. He would fry himself by flying headlong into his own black sun.
Of course, he knew Julián’s every move, exactly where he was at each hour of the day. They’d had telepathy, hombre; for instance, if they were in a crowded room of people they might look for each other at the same exact moment—they were the same height, which was a head taller than the rest—and meet eyes, and start laughing, laughing at the telepathic joke they told each other over the heads of all the people standing between them who would never know their joke, because they didn’t possess anything like the telepathy Ambrosio and Julián had, that secret channel.
He’d picked an abandoned
bodega
, of which there were hundreds in this part of the country. He would turn the engine off, and in the plot he’d concocted, the one he’d fantasized about,
†
he would drag Julián, bound and gagged, from the trunk of his car into the cave. Killing him with a gunshot or garrote to the throat would have been an act of cowardice. If you really meant to kill your best friend, to change him in death, it should have to be long and slow, thereby providing repeated edification.
The moment of truth: Julián bound tightly in a chair, the knife and
candle on the table. Ambrosio would start by leaving him in the dark for a few days to think about things. Then he’d appear with cheese and wine. Expansive, jovial. Light the candle, drip a bit of wax on the coarse tabletop, and prop it there. He wouldn’t yell; he wouldn’t hit. He’d sit down and eat and drink in front of his good friend—sucking, slurping, masticating, wine dribbling from his lips, as Julián sat swollen and parched. And night after night, he would tell him stories, “the thousand and one stories of our friendship,” as Ambrosio had put it.
Do you remember our first
merienda
at the
bodega?
We stole the wine, just the four musketeers, right? Can you picture Enrique’s face, when he was still alive? And do you remember the story we told that night about the Witches of Peñafiel …
