The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (44 page)

Ambrosio went to speak, but I raised a halting hand. I’d thought through a short speech, and I intended to deliver it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about El Cid—” I said, and then I regurgitated his story, unraveling it slowly, describing El Cid’s loyalty for his friend the king Sancho, detailing how Sancho’s brother, Alfonso, and sister, Urraca, conspired to have Sancho killed, and after they did, how Alfonso took the throne, and how then, after some other nonsense, El Cid, the most loyal Castilian, was banished from Castile. “When El Cid was turned out by King Alfonso, he marched south,” I said, “and for every town he sacked, he sent the spoils back to his betrayer, the new king, all in hopes of seeing his homeland again.” Was I being presumptuous? Annoying? Was I striking a chord? “This is also the legend of what it means to be Castilian,” I said.

Ambrosio sat and listened. He considered deeply. The Cid alone was capable of this saintly sort of majesty. The rivers of Castile pulsed through his veins, the mountains and Meseta made him mighty and unshakable. Deprivation had made him all-powerful. He marshaled the wind, the hail, and lightning—and unleashed it on the world. He turned his betrayal into a righteous force for good.

Surely Ambrosio could understand such a tale, for his blood flowed from the same river. He saw El Cid as kinsman and life source.
He saw him riding alongside his car, on his horse, Babieca, wielding Tizona, his sword, as we drove home from Haza on a stormy night. He spoke to El Cid when he saw his face in the clouds. To appeal to Ambrosio through the legend of El Cid seemed in some ways foolproof, for it gave Ambrosio the ultimate chance to save face: Be the legend. “As much as the story of El Cid is about courage and strength,” I said, “it’s about striving for a certain kind of forgiveness, too.”

Ambrosio rubbed his lower lip, averted his eyes to the fire. “Julián wants to meet,” I said. “He’d like for you two to put the cheese behind you, as you told me you’d also like to.”

I remembered the last time I’d seen Ambrosio, in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, when the world seemed cracked open, when—perhaps struck by a thunderclap that he was next in line, that death was hurtling toward him, too—he’d laid himself bare, weeping openly in the bar across from Julián’s office. But now as I spoke I couldn’t read him, and when I came to the end of what I had to say, his mouth fastened in a hard line.

I waited, entertaining one last image of vanishing cudgels, two men embracing. Then Ambrosio issued his final decision.

“No,” he said. “It’s not possible to forgive that fucking
puta
.”

I
N
F
EBRUARY
2008 I received an e-mail from Angel, telling me that he and Ambrosio would be coming to New York for a few days. “We will have plenty of time to meet, in fact we have almost nothing to do, only look around,” he wrote. The reason for the trip had to do with Angel’s desire to invest in Manhattan real estate. He’d sold a finca he owned in Patagonia for $2.5 million and was looking to reinvest the money, given the favorable exchange rate and the burst U.S. housing bubble.

One evening, while Angel went off to see a few apartments, we—my buddy Carlos, Ambrosio, and I—met for dinner at a steakhouse, Keens, on West Thirty-sixth Street. We sat beneath a collection of clay churchwarden pipes hung from the ceiling, surrounded by
ephemera—paintings, photographs, notices—on the walls. In Spain, I’d always been at Ambrosio’s mercy, in restaurants and bars, on the road or street, navigating a language I couldn’t completely grasp, but here, when he sat down in the dark-wood booth and opened the menu, Ambrosio seemed utterly lost and out of sorts.

