The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (41 page)

Until she buried you for good.

H
E ARRIVED AT THE BAR AROUND
7:00
P.M., SPORTING A JACKET
and tie and dark pants. The bar was situated down a set of steps, half underground, with a low ceiling and windows that provided a view of Madrid’s below-the-knee fashion scene on the twilight street—of cuffed slacks and shimmery stockings and shiny, pointy shoes clicking on the sidewalk outside. Julián was accompanied by a fellow whose name I didn’t catch, another attorney, originally from Cuba, where Julián also did business. Having been to Cuba, I tried to break the ice with the stranger, but this fellow, barrel chested and imposing, didn’t seem amenable. When he grunted, we agreed to let it go, and from that time forward he sat with his arms folded over his girth, yawning to punctuate his indifference. Was he there to fill the role of bodyguard, or was he merely second-seating his colleague at the defense table?

I never asked.

Julián wore his hair neatly parted, his face and hands unblemished by the flaking, dry patches of our first visit. He struck a more
confident figure. His phone kept warbling, which required his constant attention, living as he did in lawyerly minutes more urgent than our merely quotidian ones as he triaged the emergencies of the day.

The waiter took our orders, vanished briefly, and returned with beer in tall, chilled glasses, along with silver plates of mixed nuts and
quicos
, roasted corn kernels. After checking his phone again, Julián looked up, sighed, and said, “Yes, Ambrosio and I were very, very close friends, from when we were very small—and as a result our families were really close, too.” He sat with one leg folded over the other, stock straight, and at first he seemed at a remove, as if he were there to watch the rest of us play a card game. “Ambrosio, as you know, was always a farmer, he was working the land, but he had bigger ideas. He was a restive fellow,
inquieto
, scattered, always playing music. But incredibly imaginative. Once he read an article about worm farming and bought a million earthworms because he had the idea that their excrement was a good fertilizer and would help the plants grow in his garden.”

Julián’s tone was even, flatly factual, a baritone the same as Ambrosio’s. If he was presenting his opening argument, I was rapt, inordinately so, especially for someone who, upon first hearing Ambrosio’s story those years ago, had vowed in outrage that I was “going to find this Julián,” and “ask him some questions.” Now Julián’s fingers grasped the
quicos
, brought them to his mouth, while in my mind’s eye I saw those same fingers wiggle from Ambrosio’s flickering blade. He talked about other Ambrosio schemes: There’d been a long-ago attempt to make goat cheese—a sudden trip to Basque country to buy a bunch of goats—that had failed. “But the sheep’s cheese,” declared Julián, “that was the one thing he had great success with.”

Julián recalled the first time Ambrosio had mentioned it. “He told me two things: One, he said, ‘I remember my mom used to make this incredible cheese, and that cheese doesn’t exist anymore. There are no artisanal cheeses like it on the market.’ And two, he said, ‘I want to produce this cheese from Churra sheep.’ ” Normally, according to Julián, Churra were meat sheep found in Extremadura, in Castile, even
in Australia, a breed that lived off small sprouts rather than lush vegetation and thrived in the more extreme climes. He went on briefly in this vein, while my mind processed what he’d just said. Was Julián suggesting that Ambrosio’s cheese had been a business proposition first and foremost? If it had been an offering in the name of Ambrosio’s returned-from-the-dead father, wouldn’t
that
have been what stuck in his best friend’s mind?

Julián said he couldn’t recall Ambrosio saying anything about the cheese as an offering. “There’s much I’ve forgotten, so it’s possible,” he said. “But he brought it to me as a way to make money.” Yes, it could have been both at once, I reasoned, for why did they have to be mutually exclusive? Everyone had to make a living, didn’t they? Some were just better at it. Like Julián, who might have stood for everything Ambrosio wasn’t: orderly, well dressed, a disciple of logic and facts, a success by the standards of the new Spain. His credibility came not just from experience or money or even a touch of vanity—all of which he seemed to have—but rather the low, rumbling reasonableness of his vocalized mind. He remembered a Saturday when Ambrosio, Angel, and a couple of investors had shown up to tell him that they’d signed papers in front of a notary to form a corporation with the sole purpose of manufacturing cheese. It had been a fait accompli. Julián recalled that the operation was going to be run out of a stable across the street from Ambrosio’s parents’ house with a little
nave
on the side for the sheep. What they’d wanted from him were some ideas on how to procure aid from the state for starting an agrarian business. Julián had pointed them to an expert.

