Authors: Michael Paterniti
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (29 page)
“He won’t answer any questions about the cheese,” I said.
“Have you asked?”
Had I
asked
? Oh—ha, ha, ha. That was rich. “Not recently,” I said. “I’ve tried, though—it’s not easy.”
“I mean this in the kindest way,” she said, “but you seem confused. Or even a little—I don’t know—
emasculated
by Ambrosio.”
Had she really just used the word “emasculated,” in the kindest way? (Debatable.)
“What do you mean, exactly?” I said. True, I was a journalist, accustomed
to asking intimate questions, but in my mind this wasn’t a job at all, and intimacy was something to be earned by long periods spent
not
asking intimate questions, especially when trying to gain the trust of someone who didn’t want to be reminded of the greatest failure of his life by the asking of intimate questions by his awesome new friend, one who was now in training to become an Old Castilian.
“You’re afraid of him.”
“Oh—okay, I’m afraid.”
“Not
afraid
afraid. More like Gilligan and the Skipper.”
“Wow.”
Sara was smiling now. She’d made herself laugh. “I just think you need to level with him.”
“This book is much bigger than a piece of cheese,” I said, with a last, truculent exhalation.
“No,” she said. “It’s the same exact size.”
*
The best descriptions of wine by sommelier, seller, or critic deserve their own literary award. I’ve heard reds described as “chicory and licorice,” “chewy and charcoal,” and in one particularly fine restaurant, “hay and sweaty saddle.” As for Ambrosio’s wine, let’s just say it was grape Pellegrino, purple SweeTart, liquid Pixy Stix.
†
This last happened not to be an exaggeration at all. At twenty-one, Josué (remember:
ho-sway
) was a spectacular human specimen. Just ask my wife, whose Josué crush was famous among those who visited us in Guzmán and others who’ve seen videotape evidence of her chasing his tractor, chirping “Hola, Josué!” Even Carlos, a happily married man, may have had a crush. “He’s a statue,” said Carlos one day. “He almost looks like a Viking on a boat. That’s how strong he is to me.” Indeed, he possessed a bold Iberian nose, soft brown eyes, and despite his stoicism—unlike his father, he went days speaking only the occasional five-word sentence—laughed like a little boy. During the summer he worked long hours, shuttling between the vineyards and the alfalfa fields, his limbs covered in dust and chaff, disappearing into that conversation with the earth, the one bequeathed him by his father. Which merely added to yet another legend, the one of the prodigal son who might pick up the pieces of his broken father and make the dry, rain-starved land turn green and grow.
‡
Los Reyes Católicos were second cousins, and in the consolidation of the lands of modern Spain, they were able to reduce debt, lower crime, and further a Catholic agenda that included the Reconquest, their army marching south to drive the Muslims (and Jews) out of Iberia. They also produced a daughter, Juana La Loca, who later, after the death of Isabella in 1504, became an unlikely queen. Fluent in at least six languages and ruling not only Spain but the kingdoms of Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples—as well as vast holdings in America—she was an unstable monarch, afflicted with severe depression and possibly schizophrenia. In that familiar tale of royal families, internecine squabbles and power plays were her undoing: With designs of his own, her father, the former king Fernando, outmaneuvered his daughter at court, leaving her isolated and forced into imprisonment, which allowed Fernando to rule again. Such was the template for modern Spain’s First Family.
§
Of contested authorship, the poem was probably written by 1207, within a hundred years after El Cid’s death. Some claim a local abbot as the poet; others claim the story was recited by traveling minstrels. From the first lines—“Tears streamed from his eyes as he turned his head and stood looking at them. Men and women came out to see him pass, while the burghers and their wives stood at their windows, sorrowfully weeping.”—the drama crystallizes: El Cid carries the virtue and promise of Castile in his every heroic move, and his leave-taking is so heartrending it convulses the kingdom in paroxysms of grief. When he says goodbye to his wife, Jimena, and two young daughers, he “wept and sighed heavily … with such pain as when the finger-nail is torn from the flesh.” But once he rides away, he goes from bawling to beheading, transformed into a killing machine of such ferocity that anyone in his path quakes, becoming “anxious and distressed.” And this speaks to the bipartite Castilian character, too: great, sentimental love and a bloodless kind of rage, sometimes posing as “courage,” bordering on the kamikaze.
