The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (43 page)

Julián kept on. “The other day an uncle of Ambrosio’s, one who wouldn’t say hello to me after all this happened, stopped me on the
street and said, ‘Give me your hand.’ We shook, and he said, ‘How is it that you and Ambrosio still aren’t talking? To think of the friends that you once were … such a tragedy.’ Just the fact that this relative broke the ice made me think even more that time is having its way with the story, that maybe there’s a chance.”

Listening to him, I wondered whether time was the only truth-teller, the trickle that over aeons formed the honest canyon. Once I’d let myself believe that it curdled a story.
The boy becomes insufferable; the king is made a fool of
. But perhaps adding even more time forced new shapes to emerge, new possibilities and intimations of other worlds behind the assumed one, maybe it freed the boy of preposterousness, made the king more dignified.

When he reflected back now, did Julián feel angry that the cheese had come between them? “It’s not the cheese’s fault,” he said. “In some way, Ambrosio grabbed on to this story—this idea that I was the betrayer—as a way of saving face in front of the whole world, of justifying what happened to the outside world.”

Could he be forgiven?

“In fact, I have forgiven him,” said Julián, “because I’ve understood his situation. This is a guy who never planned, never really got too far ahead with anything—party, good times, here we go—then all of a sudden he finds himself sanctioned, embargoed, without a company, no money, at a loss with his family.”

“It was their legacy, this cheese,” I said.

“Yes,” said Julián.

“And when he lost it, maybe he kind of lost his mind,” I said.

“I understand that,” said Julián, “and for that reason I don’t harbor any rancor. You asked before if I feared Ambrosio. I know at the end of the day he’s not really capable of violence. I know that he wouldn’t send someone, or allow someone who might come of his own initiative. There’s too much beautiful history behind it and too many friends in common, too much
enlace
, intertwining.”

What was “worse than a killer putting a bullet in my head,” said Julián, was something that had actually happened. “I was having
lunch one day in Aranda with some clients, and by total coincidence there was a large contingent of Ambrosio’s family—his parents, some cousins, nephews, nieces—but Ambrosio wasn’t there. We finished eating and were leaving at the same time, and Ambrosio’s mother approached and started screaming, ‘Julián, how could you steal our business from us, how could you rob us? How could you do this to us?’

“If someone had tried to kill me, it would have been over quickly: I would be dead, or I would have killed the killer and been arrested. But this was my best friend’s mother, the head of the household where I practically grew up, screaming at me, screaming something that I believe wasn’t the truth, in front of Ambrosio’s extended family and in public, in front of my clients. It was just so painful, all I could bring myself to say was, ‘Puri, you’re mistaken. Puri, you’re mistaken.’ I couldn’t say anything else.

“A nephew of hers, who is a local judge or a magistrate, told her, ‘Aunt, calm down, don’t say these things,’ but the damage was done.”

When he finished, Julián looked a bit ill, wan, a hank of hair bobbing loose from the controlled follicular landscape of his head. He seemed to have reached the conclusion of what he had to say, and started fiddling with his phone again. What a terrible moment, I said, to have your surrogate mother berate you publicly. He heaved a deep breath, looked up, and said that obviously he’d never returned to that restaurant. “I had my friends back then. I still have friends today. Obviously I haven’t gone back to Guzmán in many years.” And then he asked me one last time: Can you ensure that Ambrosio wants to talk to me?

“Ambrosio’s aware that I’m talking to you,” I said, “so in a way I’m a bit of a messenger, even though as a journalist I want to make sure you get to answer these charges.”

Julián nodded. His phone was squawking. He took out a roll of bills, left a few on the table, reached for his briefcase, and stood. The Cuban, startled from his reverie, struggled to his feet. Julián extended a hand across the table. We shook, firmly, as if we’d made some sort of agreement.

“Remember,” he said, “I’ll be there tomorrow if he says yes.”

