The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (23 page)
Authors: Michael Paterniti
But the second death of the king is more ignominious in some ways, for it is repeated over and over, as many times as readers pass through the gates and into the
Crónica de Pedro
. What is really happening here, behind the words? One answer comes from the scholar Estow, who argues that López de Ayala, an aristocrat, lieutenant, and chronicler par excellence, who became one of the first “caballero historians,” needed to justify his own betrayal of Pedro,
g
whom he supported until quite late in his reign, at which time he jumped to the Trastámaran cause. His account, she says, is a “literary gem” that mimics the truth even as it may veer radically from it. But then, these are the plots and subplots of the storyteller, too: the grab for power or meaning, the self-glorifications and justifications, the critique of a subject other than oneself to divert attention from one’s own failings (or unconsciously reflect them).
It leaves one to wonder: If Pedro seems unusually cruel, and is a projection of the storyteller, then what great cruelty is cloaked within the breast of the storyteller, López de Ayala, himself?
*
Key to his success was Liston’s enormous left hand, which he used as a tourniquet while his right hand did the cutting and sewing. Before anesthesia, when time was of the essence, Liston was described by one writer: “He was six-foot-two, and … sprung across the blood-stained boards upon his swooning, sweating, strapped-down patient like a duelist, calling, ‘Time me, gentlemen, time me!’ to students craning with pocket watches from the iron-railinged galleries. Everyone swore that the first flash of his knife was followed so swiftly by the rasp of saw on bone that sight and sound seemed simultaneous. To free both hands, he would clasp the bloody knife between his teeth.” However, Liston’s reputation may have gotten the better of him when, during “a bravura performance,” dressed in his familiar bottle-green coat and Wellington boots, he allegedly amputated one patient’s left testicle, as well as two fingers of an assistant, both of whom died of gangrene soon thereafter.
†
By the way, this murder plot was no secret. Ambrosio told his story far and wide, in the bars of Roa, Aranda, and Burgos, to his vast circle of friends, and in the
bodegas
of trusted allies throughout the land. It was a tale of two men who had loved each other like brothers, the one who trusted and the other who cheated. It pitted purity against greed, creation against destruction, heart against spleen, the Old Castilian against the new. And when a listener asked what kind of justice might be done, Ambrosio would say, “I could kill him.” Part of the joy he derived from concocting Julián’s slow, delicious death, one might surmise, was the relief (or surge of power) he got by telling people the details of what he planned to do.
‡
…
might
…
§
The genius-esoteric but ever impractical Benjamin died of a morphine overdose as he fled Vichy France in 1940. Detained at the Spanish border town of Port Bou, he was essentially quarantined at a local hotel and, believing he was at risk of being captured by the Nazis, ended his life. Though his traveling companions soon resolved their bureaucratic snafu and found themselves on a ship to America, Benjamin’s left-behind body became the subject of another controversy. He was misnamed in death and mistaken for a Catholic, and evidence of his grave was lost in the cemetery above the Mediterranean. In Michael Taussig’s
Walter Benjamin’s Grave
, the author writes of the confusing transpositions: “You see this name in the receipt made out to the dead man, the
difunto
Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay that includes five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress. You see it in the receipt made out by the physician for seventy-five pesetas for his injections and taking the blood pressure of the traveler,
el viajero
, Benjamin Walter. You see it in the death certificate—number 25—made out on September 27, 1940, for Benjamin Walter, forty-eight years old, of Berlin (Germany—as noted). You see it in the receipt tendered by the carpenter to the judge in Port Bou for making a cloth-lined coffin for the dead man,
el difunto
, Señor Benjamin Walter, a receipt that includes eight pesetas for the work of a bricklayer closing a niche in the cemetery for Benjamin Walter. And you can see it in the receipt made out by the priest dated October 1, 1940, for ninety-six pesetas, six of which were for a mass for the dead man and seventy-five for ‘five years’ rent of a niche in the Catholic cemetery of this town in which the cadaver of B. Walter lies buried.’ ”
The irony, of course, is that in death he’s confused with someone he isn’t, the confected, ever-mysterious Señor B. Walter. And though his body can’t be found, his voice still rings in our ears.