‖
So important is El Cid’s place in the mythology of Castile and the tale of Spanish nationhood that scholars and historians have for years tried to determine the truth of his life, or, as important, struggled for control of the El Cid narrative. In Richard Fletcher’s book
The Quest for El Cid
, the author contends that the extant version of the Cid that mixes fiction and fact—and was the basis for Charlton Heston’s portrayal of El Cid in a movie seen by millions—is the invention of El Cid’s most influential modern biographer, Ramón Menéndez Pidal. As Fletcher argues, Menéndez Pidal’s 1929 bestselling book,
La España del Cid
, “is a tract for his own times disguised as history,” one that presents “his countrymen with a national hero in whom they could rejoice and to whose virtues they should aspire.” Most important, Fletcher writes that, for Menéndez Pidal, “there was no disjunction between history and legend. The Cid of history is as flawless in his character and deed as the Cid of legend.” And his Castilianness becomes one of his greatest virtues, or rather, he becomes Castile itself, the two interchangeable. Fletcher quotes Menéndez Pidal to this effect: “Thoughout the history of Spain, Castile has played a unifying and anchoring role. Castile is not the whole of Spain, but her spirit
is
the unity of Spain.”
But what of the real Cid? Evidence suggests his virtues might have been more self-serving. As a renegade professional soldier he was profligate in his partnerships, hardly discriminating between Muslim and Christian employers, with an eye toward creating a kingdom of his own, which eventually he did, in Valencia. And for whatever chivalry he possessed, he may also have been another violent, hotheaded, ambitious artist who found himself on the outs with King Alfonso’s court. In a letter from one battlefield rival, the Count of Barcelona, he is accused of placing more trust in auguries (in particular, attempting to read the future in the flight path of birds) than any good Christian should, and as Fletcher says, “The general sense of the count’s letter was that Rodrigo was a boor and a thug.” But it’s the eighteenth-century work of Dutch orientalist Reinhardt Dozy that first debunked the legend and led to later charges of “Cidophobia” by Menéndez Pidal. Fletcher sums up Dozy’s final assessment as follows: “The Cid of reality was a
condottiere
. He was neither humane nor loyal nor patriotic. On the contrary, he was a harsh man, a breaker of promises, a pillager of churches, only interested in pay and plunder. Cruelest cut of all, Dozy described the Cid in the last paragraph of his essay as ‘more Muslim than Catholic.’ ”
a
The name of the sword was Tizona, which means “burning stick.” Made of Damascus steel, it bears the inscription “I am Tizona, made in the year 1040,” though it weighs only about two and a half pounds. “By one swing, he was able to cut off six heads with that sword,” said Ambrosio.
b
This flourish seems to have come later in the evolution of the El Cid myth. In the
Estoria de España
, a thirteenth-century chronicle Fletcher terms “bizarre,” El Cid is visited by Saint Peter, who predicts his impending death, while calling for one last V: “God so loves you that He will grant you victory in battle even after your death.” The Cid ceases eating or drinking soon after, except for a daily regimen of myrrh and balsam, thus embalming himself. After he dies, his eyes are pried open, then he is clothed and perched upon Babieca, spurs and all, and conveyed back to Castile, where the king at first takes the Cid’s appearance as a miracle. Meanwhile his compatriot Álvar Fáñez defeats the king of Tunis on the battlefield. Only at some later point, when the two events are conflated by some unknown storyteller, does El Cid lead the charge. In fact, according to the
Estoria
, the deceased El Cid is seated on an ivory stool covered in silk near the high altar of a church in Cardeña, where he sits for seven years until visited by a Jewish mischief maker, who sneaks in to tweak El Cid’s beard. Just before the deed is accomplished, however, the dead Campeador’s right hand reaches to unsheath Tizona, and the horrified prankster converts to Christianity.
THE MURDER
“… arms outstretched in surrender.”
A
UGUST WAS THE MONTH WHEN
S
PAIN TOOK ITS SUMMER
vacation: The cities emptied and people fled to the seashore or their home villages, luxuriating in four weeks of freedom. Guzmán briefly resembled a thriving, if still tiny, dot on the map, its population ballooning to two hundred or so. New faces that were old faces kept appearing. A rush of fleeting conviviality reigned.
