The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (26 page)

S
OMEWHERE IN THEIR ILLUSTRIOUS
past, the Molinos family had been milliners in Aragón, and with the rise of Spain their business had prospered and grown. Eventually the family had migrated to Castile, to be closer to the sheep that grazed on the Meseta—and over time, through marriage and wealth, had acquired vast holdings of land, including tracts in Madrid that later became the Chamartín neighborhood. Ambrosio’s
patrimonio
had included the fields around Guzmán, and when the bank claimed those to repay his debts, he lost one more part of his family’s legacy.

Now he drove in a borrowed car from the slopes of the Guadarrama, teeming with boar and weasel, into exurbia, and then the city itself. He entered Madrid on Paseo de la Castellana and drifted through the bustling capital, past Bernabéu stadium, where Real Madrid played soccer, and on to the Plaza de Colón, sluicing past fountains, foreign embassies, and government ministries. It wasn’t a trip Ambrosio relished. The baroque buildings evoked that hollowed-out feeling: Among this many people he always felt alone.
^‡

Here was an irony: He didn’t have enough money to buy a coffee, and the lawyer’s office was situated near the Ritz hotel, the Prado, and the capital’s grand park known as El Retiro (“The Lungs of Madrid”). In the hub of Castilian commerce, among luxury apartments, boutiques, and high-powered corporate suites, came the rough-and-tumble, bare-knuckle reality of a modern life Ambrosio eschewed, the business lunches and drinks in fine places after work, the fast talk and
instant gratification. Time moved in spasms, businessmen gilled for their bloodthirsty profit, with no fidelity to any idea, furthering their own names and wealth. At least that’s how Ambrosio, the Old Castilian, saw it.

Ambrosio found the lawyer in his office, decorated with oriental rugs and pastoral paintings. The man projected an air of equanimity and well-worn wealth. In this cocoon of reassurance, in the calm created by the lawyer’s inviting, rather efficient manner, Ambrosio told his story, then listened intently for the possibility of justice. The law of the land, with its precise volumes and impartial scales, would weigh the matter of Julián’s deception, said the attorney, but hearing events as Ambrosio unfolded them, he believed there’d been malfeasance, that Ambrosio had a winnable case. As he warned his client, though, justice was a slow-moving process. And there were several issues here to parse out, including alleged fraud and the recovery of back wages. Due to the intricacies of the law, these would have to be broken into separate proceedings. But he was willing to try.

When Ambrosio left that day, he found himself inflating with the slightest hope again. He’d been offered an alternative plot—legal revenge—and grabbed hold, as if to keep himself from falling into that cistern of roiling must.

Still, the lawyer was going to cost money. In order to pay his fee, Ambrosio was soon hauling grain north out of Spain, through parts of Italy, on to Germany. His travels took him to the Black Sea. He waited at border crossings with other truck drivers from the Ukraine, Romania, and Poland. Ambrosio, like most enlightened Castilians, saw himself as a citizen of the world, for every Spaniard knows that Spanish blood is mixed liberally with Arabic and Jewish blood—and that of any invading tribe from the Phoenicians to the Visigoths.

Sunflowers and cocoa to Holland, juices to Austria, wine to Koblenz, chocolate back to Spain: Driving a truck suited Ambrosio just fine. “It’s like a research grant to study other cultures,” he would tell friends.

He traveled with a store of victuals—including bottles of his homemade
wine—to avoid a culinary predicament in which he might be forced to consume fast food. He packed morning eggs from the chickens, and some excellent sausage made by a good friend, and a special jar of fish conserve. Instead of eating a hamburger or “some kind of shit meal,” he would pull out a camping stove he kept in the cab and scramble some eggs. In gas station parking lots, he could be found at twilight, gobbling a plate with chorizo. It was part of his mission, to be that man at the stove in the shadows of the neon flow of modernity, to practice what he called
enlazar
, or enlacing, the bringing together, the intertwining of nature and nutrition, the old and the new. At the closest bar, where he always went to take his coffee, he met people easily, traveling bard that he was, and he collected some of their stories, too.

He told one of his own about arriving at a place—a castle-factory, he recalled—somewhere in Germany, and a small man—a dwarf?—magically appearing before him, allowing him through the gates for his pickup of Pringles potato chips. In that odd wonderland, Ambrosio was taken to a bar where he spoke nothing but Spanish while being met with nothing but some dialect of German, and yet never, he said, had he felt such a connection as that day, with that dwarf and his brethren, as they spoke their own languages and understood everything about each other.
^§

The downside to roaming all that open road was all that time Ambrosio had to contend with memories of his deceased cheese—and also the memories of his oldest, closest friend, Julián—memories that recurred when he was most trying to forget. On the horizon, in a bright sunset, he might glimpse that one scribbled signature on a piece of paper, loops of ink hanging him from the clouds, again and again.

The road does this to a person, impels him backward into memory as he hurtles forward, the episodes of a life flickering in the passing fauna of the land: Here now is the
caseta
, the little stable across from his parents’ villa, light outlining the cracks in the door as a man labors late into the night for that first taste of ancient cheese; here are
the sheep shuffling on hooves, awaiting an early-morning milking in the filmy light of the barn; here are the strange cars drifting up the narrow lane and into town, windows descending, asking after the rumor of a certain cheese said to be made in the village.

