The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (34 page)

Once the second ear was down, I focused on my stew—quidbits of tender meat (important, I now knew, not to ask from what), carrots, potatoes—and during this time, two more ears were delivered to my plate.
Seven left
. Which is when I took theatrical umbrage, gesturing with open palms to the pile of sheep ears and then at the plates of others that seemed to have three or four at most. No, hombres, this was not fair to those who consider themselves lovers of the sheep ear! As an egalitarian, I demanded
igual
rights for all! Sometimes Castilian hospitality could be its own tyranny. I scooped four back, immediately regretting that I hadn’t added two more. And then it went
on again, between my molars—
Handbag gristle, middle ear apex
—somewhat excruciatingly as I tried to get down another, and then another. As soon as our collective focus turned back to stories and wine, bawdy joking and ribbing, I exchanged a set of hand signals with Sara, the dirty-diaper hand signals, my pointing, her shaking her head no, me shaking my head back
yes!
—an attempt on my behalf to create confusion and parental alarm so I could excuse myself, which I did, to attend to the dirty diaper that wasn’t dirty at all but would save me from the sheep-ear imbroglio.

I carried May outside and breathed deeply, letting my lungs fill with clean air, my queasiness resolving in purification, in that vision of high clouds carrying away to the east in wisps and floating feathers over Mon Virgo, the mystical mesa. Everything dissolved then. She was nearly fourteen months old, this little girl with fine strawberry-blond hair and round eyes who had blossomed from that fleshy, swollen-eyed, wailing lump to this burgeoning nymph, this shiny, ever-alert creature who seemed to miss nothing. Even her squalls were fantastic, fits of tears and high emotion. She was still light, but heavier than when we’d arrived.

If I feared anything, this is what I feared: We were all growing so fast. And here was my daughter, her limbs reaching farther, her eyes focusing higher. Now her mind sparked and glimmered, her mouth motored on. Her gaze was so intent, it seemed to belong to an old woman from another time who had seen it all, and was seeing it all again. She wiggled and giggled, shouted her
holas
and
aguas
, burst into tears, and waddled with such determination and brio as to have earned a new nickname, Goosey. When we inevitably brought her into our bed during the night, she slept between us, plugging fingers into both of our belly buttons, then falling fast asleep.

Gazing out over the ancient Meseta with the gruff, worn voices of the
majos
in the background, I was arguing back, telling myself we had so much time, and that even if she was a gift more than a possession, we still had a while to offer her these landscapes and people, these adventures and epiphanies, these molecules of parental awe and
humility. Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we’d follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she’d come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be half memory, always the little girl here in my arms, or the five-, ten-, fifteen-year-old she was yet to be.

In this reverie, I felt a meaty paw grip my shoulder, and, thinking my ruse revealed—or my tender thoughts—I turned to meet Ambrosio’s inquiring gaze. “My-kull!” he said. “Come in, I’ve something more for you.”

Something more? Pig schnozzle? Hobbit toe? I’d already been given
more
, was trying to escape their wretched regime of
more
. However, I followed obediently, and when we entered the telling room again, he went to the corner next to the window, with his broad back to me. While the men carried on around the table, oblivious and louder by the minute, roaring with wine fumes, Sara stood off to the side holding Leo’s hand, pointing at whatever it was Ambrosio busied himself with, mouthing the words,
“Come look!”
When I leaned in, I saw that Ambrosio had lit a Sterno can that flashed a blue flame. He had a can opener in one hand, and lifted a white tin with black lettering in the other, that of the cheese known as Páramo de Guzmán.

He took the can opener to it, punctured the seal, and cranked the metal into a jagged edge, peeling back the top. Then he stared down at the wonder he held in his hands. It was his offering, the last tin of cheese he would ever open, more than a decade old, and he pushed it with a finger, in a sort of methodical way. The cheese, the stunning, alluring, beatific, mind-blowing cheese, glorious source and cipher that it was, the original, undead, soulful cheese, redounded in its soft amber glow. And it lit Ambrosio’s face, too.

Had he planned this as our goodbye present?

Ambrosio seemed pleased by what he’d found, as he’d been pleased all those years ago, on that Christmas Eve when the cheese spoke to him and said,
Get that son of a bitch
. But if the cheese said anything to him now—
What’s taking you so long?
Or:
Forgive
.—it
was between the two of them. Given the enormousness of the moment—the last tin opened—I’d say that what followed seemed to verge on sacrilege. Everyone at the table ignored Ambrosio. Or perhaps it was very Castilian to downplay it all. Ambrosio himself called no attention to the cheese. He took a pair of pliers and held the tin over the flame, allowing that it was important to heat the cheese, to open it up, let the pores and veins breathe, let the oils and herbs mingle and genie forth. This was one simple part of unlocking the great secret. The olive oil in which it soaked began to bubble, and Ambrosio bent over the cheese while he rejoined the conversation, adding his own commentary to the gossip. On he talked as the room filled with the aroma of warm milk, and at some point, he pulled out his pocketknife and jabbed one wedge of the cheese—the knife tip sinking softly inside—carried it through the air and pinioned it on a plate, then began slicing carefully.