Up in the telling room, I’d managed by limiting my wine intake to rack up forty more pages, for a grand total of sixty-four. But none of them belonged to me, they belonged to Ambrosio. His voice was all I heard in that room, and I’d simply become his willing parrot. The more I wrote, the more I kept wondering if all of this was a dream or a joke of some sort. (It would start:
So a guy tells this other guy a story about some cheese, and a murder plot, and he believes it. Then he goes to New York and sells it as a book.…
) Even when I tried to fit the story to my own life—conjuring those who’d “done me wrong,” whatever that meant—I realized I wasn’t plotting anyone’s murder, let alone
wasting energy on hating anyone. Could this kind of grudge be justified, or even real?
That was the question bouncing around in my head one evening at the
frontón
with Leo. During our time in Spain, my son had discovered this little soccer team known as Real Madrid, and players like Zidane, Figo, and Casillas had become his new
galaticos
. Gone were the bat and batting helmet; instead he proudly wore Real Madrid’s white jersey—of his favorite, #7, Raúl
*
—and sported a sprout of a ponytail, trying to emulate that of the team’s newest acquisition, David Beckham, who wore his hair like a gladiator’s.
We were booting the ball, playing an imaginary game against FC Barcelona, when a voluble man approached on his
vuelta
, or evening walk. His name was Pelayo. Born in Guzmán and back on a visit from Aranda, he taught English, he said. While he was quick to apologize for his “bad speaking,” he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to converse with an American, especially one with more than a passing interest in his birthplace.
Pelayo had a wonderful way with words. He called the church “the Master’s house.” He described a man from his youth, Pepe Ortero, as “a cunning success at cutting hair.” “I passed him many times cutting the hair of animals,” he said. And I could envision the barbershop, all the animals sitting in chairs. So had that been a lucrative trade at one time, animal barbering? According to Pelayo, there were
the
barberos
, cutters of human hair—named Martinino and Glada—and then the
esquiladores
, cutters of animal hair, led by the noteworthy Pepe Ortero. Later, after consulting a dictionary, I deduced that Pepe actually had been a sheep shearer, but in that moment, as in so many other moments when I only half understood, I let my mind float away with the myth, as silly as it was, of the animal barber shop, the dogs and goats and pigs all gathered to improve themselves at the hand of a kindly hairdresser spiffing them up with Vidal Sassoon product.
Pelayo wanted in the worst way to convey the importance of this lost world, if only he could make the sentences work. He told about a lightning bolt that once struck the bell tower of the church, leaving a twenty-foot gash. He remembered when the village had possessed two grocery stores, a pharmacy, five bars, a doctor, and a dance hall. He quoted a proverb—“It’s better to be a mouse’s head than a lion’s tail”—which, he said, described the central predicament of village life. One could be in charge of one’s small enterprise, or contribute to the bigger whole. In Guzmán, he said, everyone wanted to be the mouse’s head, and because of that “some people are friends and some are enemies.”
“Is that what caused the fight over the
palacio
?” I said.
Pelayo did a double take. The controversy was almost fifteen years old at that point, and he must have wondered how I knew, let alone why I might care, which is when I added an addendum about my friendship with Ambrosio.
“Ambrosio is very clever,” Pelayo said. “And is nice. A friend for many years. And strong. He told everyone, ‘I got sheeps, and I got their milk, and I make cheese. The
palacio
is in ruins. Let me fix it and move the cheese in there.’ ” Ambrosio first offered his house in the lower part of town, with its pool and gardens, in exchange for the building. “But the people became very, very angry,” Pelayo said, “and fought him.”
This was how it had always gone, said Pelayo. This is exactly what he was talking about, this small-mindedness on one side and this
self-righteousness on the other, all of it wrapped in fierce independence.
†
“You can’t be free in a small village,” he said. But at least no one had been hurt. Not like that other time, when someone had been “felled and killed by the people.”
He dropped the phrase in such a way that I almost missed it. Wait—
who
had been felled and killed by the people? Leo was dribbling the soccer ball, which topped out at his knees. As the ball rolled, sheep pellets attached themselves to it and pinwheeled off. He kept shouting out my name—my soccer name,
Zidane
. And when I didn’t respond he hollered, “Daaaaaaaaaddddd!”
