The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (36 page)

Why?
Because something that started as a lark to a broke grad student—to go to Spain and someday try THE MOST EXPENSIVE CHEESE EVER SOLD!
^†
—turned into nearly two decades of my life, thus conflating said lark with love, loss, birth, and death.

Why?
Because I was born into a family, like others, that had once left Europe behind, and so here, I thought, was my chance to regain everything lost by my ancestors, to reclaim the virtues of the abandoned, agrarian past.

Why?
Because I could see those of my generation who were increasingly made miserable by their acquired bitterness, and—this will sound terribly naïve—I wanted to go backward and find innocence again.

Why?
Because in Guzmán, nothing was ever disingenuous or ironic. In talking to Ambrosio once about the nearby convent named St. Domingo de Silos, one of the places where the Spanish language was first written down, he became animated, describing the spot as
“impresionante”
—amazing, astonishing, impressive—with signature emphasis on the word, the same emphasis he would have given it were he describing an old well or vineyard or lamb cooked over an open flame. “It has one of the oldest cypress trees in Spain,” he said, “and the church—you can feel the music in your body. The sound becomes your body. It rises to the cupola and crashes back down, a
choca de física
. That is divinity. That is what real sound should do.”

Why?
Because Ambrosio seemed right so much of the time, and he forced his prescription for a better life on me—and I felt honored to receive it.

Why?
Because in the end I saw this whole business as a learning moment of some sort—and I was waiting to see how he might resolve the ending.

I said none of this to those people who asked why I’d squandered so many precious American hours writing about a piece of Spanish cheese. In the end we were too busy for the long answer, which required
time and concentration, eye contact and the negation of our personal, handheld self-reflectors for more than a minute. No, outwardly I shrugged, while inwardly the answer came in the piles of puzzled words and half starts, the drafts that became my own figurative quest to make cheese, none of the batches tasting quite right, but still, I told myself, in pursuit of
something
.

D
URING THIS EXTENDED PERIOD
of drafting and redrafting, hallucination and hard work, we had another child, to make three—towheaded Nicholas, born an exuberant bundle of motion. Now there was no containing anyone or anything. The children grew of their own accord, long unfrozen from the fleeting dream of timelessness in Guzmán. At night while I wrote in the attic, they slept on the floor below, mumbling in sleep, their bones elongating. They lost baby fat, grew complex emotions. Their sleep-talk evolved from the single bleats of “Why?” and “No!” to actual sentences, like one our daughter uttered: “You are
not
cookie-worthy, sir!”

Now—between her assignments out in the world (India, Portugal, Ghana)—Sara urged me to return to Guzmán, to ask some direct questions, to remind myself that this cheese drama wasn’t all just a figment, that it was real and deserved resolution. “You need to put an end to this,” she said. Drive a stake through it. Kill the bull,
estoque
to the hilt. For some reason this is what I seemed to dread most, the path that led to the end, to a knock on Julián’s door, like some muckraking journalist. Would it be opened wide or slammed shut? Was he a despicable snake or someone else altogether?

“No more digressions,” she said.

“
Everything
is a digression in Castile,” I replied, adding a scholarly addendum that Castile itself began as a footnote, a buffer between pages in the master plan of the northern Christian kingdoms against the Muslims.

She thought for a moment. “You’re not Castilian.”

“Well, Ambrosio’s story is,” I protested.

“But this is
your
story.”

If it was my story, then, what did it mean that I still didn’t have the answers to some incredibly basic questions? For instance: What was the status of the various lawsuits? Or: Why couldn’t Ambrosio go back to making a slightly different cheese without Julián? And what responsibility, if any, did Ambrosio bear in all that had happened to him? Could he really be guilt free?

So I packed my bag, bused to Logan, was lifted over the ocean by airliner, and found myself in Guzmán again, the beautiful village on its witness hill, the familiar sights and smells flooding my senses—the grain and loam, the wine and homemade chorizo. Ambrosio was Ambrosio, all-enveloping in his welcome. I’d resolved to start simply, by asking him for the name and number of his lawyer in Madrid. But even that left me fumbling in the telling room, mouth turning cottony with nervousness. For some reason the question suggested mistrust, that I would now be double-checking him. Asking it felt like its own kind of betrayal.

When I looked at Ambrosio seated there in the crepuscular light, beneath the blue china plate painted with saints, I saw a good man, one of generosity and compassion. I saw someone who’d done something remarkable with his life, furthered the cause of the past by resurrecting his family cheese, by telling stories. And he’d been, in all those pages of writing, the necessary myth I somehow needed to tell myself.
Egads
, thought I,
is this what I’d done with my life, then? Told myself a story?

When I worked up the gumption to finally ask after his lawyer, I did so as casually as I could, but the shift was awkward and palpable, a lurching curve in the road. He seemed to hesitate, looked down at his fingernails, which he made a show of inspecting, then said his name: Pascual Llopis.

“And his number?” I asked.

And this time, when he said it out loud, he didn’t reach for—nor did I offer—my notebook.

I wrote the phone number down in my own hand.

“A
MBROSIO IS A UNIQUE CHARACTER
,”
SAID HIS LAWYER
, P
ASCUAL
Llopis, triangling his fingers into a steeple and pressing them under the tip of his chin, striking a pensive pose. He sat behind a large leather-topped desk in a beige suit and brown-striped tie, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, while I sat on the other side, admiring the pastoral paintings on the wall, depictions of a grape harvest, a rabbit hunt, haystacks. He proclaimed that a man like Ambrosio was a bit of an endangered species in the new Spain, “a bohemian, an artist.”