Watching his thick fingers grip the knife and delicately work the blade, watching as the cheese gave, mini-slab by mini-slab, I couldn’t help but imagine those wedges as emblems of a lost purity. Before genetic modification, before the inundation of windblown spores and superspores, there was a time when the land was discrete and parceled into its own ecosystems, tucked in its own valleys and canyons, containing its own idiosyncrasies and bursts of inspiration and originality. When Ambrosio spoke of the “old tastes,” this is partially what he spoke of: the taste of the Meseta, or this patch of the Meseta, as it once existed, and as it coursed through the blood of the animals here and sprouted from the earth. The wheat from these fields,
el trigo
, tasted different from the wheat of Burgos, fifty miles away; the grapes,
las uvas
, were heartier here than the grapes of Rioja. The
lechuga
—lettuce—of Castile, celebrated for its succulence, was worth twice that found in the rest of Spain. Even the water of Guzmán was different from the water of Roa just down the road. “We need to preserve the tastes of this magical place for our children,” he’d once told me.

Arrayed on the plate now were a dozen or so slices. Ambrosio offered
the cheese to us first, and I took a piece, then Sara took one, our eyes meeting briefly as we mirrored flickering smiles, and together we slid them into our mouths.

Yes, this was really happening.

How do you begin to describe a moment for which you’ve waited a small eternity, thinking it was never to be? How do you downplay such a consummation? Inside, I was turning cartwheels, doing the watusi, soft-shoeing with a vaudeville smile, while outside, my ersatz Castilian stoicism crumbled.

“Wow … wow … wow!” I repeated, as Ambrosio watched and grinned, saying nothing.

Oh, it was a strong cheese, a Herculean cheese, you could tell that immediately, tangy and tart, melting and then flaring again. With the first crumble it spread slowly, in lava flow, across the palatal landscape, tasting of minerals and luscious buttercream, of chamomile and thyme. It tasted of flower and dirt, manure and nectar—and perhaps of love and hate, too. A gustatory alert went up and my whole mouth was watering and alive, awakened from Van Winkle slumber and emergency-ready. This was a cheese that, like its master, sharply caught you unawares, lovingly provoked you while assuming your submission, and then its richness overwhelmed all previous thoughts, tastes, memories. I now understood, if vaguely, how the cheese must have created a conduit to the past, for its concentration was a force, an energy, a momentum, the psychic drill bit boring a wormhole in this Castilian space-time continuum.

I had no past with this cheese. My past lay in those individually wrapped slices of processed Kraft American cheese, or cheese so alien that it was spelled C-H-E-E-Z (Cheez Whiz, Cheez Doodles, Cheez-Its), fromage facsimiles that conjured school lunches and our seventies suburban kitchen, my mom flipping grilled cheese sandwiches, punching open can after can of Hi-C for my brothers and me, until our purple/orange mustaches glowed with a Sharpie permanence. Eating Páramo de Guzmán now, I realized that
this
was the memory. That is, I was
having
the memory as I was
making
the memory.
That this cheese could compress time. And yet it was just cheese, right? So what was it that I tasted now?

Ambrosio leaned over and dropped the plate on the table among the chattering men, who reached out greedily and grabbed what there was to grab. Had anyone asked, he might have said:
Oh that? That’s just some old cheese we had lying about
. But no one bothered. They gobbled the slices, carrying on as they did, not once remarking on what they ate.

Perhaps Ambrosio wouldn’t have had it any other way. It seemed like an age-old Castilian transaction, homemade food delivered to guests, like the sharing of family wine, but with wine also came conversation about the wine, and debate about the wine, and expositions about the wine, histories and tall tales and smack talk, and here, with Ambrosio’s cheese, there was none of that. What didn’t occur to me at the time, what never crossed my mind, in fact, was that perhaps the event was significant only for us, that maybe we’d made the cheese mythic—or I had, sucking in everyone behind me—and Ambrosio, flattered as anyone might be by an interested visitor, and gifted in the art of mythmaking himself, had gone right along with me, pumping helium into my balloon while I ran around urging everyone to look at the beautiful balloon. Meanwhile the men in the room took the cheese for what it was:
cheese
. Besides, why would they willingly revisit Ambrosio’s bad luck with it?

And yet here were Sara and I, transfixed and under a late-summer spell, now with a second piece of the original Páramo de Guzmán in our mouths, tasting the specific land and animals from ten years earlier (the Churra sheep grazing in the Barco de Valcabadillo), the essence of a lost place unlocked for us by Ambrosio, the giant on his witness hill. What did the cheese taste like? I’d like to pretend it tasted like love or history or God—if those things possess a real taste—that its molecules reshaped my own and created a flash of insight, but you know, it tasted like … 
really good cheese
. Sublime cheese, though in this context, it didn’t matter what the cheese tasted like.

The children cooed and squawked. We were bursting with gratitude.
Ambrosio placed the last of the slices on the table, and one by one, the men with hairy fingers and raspy laughter picked them from the plate and popped them thoughtlessly into their mouths, until the much-heralded and ballyhooed Páramo de Guzmán cheese was gone forever.