W
HERE ONCE
I’
D COME OFF THE OVERNIGHT PLANE FROM
the States bleary but on a speed-walk to the rental car desk, and after procuring my
coche
I’d gun that minicar and merge onto A-1 headed north, driving full of expectation, trying to skip minutes forward into my
campo
paradise, my double life, to get to Ambrosio’s house with its abandoned pool next to the Duero River, to visit the fields and village bars with him, chugging Cokes to stay awake (so as not to miss anything)—now I devised what excuse I could to loiter a little, to steal a night or two in Madrid, walking the barrios (La Latina, Lavapies, Huertas), visiting new friends in the city (including Ambrosio’s brother Roberto and his wife, Mika), inevitably ending up at the Prado to see the Goyas. On one trip, I went to the museum no fewer than four times, muttering at the canvases.

It’d become a rite of sorts: I’d visit
The Family of King Carlos IV
, my eye drawn past the toadlike king and his brood to Goya in the shadows, painting at his canvas. Then I would stroll around the corner to stand in awe before his Black Paintings, before
The Colossus
showing Saturn in full devour, and the drowning dog, and the two boys in
Duel with Cudgels
. I’d stand there and wonder: What caused those two boys to turn against each other with such fury—the cudgel cocked and ready to slice the air with whistling indignation toward the skull—for they seem nearly the same in body, dress, and disposition, just like mirror-imaged brothers, shoulders turned toward each other? What result could possibly favor either?

I saw Ambrosio and Julián in that painting, of course—and the intractable human condition, the seed of all civil war. But did that really warrant all the time I spent standing before it? What was up with me standing in this spot, like Fernando in the shade of the tree across from the church in Guzmán?

Afloat before the Black Paintings, I was reminded of an alternative legend about the paintings brought forward in recent years by a Spanish historian, Juan José Junquera, best known for his writing on eighteenth-century furnishings. When he was commissioned to write a book about the Black Paintings, he combed the archives in Madrid, stumbling on a trove of documents about Goya’s farmhouse, Quinta del Sordo. In Goya lore, it was believed that the Black Paintings were completed sometime between 1820 and 1823, and covered the walls of the first and second floors of the house. But Junquera was astonished to find one salient, undermining fact: At Goya’s death, in 1828, there was no second floor. That came later. “If the upper floor does not exist in Goya’s time, then of course [the Black Paintings aren’t] by Goya,” Junquera was quoted as saying in a 2003 article that laid out the entire imbroglio.

The drowning dog and the boys with their cudgels, among others, were allegedly found on the missing second floor: So how did they come to be? It was a mystery, according to Junquero, but to his mind, the myth of the painter lost in some spirit world, desperately trying to keep pace with the images haunting him, was flawed by fact. None of Goya’s intimates ever claimed to have seen the paintings, and those who wrote about the house described its walls covered with artwork but of a more rustic nature, scenes from country life, friends. It doesn’t
quite have the same ring, does it? Goya at the end, in a frenzy, painting … 
picnics and stuff
.

The writer of the article, Arthur Lubow, claims that our ability to judge the authenticity of the Black Paintings is also partially clouded by this “biographical mystique.” “In addition to bearing a great-artist sticker, the Black Paintings come with a narrative of the most compelling sort,” he writes. “Like van Gogh’s crow-haunted fields and Pollock’s twisted skeins of paint, Goya’s Black Paintings are popularly believed to be the outflow of a tormented great soul. A reattribution would strip away their pained sincerity along with their authenticity.”

There are also indications that the Black Paintings don’t entirely belong to Goya: the crude, clawlike hands, the heavier use of black, the fact that X-rays reveal other images beneath. Every canvas contains its own story—and mystery. Adding to the confusion are photographs taken at Quinta del Sordo in the 1860s that show some of the paintings in a form very different from what would eventually appear on the canvases at the Prado.

Junquera’s theory, however shaky, is that Goya’s only son, Javier, may have been the auteur, painting them for pleasure, and when he passed away and his son, the profligate Mariano Goya, thought to sell the property, he saw a greater financial upside in calling the paintings his grandfather’s rather than his father’s.