‖
On this note, I’m reminded of the Eskimo storytellers whose tales tend to be divided into two groups: 1) ancient communal ones, and 2) newer local ones. The ancient tales are the well-practiced ones that hew to a pleasing, memorized script, though they make allowances for the peculiarities of the narrator (tone, gesture, and so forth), as well as for the occasional mapped digression. Meanwhile, the newer local stories require the Eskimo storyteller to weave brand-new tales, often concerning recent events. These are infused with asides and mysticism breathed to life by the teller, as surely as the original storytellers filled the original stories with spirits and phantasms, forming, as one ethnographer has phrased it, “myths of observation.” That phrase now seems so beautifully apt—
myths of observation
—as if describing what we call history or the genre of writing known as nonfiction and memoir, as if describing the truth of all storytelling really by the fallacy of its scientific/factual investigation.
a
Fadrique is really Pedro’s half brother, born of Pedro’s father’s twenty-year liaison with his longtime mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, an affair that produced eight more illegitimate offspring, of which Fadrique had been the fifth-born, with a twin, Enrique. To Pedro, the whole lot of bastards wasn’t to be trusted.
b
The Castile of 1350 was a land divided, with Seville acting as a southern colony of sorts. In the wake of victory over the Moors, which drove them back across the Straits of Gibraltar to Africa, 24,000 Castilians had been repatriated to Seville, and the king was soon to embark upon an ambitious renovation of his castle there.
c
In this way perhaps, Julián ceased to be a real person, or never fully was. He became a foil, an adversary, a bugaboo. Perhaps he was the ghostly embodiment of one Count Julián, a Spaniard from history blamed for the collapse of King Roderic’s Visigothic Spain in the eighth century. Rumor had it that Roderic had seduced Julián’s daughter. To exact his revenge Count Julián aided and abetted a Muslim leader named Tariq in battle against the king, whose army fell in surprising fashion, thus relinquishing the entirety of Spain to the Muslims, who would remain on the peninsula for the next millennium. While the story was completely untrue, Count Julián had served as a convenient scapegoat. In order for Spain to believe in her own greatness, her downfall could only be caused by another’s horrible underhandedness.
d
“Proud, high-spirited and confiding, his confidence was met with treachery by one after another of those he trusted,” reads a 1911
New York Times
review of a book sympathetic to Pedro. “Rebelled against by his brothers, he sought reconciliation with them to be again deceived. He trusted his mother; she conspired against him.” The headline of the article, however, says it all: “Pedro the Cruel of Castile: A King Who Has Had the Ill-Luck to Be Portrayed Only by His Foes.”
e
After Pedro’s demise and the ensuing fall of Toledo, Enrique auctioned off the Jewish citizens, ostensibly as slaves, in order to pay his army.
f
“Oh noble, oh worthy Pedro,” says Chaucer in the Monk’s Tale, “glorye of Spaine.”
g
After all, one need only have glanced one kingdom over, toward Pedro’s contemporary Pere III, the king of Aragón and Catalonia, who may have been much more paranoid and creatively zealous than Pedro when it came to persecuting his enemies. In one case, after quelling an uprising of the Unionists of Valencia, Pere ordered his men to boil down the bell used to call meetings by the rebels so they could “taste of its liqueur.” The molten lead was then poured down their throats.
AMBROSIO OF THE MILL AND FIELD
“Give praise.”
T
HE WINDOWS OF OUR BEDROOM WERE COVERED BY METAL SHUTTERS
meant to block the Meseta’s relentless glare, and yet at dawn first light came oozing like lava through the crannies, setting the bedroom ablaze. Sara and I would groan and bury our heads beneath the pillows. The patter of feet flurried down the hall, and our kids did their morning ambush, if they weren’t already sprawled between us from the night before.
How did the Spaniards do it? They drank each night with celebratory élan, ate their
cena
somewhere between midnight and two, popped up early in the morning, and started all over again, cleaning, talking, walking, cooking, farming. I’d read somewhere that in all of Europe, the Spaniards ranked themselves highest in sleep satisfaction. Meanwhile, we’d never slept less.
