The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (22 page)

The stories would unfold in slow motion. He would tease out this intricate detail, that funny strain. He would make beautiful origami out of memory, out of innocent tales of childhood, and then hang it there from the cave ceiling. Afterward, he would dispense with the niceties and let his mood swing to the affliction of his mind. He would approach Julián, picking the knife from the table, and in one motion he’d slice an earlobe. To stanch the blood, he’d cauterize the wound with the lit candle. It was so easy, the way you could begin to edit and delete a body. They were so far from civilization the screaming merely sounded like the wind. But even that didn’t feel like enough. He wanted to give more by taking more. He would tell a story for each amputation. He had so much to give.

Do you remember the fiesta? Do you remember the girls at the Burgos dance?

He needed Julián to live, in order that he might understand what Ambrosio meant by “the disability of memory.” He wanted Julián to live forever, in order to remember how it had once been when they were young and innocent and most alive. He would bring Julián to a place where there was no such thing as time.

Night after night, Julián heard the stories and songs. Even in his diminishment, he still clung to life, to the sound of Ambrosio’s voice. But Ambrosio couldn’t help him live forever. He knew there’d come a
night when Julián would remain motionless. Perhaps Ambrosio, who could be moved to tears by an old dog with a limp or young child with his hair parted just so, would feel nothing except a final flash of anger.
¡Puta madre!
It seemed this brother of his, Julián, was, for the moment, dead.

B
ACK WHEN
I
WENT
to Storytelling School, we encountered a parade of visitors from beyond (usually New York City), all the real and amazing writers, agents, and editors of our day, who came bearing grim news: What we were doing was madness. A suicide mission. No one had time for stories anymore. No one cared. Look, this is 1991, they said, unleashing an elephant hose of icy water on our fantasies. You can’t compete with
Murphy Brown, Designing Women
, or
Murder, She Wrote
. There are thirty channels of something called cable. There are
one million
Americans using something called the Internet. Statistically speaking, we were told, there was barely a chance for any of us. Maybe one day if Johnny Carson retired … or if Charles and Diana separated … or, if in some space-age future, they invented a handheld device that acted as phone, camera, and portable multimedia player (and because of that, people started buying Macintosh products again, ha, ha, ha) … well, if all of
that
somehow came to pass, then one of us just might
^‡
make it as a writer.

Leaving those roundtable sessions with our heroes, my colleagues and I bore the countenance of the damned, eyeing each other as if weighing the possible toll on our psyches if we started cannibalizing the weakest. But our biggest, saddest thought balloon was transparent to all: Why hadn’t we been told all of this
before
we opted out of law school?

At the time, I was reading the great Jewish-German essayist Walter Benjamin,
^§
which, for once, should have lent me an air of intellectual
rigor and credibility at the coffee shop, had it not been combined with my habit of drinking hot chocolate topped by frilly mountains of whipped cream. In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” Benjamin posits that the storyteller, as well as the story itself, has lost primacy in a world that craves information, progress, and speed. The teller of tales is therefore left “remote,” an endangered species. The storyteller, in the oldest sense of the word—i.e., the one who imparts counsel or wisdom, who carries forth the oral tradition of tales—has been eclipsed in Benjamin’s mind by the stultifying demands of modern life. “Every morning brings us the news of the globe,” he writes, “and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.”

I could feel the pain of this, even wearing my whipped-cream mustache. I craved to write a story, however impossible, hewing to Benjamin’s penchant for fable and “a chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis.” But here was something else I was beginning to recognize: Even if I did, or could, nobody would
ever
read that story. No—like a nomadic tribe, the mass story consumers of our day had unstaked their tent poles and moved on, craving news and sound bites, reprogrammed by predictability and sentimentality, by television and the big screen of the Story Industrial Complex.