Sometimes another vivid flashback played like a film in the windowed screens of the truck, from a time during Páramo de Guzmán’s heyday, when the cheese was still being made in the stable across from his parents’ house. Ambrosio’s idea for expansion had been, he thought, inspired: If the cheese could be made in Guzmán, by the
people
of Guzmán, perhaps an opportunity existed to rehabilitate the
palacio
and turn it into a factory.

With its two towers and an imposing limestone facade, the
palacio
was a no-frills castle. Yet it anchored the village, serving as a secular nexus to the church’s religious one. At some point the
palacio
had been left to disintegrate, becoming the public property of Guzmán itself. But it seemed such a tragedy: Gazing up through the gutted, four-story carcass, one could spy patches of sky, birds funneling through torn rafters into the blue. It had become an irretrievable mess, a monument to the disintegration of the village.

Enter Ambrosio’s dream: The palace would be revived and transformed into a state-of-the-art facility, with the finest cheesemaking plant, a
bodega
for storage, a tasting room where visitors could try Páramo de Guzmán paired with local wines, and meeting halls to be used by the citizens of Guzmán for town business. Since the village had no money, Ambrosio cast himself in the role of altruistic lord, like the original Guzmán.

Some villagers brought their own interpretation to Ambrosio’s designs, however, and as they did, his intentions took on a different quality and texture. By the time his enemies
^h
had their turn with it, the dream was a most pernicious plot indeed. According to them, Ambrosio wanted to turn back time, all right—to the Middle Ages, installing
himself in the
palacio
and ruling Guzmán. Pockets of resistance swiftly formed. A vote was called: yea or nay to the cheesemaker getting the
palacio
. What emerged was a debate not about saving the palace, but about what
los Ambrosios
had up their sleeve.

True, the Molinos clan had long been regarded as Guzmán’s de facto royal family—monied, handsome, successful—and had been perceived, rightly or wrongly, as looking down upon their neighbors. Though here in the new Spain the ancient practices of patronage and entitlement existed only in vestigial form, it was an attitude, a bearing, an aristocratic manner that survived. As happens in a small village, the fault line existed. It was just waiting for a seismic event.

Ambrosio was the seismic event. Suddenly the issue became a referendum on
him
, too. Flamboyant, prideful, obstinate—the epitome of Spanish temper and duende
ⁱ
—he wouldn’t budge on his plan to restore the
palacio
. Why should he? It would benefit everyone. As much as he was becoming his own cult of personality with Páramo de Guzmán, he was creating a bit of an industry, putting Guzmán on the map as a destination. Travelers might arrive for cheese, but then also stop at the bar for a drink, take note of the village’s beauty. Perhaps because the villagers felt Ambrosio thought too much of himself—after all, it was very un-Spanish to elevate yourself over your village
^j
—or because they’d felt inferior to the Molinos family for so long, an unsettling thing began to happen. A campaign was waged against Ambrosio that turned aggressive, and he responded with aggressivity.
^k
His
motives—to his mind, absolutely altruistic—were questioned as ulterior and craven. Well,
puta madre
, went the line of argument against Ambrosio, Spain already
had
a king! The communal and sacred monuments of Guzmán were not there to be cherry-picked, for after all, the palace was an emblem that connected Guzmán to Spain, and Spain to its past.

At this time, Ambrosio’s family lived in a pretty, three-bedroom home with red-tile roof, the first as you entered the village, set down in a little hollow with neglected tangles of greenery, and, of all luxuries, a swimming pool carved out in the back. On the morning of the vote, Ambrosio left from the front gate of his house as usual—and, to his shock, walked into a blaze of white: fluttering wings of paper like some modern-art installation. He reached down and picked a flyer from the ground.

In the night, something crazy had occurred. Hundreds of leaflets had been spread anonymously, left on walls and doors, littering the streets. The flyer bore a picture of him, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, the cheesemaker of Guzmán, and read:
DON’T LET HIM STEAL THE PALACE
.

He could think of only one word:
Why?
How could one not feel let down and betrayed, surrounded by Lilliputians, all enemies now who would never grasp what could have been? Enough was enough. In the months that followed, with the help of Julián and his new investors, he moved Páramo de Guzmán to the factory in Roa, then moved his family to a house nearby, bitterly washing his hands of the village, while the village washed its hands of him, too.

T
HE OPEN ROAD FLOWED
with memories such as these, as painful as they could be. But then there were loads to haul, pickups and drop-offs to make, schedules to keep. Up in the cab, in the throne room of his
new life, the Meseta gave way to the Pyrenees, rocky mountains gave way to alluvial lowlands and limestone basins, the vineyards and rivers and forests that ran into more mountains—the Alps, Apennines, Carpathians, and Caucasus. Here were the plains of Hungary in gray light, the Crystalline High of Germany in icy blue, the North Sea in green storm. The world was much bigger than Guzmán. Let the village die its own silly death, then. He’d done what he could, offered what he had. And now he had nothing.

He rode, keeping himself company, talking to himself as if split in two, as if he were both driving and riding in the passenger seat. No one could soothe him, he knew, but someday he might soothe himself with a tale that explained it all, a unified theory. Drawn out over Europe, he rehearsed. The body in the passenger seat (himself), listening so intently, believing so fully in himself (the driver self). He built himself back up on the road, and came home, and listened for what the wind said, the vines, the river. He wondered if happiness might ever be possible again, for he hoped it might be. He no longer expected it, of course. He came back to his homeland and drew his head down, waiting for some sort of retributive justice, though. As powerful as he was, he now felt like the victim of everything he’d loved more fiercely than himself.