You can imagine the cacophony raised in opposition to this theory, but does it make it less valid? And if not Javier, then couldn’t one honestly say that the curator and painter Salvador Martínez Cubells, who took the images from the walls of the Quinta, restored them, and then transferred the Black Paintings to canvas—perhaps for the worse—deserves a credit, too?
^*

No, we’re enthralled by the story, the biographical mystique. Even when Lubow visits with Manuela Mena, the Prado’s head curator of eighteenth-century art, she claims
The Dog
is one of the most revered paintings of our time and tells the story of Joan Miró’s last visit to the Prado. He wanted to see two paintings: Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
and Goya’s dog. And so go the last lines of Lubow’s article: “ ‘For [Miró],
The Dog
and
Las Meninas
were of the same level intensity,’ ” Mena said. She looked at me challengingly. ‘We cannot send
The Dog
to the museum basement because it was on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta.’ ”

So was that to say that mystique won out over the truth every time? All the best stories and strangest dreams metaphorically seemed to exist on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta, didn’t they? In the end, it wasn’t so much that there was an alternative narrative—there always was—but it came down to belief: Which one did you
want
to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps most to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?

I
WAS TELLING MYSELF
a story, too. So who was I kidding? This whole business had long ceased to be journalism. It was mythicalism, the making of and suspension in something mythical. This was encouragism, the telling of a story to remind yourself of your higher angels. Before it became discouragism. Or discombobulism. Before it became implicationism and possessionism.

After meeting with Julián, I’d needed to process. And yet in the space of twenty minutes, Ambrosio had called my phone repeatedly: five, six, seven times. Why? More than anything, I felt as if I’d been had. Or I’d let myself be had. Or that I needed to think about whether or not I’d been had, and by whom.

Eventually I returned the call and said that the meeting had gone well, that there were contradictions of course, and that we’d cover it all when we returned to Guzmán in a couple of months. I had a plane
out the next morning, to Portugal for a story. I was glad for the space. And soon I was back home, sitting in my attic office, watching the squirrels as they ran on their power-line highway to nowhere and back, as I turned it all over in my mind. 311 pages now, and here’s what I knew:

1) Julián the
puta
didn’t seem like a
puta
at all.

2) Ambrosio the heroic suddenly seemed grasping and flawed, like an actual human being.

3) I’d somehow entered the drama as the Negotiator.

So wasn’t it finally time to force the issue? What if I could find a way to mend their friendship? We might repaint Goya’s
Duel with Cudgels
(for if one were to erase the cudgels, the two men appeared on the verge of falling into exhausted embrace), or unbury the dead in their mass graves. Yes, this
was
all about cheese. And now by resolving it, we could begin on the road to world peace.

This was my muddled thinking when I returned to Spain about eight weeks later and found myself killing time in Madrid, visiting the Goyas again. But then I had a nervous feeling in my gut. I’d always been the tide to Ambrosio’s moon. He moved me as he pleased, and it had never been the other way around.

I went north to find him in the family room of his house, a fire in the fireplace. He wore a sweater vest, and boomed hello, that wonderful way he had of saying my name—MY-KULL!—as if discovering it for the first time. We embraced. I stepped back, and looked upon him with the fire lighting his face. The mournful eyes, the mirthful mouth. How many years had it been since we’d first met? Almost ten? He was aging before my eyes—and I before his. And how I loved him—and depended on him to say the right thing now.

He motioned for me to sit. There was the usual rundown: my kids, his family, Sara and Asun; the latest news in town, the first plantings and vineyard prep, and so on. And then there was silence, a
highly unusual thing in Ambrosio’s presence. He was rocking in his chair. He looked askance at me, then at the fire. Had he ever waited for something I had to say?

“I want to tell you about my meeting with Julián,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “tell me.” He dragged a forefinger over his lower lip.

“He had a lot to say,” I said. “And some of it sounds different from your version.” I could hear a little quaver in my voice. Crap. This wasn’t the Negotiator; this was the guilty ex–altar boy. I felt as if I’d jumped sides, right before his eyes. Speaking of Julián with such intimacy had the odd effect of putting Ambrosio on the defensive, something that seemed impossible. “The most important thing,” I said, “is that he’d still like to meet with you if you were willing to meet.”