Perhaps Benjamin had identified the most precious sorts of stories in order to protect them. They were, in fact, like Ambrosio’s artisanal cheese, needing to be recovered, revalued, remembered. Unlike the Industrial Story—written by committee and writing team, flattened and familiar, with Hollywood product placement or commercial breaks—they connected us to the larger floe of history and dream. They seemed to be tales that were local, personal, and oral. They might have been the stories we swapped over bottles of beer at Old Town Tavern or at our student mailboxes or on the steps of the graduate library, where Sara and I had first met, hauling out certain mythologies about ourselves.
^‖

It didn’t seem to matter if these stories corresponded to exact truth, as the fictions we wrote for class weren’t expected to either. And by the time I was done with my own fictions, the truth was unrecognizable,
not out of deviousness but because, under pressures barely accounted for, I was building the stories I needed to hear. Or making the truths I needed to believe.

A
BRIEF SURVEY OF
Spanish history shows Pedro the Cruel, ruler of the kingdom of Castile from 1350 to 1369, to be the most vicious, repugnant slug ever to darken a medieval throne room, the most bloodthirsty snake to lay fangs on the royal apple, the most demonical scepter-wielding conniver ever to cry paranoid foul. Famous for having insurrectionists boiled, burned, and hanged, Pedro seemed to have had a flair for eliminating his imagined enemies. On one occasion, he had a powerful cousin killed (suckered in by the king’s false favor and trust, the cousin was left to defend himself with a small knife against the king’s knights as His Excellency looked on), then ordered the body thrown down onto the plaza. “Behold!” he shouted to the throngs below. “Here is the Lord of Vizcaya you acclaimed.” It’s also believed he had a hand in the death of his own wife, Blanche, whom he hated, and of his two younger half brothers, Juan and Pedro, both just teenagers, who were held in custody for most of the king’s reign.

One might ask: What made Pedro so cruel? And how do we know all of this nearly seven hundred years later?

The answer is the storyteller—in this case, Pedro López de Ayala, author of the medieval text
Crónica de Pedro
, which either exaggerates Pedro’s distemper or tells it like it is. But as one of Pedro’s trusted courtiers, López de Ayala lays claim to a tantalizing kind of authority, that of eyewitness. As the scholar Clara Estow points out in her wonderful book on the medieval king, López de Ayala, “the consummate dramatizer,” weaves a masterful tale, incorporating bits of dialogue—some borrowed from speeches and letters—to voice opinions he avoids as the “objective” storyteller, while manipulating “certain key episodes to exploit their dramatic potential and emotional impact.” And nowhere
does the monarch seem to show his true colors more than in the story about his poor brother Fadrique.
^a

May 1358—and Seville appears beyond the alcazar window, a city of orange blossoms and incense wafting on benevolent breezes, an oasis of abundance in comparison to the harsh Meseta. Here in the alcazar surrounded by waxy palms and fecund gardens, Pedro is far from the wife he despises, living with his lover, María. Like his father before him, Pedro adores this place over all other Spanish cities, most especially the seat of royal power in Valladolid.
^b

But he can’t escape his own embered mind, obsessed now with what to do about Fadrique. Recently his brother has been caught with seven hundred troops on the Portuguese border, trying to foment revolution against Pedro. He repents and swears his loyalty. As a test of fealty, the king has asked Fadrique to reclaim a fortress at Jumilla, in Murcia, belonging to another of Fadrique’s former rebel allies. When the king receives word of Fadrique’s victory, he calls him home to Seville for what Fadrique assumes to be a hero’s welcome.

Fadrique arrives at the castle and, separating from his men, pays his first respects to the king’s lover, María, but there’s something amiss in her expression, some uneasy signal she’s trying to convey. (Is it that she herself can’t stomach the king’s ruse?) Fadrique senses this, and looks to escape. But he’s apprehended in the courtyard by two reluctant guards, and brought to an antechamber of the king’s quarters, where from a nearby room the king orders his men to attack him, not
even dignifying Fadrique with a face-to-face death sentence. The guards do their business and leave him for dead.

Meanwhile, the king scours the castle for the remainder of Fadrique’s now scattered men, finding one in María’s quarters holding his daughter hostage, whereupon Pedro sticks and drops him with his poniard. Soon after, he stumbles upon Fadrique’s body, apparently not yet dead. Drawing a knife, he hands it to a lowly page, commanding him to finish off his half brother. After the deed is done, the king orders a feast to be eaten in plain sight of Fadrique’s body (
blood
,
snot
,
ligament
,
bone
), but whether there’s cheese on the table, and whether the food tastes better in that rush of revenge, with the thick scent of death-treacle in the air, the storyteller doesn’t say.