“My role was occasional in the beginning,” he said. “They might ask me to look at a contract when they were buying some sheep, but that was it. I remember they started off with very few people; even Ambrosio’s mother worked on the cheese. The idea was: high quality, small amounts.”

As an intimate, Julián was invited to the first tasting. “It was fantastic, exceptional cheese,” he said, growing animated. “It was like a bomb going off in your mouth. It was really strong and salty, which I
loved. And had an authentical taste of milk. You could only eat a little at a time.

“In the beginning the cheese wasn’t soaked in olive oil,” he continued. “Rather it had a lot of fat in it from the pure milk, and it would sweat and dry out very quickly. And this was producing losses in production. So Ambrosio thought to immerse it in oil.” Ambrosio’s other smart, if absolutely bold, idea, said Julián, was to export Páramo de Guzmán. So he began visiting food festivals, and, given the force of his personality and his cheese, he seduced a lot of people. Soon, Páramo de Guzmán was carried by El Corte Inglés and Harrods, in countries from France to the United States. “The result of his success was that he gained more fame,” said Julián, “but then his fame was bigger than his production capabilities. He couldn’t keep up with the demand.”

Julián took a sip of beer, glanced at his phone. I’d grown so accustomed to the chaotic wires and sparks of Ambrosio’s tales—the digressions within digressions, the footnotes and annotations—that I was relieved by Julián’s methodical efficiency as a storyteller. “Now that I’ve established these two facts,” said Julián, “about the fame and prestige of the cheese and its actual production, I need to express my opinion that, in the beginning, the outflow of cash wasn’t controlled very well. No one had a good handle on the movement of money. And Ambrosio was the guy running the show. His partners were just pure investors.”

Julián claimed that, when the original investors realized they weren’t likely to make any money, that the company was running up debt, they sold their shares to Ambrosio’s two brothers, which for a short time made Páramo de Guzmán a strictly family-owned and-operated business. But the problems persisted, and then became dire: too much demand, too little cash flow, limited means of production. The brothers bowed out. For the company to become profitable—which would allow Ambrosio to pay his growing pile of bills—Ambrosio believed that Páramo de Guzmán needed to expand, which
required an influx of cash. After the village had rejected its prodigal son with a flurry of flyers—
Don’t let him steal the palace!
—this was where Julián could help, wrangling the new investors Llopis had mentioned: Pedro Tallos, the local businessman with whom Julián already had dealings, and Teodoro López.

The company now incorporated as PRESA, the new investors facilitated the move to the Roa factory by pledging money and outfitting the facility with the latest cheesemaking equipment. Soon, however, they found themselves at odds with Ambrosio. Despite the popularity of Páramo de Guzmán, despite a full warehouse and trucks transporting containers of it at all hours of the day, the debts multiplied. At some point, according to Julián, everyone began looking for relief.

“This is the period when things went south,” he said, leaning in. He seemed in the card game now. “I don’t know what happened. And obviously I haven’t ever had the chance to talk to Ambrosio about it.” He reminded me that, again, he wasn’t involved in any of the day-to-day business operations, but acted as a friendly adviser for which he claimed he was never paid a cent. But he remembered offering a piece of advice to Pedro and Teodoro. “Ambrosio’s not a businessman,” he told them, “but he’s the salesman, the public relations guy, the controller of the quality of the cheese, the face of the company—he’s brilliant at that. He’s just terrible with numbers. If you guys keep control of the numbers, you’ll be fine.”

But, according to Julián, they didn’t listen.

Meanwhile, sales couldn’t keep pace with expenses.
Not everyone eats caviar
. So the three shareholders—Ambrosio, Pedro, and Teodoro—came to Julián yet again in search of new investors. Julián enlisted two more local businessmen, who formed an entity called ESCOSA that pledged nearly $1 million to Páramo de Guzmán. I asked Julián why anyone would have invested at this point, given the realities of Páramo de Guzmán’s balance sheet. “They were friends of mine, and trusted me,” said Julián. “The factory was state of the art, and everybody loved the cheese. We all believed in it. It was so good, you know?”