The village rooster didn’t help, of course, nor did the dogs living next door, whose call-and-response with Chanticleer created a rushing pandemonium of first wakefulness that sounded an alarm. The sun was pulled a little higher on its string, and some days, not more
than fifteen minutes after sunrise, we could feel the heat pulsing through the walls, as if we lived in some fairy tale about the strangers who came to town and chose, to the confusion of the natives around them, to live in a Dutch oven.
At first, time seemed limitless. We threw open the shutters and ogled the view. Having partly eschewed the world of commerce and commodification, I felt the book could wait a couple of weeks while we settled and explored, which was part of the book, too. And while I waited for my buddy Carlos, whom I’d hired to help for a month. As it was, my Spanish had progressed from
inexistente á rudimentario
during
seis
weeks in Salamanca, but I was a long way from understanding anything obvious, let alone nuanced.
Our arrival coincided with Ambrosio having work—a stretch of truck trips—that took him out of town. In his absence, I soon found that our version of village life organized itself around the ascendancy and final daily importance of doing nothing. Sitting on benches, ambling aimlessly, going to the bar or the
pantano
, the swimming hole, pretty soon
that
became everything. I was the busiest hombre in town, cramming in tons of back-to-back nothing. In that newly made space an alternative reality rose, a nest knitted by ambitionless being, the sound of breathing and laughter, and behind it, an all-engulfing silence. Would it be possible to submit blank pages, ask my editor for an earnest edit of those blank pages to include no marks at all—and hours on the phone saying nothing to each other—and then publish it at three hundred pages of white space, regarded as the ultimate bit of performance art in our harried times,
The Book of Silence and Nothing: A Meditation in White
? I feared ruining the best, wordless part of this world by trying to capture it in words.
The morning hours were luxurious, if touched by the faint boredom of another planless day sprawling before us. What would we do? Who knew? There was no phone ringing, no e-mail to answer, no immediate deadlines pressing. There was only this feathery weightlessness, the exhilarating and claustrophobic prospect of permanent together time. Wasn’t this exactly what I’d been after?
At first the magic moments were plentiful. Unhurried breakfast seemed a surreal phenomenon, languorous conversation a gift. A lot of time was spent trying to decipher the news on Radio Cinco. If the heat was reasonable, Sara and I might trade off runs out to the
fuente
, a spring directed by pipe into a rectangular stone catch tucked into a ravine on that vast plain above the village.
*
Nearby, sunflowers burst their yellow petals; a small hill rose with an ancient stand of majestic
nogales
trees. Something about the place, stranded out in all of that openness, moonlike but with the grace of shade and the music of burbling water—the stone cistern always full, but somehow never overflowing, the sunflowers nodding yes and hello—always inspired a deep sense of well-being and peace.
If the heat was instantly too much, we’d go to Plan B, run a hose from the garage to a little plastic pool we’d bought, and let the kids splash around. We followed exercise with a slow breakfast of stewed fruits and vegetables along with cereal or eggs, and coffee for the adults, dressed ourselves, and took our first tentative steps out into the morning, where as the hours ticked by, certain less idyllic truths about our family reared their ugly heads: May and I were known to turn surly when not properly fed and hydrated; Leo became slightly irascible when separated from his baseball or when people tried to redirect him away from his extended knight fantasies. And Sara was known to hit a point on the hottest days where, with all energy sucked from her body, she might refuse one further step.
About baseball: We’d arrived in Spain at the height of Leo’s fixation on the game,
†
thus he demanded to play daily. After breakfast he
and I would mosey from the house—me with the mitts and a ball, him dragging a small bat—and trundle through the village, stopping here and there on our zigzag to the
frontón
.
‡
Ten feet or so from our front door came our first stop, a quick hello to Don Honorato as he stood each morning watering his lawn. Don Honorato was a beautiful old man, with neatly parted white hair. Short, with the bearing of an eagle, he stood stock-straight with rubber hose in hand, water glubbing forth, wearing two pairs of chinos for some reason I never quite gleaned. (You could see the one beneath hiked higher at the belt.)
