The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (37 page)

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” said Llopis, “so I wasn’t surprised by the outburst; I was more surprised by the
accionistas
. They kept their calm with an iciness that was chilling.”

The
accionistas
insisted they should go immediately across town to legalize Ambrosio’s resignation from the board before a notary. The
new board would consist only of Tallos and López, while Ambrosio was relegated to employee status. Five days later the board fired Ambrosio—and Asun—outright.

Listening to Pascual Llopis relate his version of events, I found myself confused. Where was the big showdown between Ambrosio and Julián, the standoff in Julián’s office, the
puta
clutching his dissembling throat and emitting the liar’s choking giveaway,
huh-huh-huh …
? Then Llopis said something with a bluntness that surprised me, as if stating a universal truth. “When it comes to the law and business, Ambrosio is a big zero,” he said. “He understands
nada
.”

It hadn’t ever occurred to me before this moment that anyone would use those words—
big zero
—to describe Ambrosio Molinos. And this was his lawyer speaking. I’d taken it on faith that the cheesemaker was without glaring weakness, even if he hadn’t made it past high school. If he was gullible—if that was what had led him into the whole mess with Julián and these newly introduced
accionistas
—then wasn’t that still a virtue more than anything? A sign of his nobility and deep-seated trust, a belief in the goodness of people?

Llopis carried on, the bright December light slanting through the windows at his back, finding the gold flecks in the worn oriental rugs. Distant street noise rose through the window, too, the oblivious masses moving from appointment to appointment in the fancy Retiro barrio without, as Ambrosio would have had it, time to shit.

“This is when we get to the big problem,” Llopis said. “Ambrosio was still the third shareholder in the company. He’s been fired, he’s not an employee, he’s resigned from the board, but he’s still an owner of a third of the business. This is when he really gets into trouble. Because all of a sudden, all of the shepherds, all the people who are delivering the milk, they aren’t being paid, and they start to go after Ambrosio
solo
, because he’s the one who pays them.”

Llopis explained that in 1992 and ’93, “there was a lot of aggression flying around. It was Kafkaesque. And worse in a tiny town.” When I asked what he meant, he said, “Death threats.”

“Death threats?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very serious.” Shepherds were knocking on Ambrosio’s door and “threatening acts of barbarity.”

What, exactly? I pressed.

Like the killing of his wife, Asun, said Llopis.

This seemed impossible. What did Asun have to do with it? It was Ambrosio’s signature on the contracts. But then I reminded myself of what had happened during the war, of what Eduardo Cristóbal, the archaeologist, had said about the victims in the mass graves: “What we found were innocents.” The shepherds didn’t want to kill Ambrosio; they wanted him to pay. Under the pressure of such a threat, he might pay faster.

“Ambrosio’s a big, strong guy,” said Llopis, “but this is Castile, and when someone threatens you, you listen. The most painful part was the loss of honor. Some of these guys were friends of Ambrosio’s from childhood, and he had committed to paying them, and couldn’t, and the whole thing drove him crazy.”

Llopis helped Ambrosio reluctantly prepare the bankruptcy papers, which were filed with the court in Burgos at the beginning of 1994. According to Spain’s laws, a company filing for bankruptcy must gather willing creditors—those to whom they owe money—to vouch for and approve any potential judge’s ruling. At first most of the aggrieved parties were, as Llopis said, “at the door threatening death,” so they were not exactly in the mood for “a bankruptcy party.” Therefore, the first filing was rejected that March.

Meanwhile, the two
accionistas
had one more surprise up their sleeve. “In the midst of working out all of this bankruptcy stuff,” said Llopis, “the guys sell the whole company, all of the assets of Páramo de Guzmán, for so cheap that the cheese in storage was worth more than what they sold it for, which was eighty million pesetas,” or roughly $850,000. “Not only do they sell off the assets, but twenty tons of cheese at market to pay off their debts, and the first agreed-to sum goes to the bank, which is the first creditor in line. After that”—and here Llopis clapped his hands together—“they’re clean. No more
Páramo de Guzmán, no more assets left to pay all the day-to-day guys who are coming after Ambrosio.”

But, I wondered, as an equal and third shareholder in the original company, wasn’t Ambrosio entitled to one-third of the money from the sale?