In coming to see Llopis—this was December 2005—I felt something break loose, some winged bird take flight. I’d spent five years vacuum-sealed in Ambrosio’s world, and now I would find that there wasn’t a question Llopis wouldn’t answer, as he led me through the obliterated cheesescape of Ambrosio’s dreams.

Llopis (pronounced yo-
PEACE
) was maybe sixty, with a kinetic, busy manner. He conveyed a shrewdness ostensibly built on a bedrock of experience and professional success. He admitted that he was very
fond of Ambrosio, even protective, and that he’d first heard about the cheesemaker from another client, which seemed to contradict Ambrosio’s version that they’d met through Ambrosio’s father.

The trouble began, Llopis said, after the
palacio
debacle in 1989, when Ambrosio went looking outside of Guzmán for more space. While Páramo de Guzmán was a darling of caseophiles and the international cheese cognoscenti, while world leaders and celebrities consumed it, and while it was sold in some of the world’s finest stores, it remained an eccentric cheese. It was one of the first sheep’s milk cheeses on the market, and one of the first artisanal Spanish cheeses to find a larger audience. And yet one friend and would-be investor gave Ambrosio this advice: Keep it small. “ ‘This is a niche product,’ ” said Llopis, quoting the friend’s message to Ambrosio. “ ‘Just because it sells well to a predetermined group of people doesn’t mean the whole world’s going to buy it.’ ”

“What he tried to tell him was: everything in moderation,” said Llopis. Meanwhile, Ambrosio had fallen under the spell of two local investors—Pedro Tallos and Teodoro López—who were hungry to expand their portfolios and whose sales pitch, according to Llopis, seemed to match Ambrosio’s vision for his cheese operation. All three were taken with the idea of buying property in Roa in order to build a state-of-the-art factory complex with a large cellar, a tasting room, and land to expand. “Ambrosio began to dream bigger and bigger,” said Llopis, “and it was easier—and in some ways, lazier—to go with the yes-men.”

Right from the start, with their initial contract, the fraud was in place, claimed Llopis. “Even in that basic arrangement, you already have the trick”—
un engaño
—“because the investors promise to be Ambrosio’s partners, but have majority control of the company”—two board votes to Ambrosio’s one—“and no legal or monetary exposure. Meanwhile Ambrosio has staked his entire
patrimonio
”—his inheritance, including all his land and money—“on the company.” In other words: While the investment of Tallos and López was in fact minimal, while they offered Ambrosio the presidency of the company, paid
him a salary, hired his wife, and allowed him to keep running the business, they had majority control. At the same time, Ambrosio carried all the financial exposure, since it was his name on the contracts with suppliers.

It wasn’t until the company was drained of funds and unable to pay its debts—the moment when the board members, seeing the writing on the wall, began scrambling to protect their own assets—that Ambrosio realized the implications of his signature on that initial partnership agreement and the supplier agreements he’d signed. “My client let himself, or got himself, tricked by a couple of guys without shame.
Sinverguenzas
. And he was fooled for, like, two years,” said Llopis, drawing a hand through his full head of silver hair. “So the problem—and huge danger—for Ambrosio, and his wife, Asun, was that they were the only ones who had contracts with the providers, the shepherds and all the people they had to pay monthly to keep the business going. The investors had no obligation.”

And the debts piled up with astonishing speed.

But, I wondered, how in the world would Ambrosio allow himself to be so duped, unless led into it by Julián, who was supposed to be checking such contracts?

“What gave Ambrosio confidence from the start,” said Llopis, “was that there was tons of cheese in the
bodega
, stored and cured—and it was essentially cash, money in the bank. Knowing Ambrosio, you kind of get the feeling that he was like, ‘Don’t worry, I got it. I’ll pay the shepherds.’
^*
After all, he’s the Guzmán guy, it’s what he wants to do. He
wants
to be the one who’s up there dealing with the sheep and shepherds, because that’s where he’s most happy and alive.”

Even so, without having parsed the intricacies of the contract, and suspecting Julián’s hand in what he took to be a conspiracy, he sought out Llopis. “Ambrosio came to me, and at first he was very angry. He was in a bad state. And he said, ‘Can we still save this company? Can
it still be mine?’ ” Llopis said that, if the company hoped to avoid bankruptcy (an act that would relinquish control of Páramo de Guzmán to the bank), there was no option but to freeze all cash outflow, to stop payment to the shepherds and other providers. But in order to go ahead with the plan they needed the approval of the other two investors—the
accionistas
, as Llopis called them.

“So one fine August day, I went with Ambrosio to Roa to meet with them, and they laid out the same plan, to stop payment.” But then, most strangely, according to Llopis, the two
accionistas
said they weren’t going to vote for it. They didn’t care whose family cheese it was. Once they realized there was no upside, they wanted out. Or so it seemed.

“I was there with Ambrosio, as his attorney, but they didn’t have any lawyers present,” said Llopis. And Julián, in his auxiliary role, wasn’t there either. “These guys were pros; they knew exactly what they were doing,” he claimed. What they said, in essence, was that Ambrosio bore the obligation of those payments, and if he couldn’t raise the money, the company was headed to bankruptcy. Realizing his powerlessness, offended by their ruthlessness, Ambrosio immediately renounced his board position. Páramo de Guzmán was an artisanal cheese, and Ambrosio had been its creator, curator, and head artisan from the beginning. Perhaps he never expected them to call his bluff; perhaps he overestimated his importance; perhaps he could already see the outcome. But the two
accionistas
seemed pleased, according to Llopis, like, “Okay, you’re going to resign? Perfect!”

In Llopis’s telling, the two men sat blankly while Ambrosio exploded. He raged and called the men bastards, yelling,
“Me cago en todos …”
I shit on everything.