N
OT EVERYONE BELIEVED THAT
Ambrosio intended to
kill
Julián, and of those who did, few were in favor of the idea. Relatives from the north called one evening for a hushed conversation with Ambrosio Senior:
Does something need taking care of?
It would be nice to settle this the old way, said Ambrosio’s father, but no, that’s a sure course to insanity. He reiterated to his son that a life in jail was hardly an even trade for having something, even the family cheese, stolen from you. It would be a double captivity. Others in the extended family urged Ambrosio to take refuge for a while at a nearby monastery, to cleanse himself of his anger, which was an idea he gave serious thought to. But the deeper Ambrosio fell into the meaninglessness of his life without Páramo de Guzmán, the more he lost a grip on his equanimity, the more vehement he became. If other people doubted his intentions, he felt all the more resolved.

This kind of sudden disorder, this upending of happiness, this complex of futility, loss, and violent fantasy, gives rise to many strange bedfellows—drink, depression, self-loathing. Having seen Julián so completely as a doppelganger, Ambrosio lost his bearings. Yes, revenge was paramount, but was there something more to this wish to kill Julián? Was it a wish to kill some part of himself, too—to silence
his mind? And was it possibly more useful to keep an enemy, thereby keeping yourself intact, than to eliminate him?
^c

On the Meseta, you might drive thirty, forty, fifty miles to nowhere, a bunch of ramshackle buildings, and bump into the very person you’re hoping to avoid. There was a story about the time Ambrosio had taken his place at an out-of-the-way bar in Haza, a virtual ghost town. Ambrosio sat with his back to the door, and Julián had allegedly entered in the shadows, seen Ambrosio from behind, and instantly retreated, while Ambrosio’s poker-faced friends betrayed nothing, until much later, when they were sure Julián was long gone.

Two years passed in this way, and who knows how many near misses there might have been, Julián entering a bar five minutes after Ambrosio exited, Ambrosio stopping for gas where Julián had just bought cigarettes. Ambrosio went on living his life, stalking Julián in his mind, ready for him when the moment arose.

L
ET US RETURN NOW
to the king, once more at his table, before the lifeless body of his half brother. How are we to read this man who is stuffing his gullet? As bloodthirsty murderer and irretrievably disturbed individual? Or justified somehow in his actions?

In the
Crónica
, López de Ayala is quick to itemize Pedro’s revenge killings (sixty or so in all), as well as the granular bits of his grumpiness. It’s a wholly damning bit of storytelling. What shines through
the centuries and leaves its afterimage isn’t the king himself. It’s not Pedro’s own version of his life, or that of his lover María, or the sweet reminiscences of his children, if they were sweet at all. What endures is not kindness or empathy or intelligence, though Pedro’s supporters argue that he was cruel only in avenging the wrongs perpetrated against his citizens.
^d
They point to his tolerance of Jews and Muslims, a trait not shared by his Trastámaran half brothers,
^e
as proof that the king had dimensions, perhaps even a greater compassion and sense of egalitarianism than those of his day.
^f
But in general, for as much pain as Pedro may have inflicted, he has become a victim of the storyteller. And so he’s died twice.

The first death is simpler: Fadrique’s twin, Enrique, stages a night march that catches Pedro and his troops by surprise, and in an attempt to wriggle free, the king strikes what he believes is a deal with one of Enrique’s lead commanders, Bertrand du Guesclin: the king’s freedom in exchange for six towns and 200,000 gold
doblas
. When the king arrives at the commander’s tent, dismounts his horse, and enters, urging the commander to hurry, he finds the entrance blocked—and in strides Enrique, fully armed. Though at first Enrique fails to recognize his half brother (it has been years since they last met), he draws his dagger and stabs Pedro to death, which begins nearly 150 years of Trastámaran rule in Castile. In symmetry with Fadrique’s murder, the king’s body is left lying on the ground for three days, while Spaniards come to mock him.