But even with an infusion of cash, Páramo de Guzmán continued on its downward spiral. It was at this point that Julián saw “less and less” of Ambrosio, while Pedro emerged as the one keeping him apprised of developments, assuming the go-between role. “One day Pedro came to me and said there’s a problem with the company, a split between PRESA and Ambrosio,” Julián said. Ambrosio wanted to declare bankruptcy, while PRESA was in favor of trying to sell the company.

“I’ve thought so many times about what happened,” Julián said, tugging the cuff of his dress shirt, seemingly agitated. “I think one possibility is that Pedro pulled a fast one on me. I remember clearly saying to him, ‘If you have this conflict, why don’t I call a meeting?’ And in that moment, Pedro said, ‘Forget it. Don’t even think about it, because Ambrosio doesn’t want anything to do with you. He’s already got a lawyer in Madrid who’s trying to get a bankruptcy thing going.’ At the same time, I think Pedro might have told Ambrosio, ‘Guess what, your old friend Julián doesn’t want anything to do with you right now,’ thus creating a rift. In retrospect, I made a big mistake in that moment: I should’ve called Ambrosio just to say, ‘What’s up, what’s going on?’ ”

According to Julián, the urgent issue for Ambrosio was his own personal debt, which Llopis had calculated at that dizzying $3 million figure. “This idea that he wanted to save the company doesn’t jibe at all,” Julián said, “because, at first, Ambrosio wanted to sell his interests and just stay on as an employee. Pedro and Teodoro were the ones who insisted, who strong-armed him to keep his part of the company—and gave him a salary, too. I mean, in some ways, he never lived better: he was getting paid; he had benefits; his wife and aunt were employed. But he wanted to sell the whole thing. He wanted out.”

Again the words came in a rush that needed deconstruction.
He wanted out
. The heretical sentence echoed in my head even as Julián kept moving his mouth, low-volume jazz playing in the background. Really? Could it really have been that Ambrosio Molinos, rather than
fight the malevolent forces that sought to unfinger his grip from the cheese he loved, had come to such a desperate impasse that he wanted—indeed,
needed
—to dump it instead?

The idea of this was like a full-body Rolfing, the sudden readjustment of some narrative spine. I needed to let it settle and to rearrange the architecture of my thoughts around it, for I was thinking about all the years I’d let myself live in this stupor of belief—that Ambrosio was so heroic and principled that he could never be tied to venal concerns, that, aside from being magical, from being a cheese of lost memories, Páramo de Guzmán symbolized a kind of lost purity that needed to be ferociously protected at all costs, that only Ambrosio could have made, nurtured, and guarded a cheese such as this. How many times, in how many drafts, had I written it so? The way Julián described Ambrosio’s toxic finances led me to realize that, with each passing day, the cheese must have broken Ambrosio a little more because he owed more and more—and lost a little more of his dignity in the process, which was the thing that mattered most to him. Only bankruptcy, in the end, could have stanched the hemorrhaging.

In this alternate telling, Ambrosio appeared in Julián’s office, lamenting that Páramo de Guzmán, his company, was “crashed, gone, dead.” Ambrosio confronted Julián over the bankruptcy issue, and Julián told him that he didn’t advise going the route of bankruptcy because, in the end, it would be a financial mess for everyone, that the banks would go after personal assets.

“I told him that it’s better to find buyers, because the product is good, and you can keep this business alive,” Julián said. “Otherwise, the banks don’t care: They’ll try to take everything.”

As a man with nothing, perhaps Ambrosio thought the banks could take nothing more. He just needed an ending. And yet in Ambrosio’s version, he’d arrived at Julián’s office waving a spurious contract as the flag of his betrayal, papers he said he’d signed unwittingly that gave away his cheese. And Julián had retreated in fear.
Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh …

Never happened, said Julián now.

Rather, in Julián’s account, it was he, Julián, who argued to keep Páramo de Guzmán alive. The last meeting in Julián’s office, the one Ambrosio had described so graphically as that final showdown in which Julián, hoist with his own petard, in a puddle of fear, clutched his throat, whining out his mercy song, seemed a very different encounter from what Julián described now. Julián mentioned nothing about cowering before Ambrosio’s anger, though he admitted his friend’s anger was real.