“No, he was the third owner of a company that had nothing,” said Llopis. And that company was gone now. He had no stake in the new company, the one making Páramo de Guzmán cheese without him. The only legacy left to Ambrosio Molinos of his beautiful family cheese was now the nearly $3 million of debt that was his alone to repay.

H
EARING ALL OF THIS
, I felt the need to speak up, to defend Ambrosio. But then I realized it wasn’t that Pascual Llopis was blaspheming or disparaging my friend. Quite the contrary. I understood that the lawyer was summoning his truth as best he knew it, based on logic and facts, on certainties and the exact color of the shirt worn.
^†

It’s not that I couldn’t imagine Ambrosio’s defects once they’d been pointed out. Of course, he knew nothing of the law. (Who understood the law anyway? That’s why the world is populated with lawyers charging $1,000 an hour for their services.) As for his business acumen, evidence suggested another lack. Yet, to my mind, Ambrosio Molinos wasn’t driven, in the end, by money in a way that made him careful with money. He was ambivalent about it, at times oppositional toward it. He appreciated a modicum of comfort, but his ideal was that sculptor in the nearby village, Santiago of Sotillo, hammering at his rock with no regard for how food came to be on his table or a roof
over his head. Let others be the moneylenders and profiteers while Ambrosio made his poetry!

His mind was rife with visions, and having lit upon one, his assumption was that you, too, could see it, through the power of his words and convictions, that you could cross some imaginary threshold with him—for Ambrosio Molinos rarely traveled anywhere alone—breaching this wonderful frontier, this new ideal, in the same stirrup. He was a rare believer in this collectivity. And if this was the nature of his gullibility, then he was guilty as charged. He was animated by others, by their companionship and a sense of shared trust. That he gave of his own trust and company so freely was his greatest downfall in the new Spain. And he’d paid his price.

At least that was my thought in the moment, followed by a second one more self-damning. My downfall, it was dawning on me, had to do with these delusions I seemed to perpetuate in my own mind: How, when I found myself deeply in the throes of a story-spell, everything gleamed with gold leaf where a much duller patina existed. I felt thrill amid boredom, saw angels in the twig tree and secret hieroglyphics instead of fried worms in the road. Where this village of Guzmán might have been considered shabby, disintegrating on its rise of land that surveyed the Meseta, I had come upon it as an intoxicated explorer and saw a lush paradise. Where its eighty or so inhabitants were all dying their own slow, in many cases painful, deaths—lung cancer from smoking, failed livers from drinking, bodies beaten by farm labor, psyches weighted with sin and grudges—I’d seen a compelling tableau: kindly old men wearing black berets, cane-clomping with dignity, concealing light-filled truths within their secret hearts. If a man coughed up half his lung, graphically cursed the Creator, and spit out some foamy substance at the side of the road, I conceived of it as a sentimental gesture full of hidden meaning. In this world I’d found dusty-booted Ambrosio, and fallen in love with the ideal for which he stood.

How could you not? And this was what angered me most about the Julián I hadn’t met: As he’d once basked in the glow of that ideal
together with Ambrosio, how did he now justify having thrown it all away to be in cahoots with the
accionistas
?

Llopis held up his hand, signaling
patience
. There was more. Páramo de Guzmán, the first company, was now dead. But its debts were very much alive, which meant that Ambrosio still had to go through the effort to declare bankruptcy. When the first petition had been denied by the judge, more creditors warmed to Ambrosio’s predicament, in part because they realized that he, too, had become an aggrieved party. In a separate ruling, the court had decided that the
accionistas
had fraudulently driven the company toward bankruptcy and owed Ambrosio a penalty payment—roughly 250,000 euros, according to Llopis, in part for his client’s illegal firing. So Ambrosio had taken his place in line with the shepherds and other suppliers for remuneration that would never come.

For the second bankruptcy petition, twenty creditors agreed to join, since they had no options left. Ambrosio was broke, in debt, having lost the totality of his inheritance—including his farmland—to the bank. And this time the judge granted the bankruptcy.

Llopis rose from his desk and disappeared, in search of some document he wanted to share. Outside, eternal Madrid: the blue sky, the skeleton trees of winter in Retiro, the hushed sound of traffic and a stray voice rising from the street that sounded like a squawk of distress. In a 1620 book,
Guide and Advice to Strangers Who Come to the Court in which They Are Taught to Flee the Dangers that are in Court Life
, the author, a prolix titler named Antonio Liñán y Verdugo, wrote that “of every four things one sees, one cannot believe even two,” because in the end, the court was a stage set of “fabulous appearances, dreamed up marvels, fairytale treasures, and figures like actors on a stage,” all conjured, in part, to devour the novice. The “strangers” in the title also historically went by another name in Madrid,
forasteros
, new arrivals tinged by a sort of naïve bumpkinism. And this, too—the illusion, the stranger, the bamboozlements—all could have been true of modern Madrid, or Castile, or the story in which I found myself, as well.

Llopis returned with an unruly accordion file under his left arm
and a single, fluttering piece of paper in his right, set it on the desk, and barely referred to it again. “Among his debts, Ambrosio owed a large amount to the Bank of Bilbao,” said Llopis. And what did the bank do? It did what banks do in Spain: It took everything, in order to hold an auction to make that money back.

“No farmer in Castile is going to buy a farm because his neighbor went under,” explained Llopis. “It’s more than bad taste. You can’t do it. The benefit of buying that farm cheap would be far overshadowed by the problems of taking over his destroyed neighbor’s property and then making money off of it. So the bank holds three auctions for Ambrosio’s land. No one steps forward, no one takes advantage of this cheap deal. After three tries, the bank says, ‘Okay, well, we’ll keep the property.’ Its value is sort of undetermined, ultimately, as you can’t say anything’s worth anything, really, until somebody actually pays for it.”

Llopis sighed. “All this stuff that we’re talking about right now,” he said, “if I were explaining this to businesspeople and merchants and economists, this is all normal. They understand all of these machinations. But, the problem is, you take a guy like Ambrosio who knows planting, he knows farming, he knows how to make a really good cheese—by the way, the cheese was
fantastic
!—and he knows about local honor in a small town. And you start talking about this stuff to him, and you might as well be speaking Chinese.”

There was something tragic in his tone, a resigned nostalgia. Even Llopis seemed to recognize the glories of the bygone world embodied in his rather hopeless client. “When Ambrosio first came to me, I said, ‘You were the owner and creator of Páramo de Guzmán. Are you telling me you didn’t put any guarantees in that contract, nothing to protect you?’ And Ambrosio said, ‘My lawyer was my friend.’ But what a friend! Like,
vaya, amigo
—wow!” Llopis then elucidated how a basic contract with protections might have read: “Say you were bringing in outside investors who wanted two-thirds control for giving a million. If they’ve only put down twenty-five percent in the beginning, well, up to now, you only have twenty-five percent control of two-thirds. And if next month, you’ve put down fifty percent, okay, now you’ve
earned your fifty percent. And so on. You might also stipulate that they never have administrative control of the company, so they can’t make decisions about selling assets. There are all sorts of simple protections like this.”

But none of them appeared in the contract. The
accionistas
were immediately granted two-thirds, but according to Llopis, only delivered a small portion of the money they had pledged.

So who was to blame? That was the question suddenly on my mind after assuming for years that the answer was simple, and exactly as Ambrosio had delivered it to me. Llopis thought for a moment, then surprised me again with the blunt force of his answer. “In large part this is Ambrosio’s fault. For being the bohemian he is, for being disconnected from everything legal and financial.”

I tried to see Ambrosio in this new light, but couldn’t quite manage it, and continued to admire him, and caught myself admiring him again. Yet some part of me then forced the other part of me—the part of me that lived inside these stories—to recognize that there’d been a real cost to this deficiency of Ambrosio’s. What first enraptured me had been Ari’s newsletter riff, one that had set my imagination whirring, followed by Ambrosio’s telling of a legend that blew my mind. But these had been story versions of a real life in conflict with a real world. And this conflict hadn’t been spurred by just “the bohemian” coursing through his veins, but a little of the hubristic hidalgo, the nobleman, too. Llopis confessed that, yes, it was likely that Ambrosio’s grandiosity might have had something to do with it. As a member of one of the richest families in town, being in charge of a renowned cheese company may have fulfilled the hidalgo’s role he fancied for himself as provider and benevolent, principled patriarch. Certainly, Ambrosio saw his own rise as a validation of the past.