Carlos translated for him, running through certain features of the menu: appetizers, sides, main dishes. Ambrosio ordered an aged, prime T-bone and nothing else but beer, because he appeared confused by the concept of “sides.” He fiddled with his stylized steak knife as if he didn’t know how to work it, as if fascinated by this fancified tool meant to slice his well-marbled piece of meat. I remembered a meal at his
bodega
, at the end of the summer we lived in Guzmán, to which we’d invited the whole Molinos clan as thanks, as if inviting them to their own telling room was an invitation at all. Knowing that
ternera
was normally a can’t-miss, Sara and I relied on a memorized recipe from an old
Bon Appétit
, one we often trotted out for our mignon-loving friends back home, that included a delicious, buttery sauce with roasted peppers. The result could be sublime, the chargrilled meat achieving succulence, the sweetness of the peppers, the butter of the sauce carrying it forward across the tongue in sumptuous sparks. On that special night of thanks at the
bodega
, when we were pretty sure many Castilian minds were about to be blown, everyone seemed to be scraping that amazing sauce off their meat, or if not, swallowing less than enthusiastically. Only much later, when I asked him about it, did Ambrosio admit, as politely as possible, that Castilians didn’t like “their meat hidden.”

At Keens, however, that was not the problem. The problem was that the spell was broken. In Manhattan Ambrosio didn’t seem to have the energy to talk about Guzmán, for it didn’t seem pertinent or resonant here, dwarfed and bewildered as he was by the city and its upside-down stalactites. He ate with gusto, of course, voracious with his appetite and appreciation, but in the end found it hard to say much of anything.

Afterward we wandered up toward Times Square, to the hotel
where he and Angel were staying. We paused, beneath a five-story, lighted billboard showing M&M’s as characters of many colors and expressions, doing cartwheels because it was somehow important for the Mars corporation to spend millions to have us believe that M&M’s are alive and incorrigibly spunky. Once a monumental figure, Ambrosio was trying to be heard above the din, but all I kept seeing were yellow, green, and orange orbs doing cartwheels over his head, winking and saucy. In the capital of commerce, in a place where everything moved so quickly, Ambrosio seemed small and demeaned somehow, in need of protection.

We left him there, melting beneath the lights, half expecting he’d turn yellow, green, or orange himself, maybe throw a backflip with the other M&M’s. When I turned to find him one last time, though, he was gone—to his hotel room, to the airport, eventually to solitary, dying Guzmán again, where he might don his farmer’s
mulo
once more, and everything that was good and right about the world could reestablish itself under his two feet.

S
ARA COULD HAVE MARRIED A DIFFERENT GUY
. S
HE HAD A DIFFERENT
guy, whom I’ll call Mark. They backpacked across Europe after college and ended up in Madrid, at the Prado, looking at the Titians and El Grecos, Velázquezes and Goyas. Afterward they lounged on the museum lawn, in the heat of a June day, and fell into a philosophical conversation. How it started Sara couldn’t remember—perhaps they were comparing the orderly realism of one artist to the chaotic dreamings of another—but eventually it boiled down to a simple question: What does one plus one equal?

Mark said two.
Obviously
.

One plus one equals
one
, Sara said.

Mark was adamant. It was an inviolable truth: One plus one equals
two
!

Pfffft
, said Sara. One man plus one woman equals one child. One family plus another equals a village. One point of view plus another might equal consensus.

Following this line of argument the world itself—and everything
in it—didn’t need to be a fixed thing, and one’s progress through it might be guided less by grid than by random Etch A Sketch, guided more by possibility and impulse than forethought. That is, one plus one could be whatever you wanted, leading you wherever it led.

So the question itself was a litmus test, a decider of what kind of person you happened to be. The world needed both, of course—the grid-bound and the Etch A Sketcher. But in that moment on the lawn, under the hot Iberian sun, Sara had another thought: Who you are is defined by who you gravitate to, who surrounds you, who reflects you back. Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic: law school, law practice, law-abiding citizen in an American city, perhaps following an unchanging daily routine, while she, the Etch A Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines. As great as their friendship was, the love affair was over.

I’d never heard that story until a day when we were discussing my/Ambrosio’s book—specifically, why I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, finish it—and she observed that Ambrosio was a “one-plus-one-equals-oner.” And then she said: “You are, too—and maybe that’s it: You can’t finish because you think it will prove everything really
is
finite.”

Like all parents, I suppose, the ache of this finitude was something I increasingly felt as our children grew. With the passage of time, Leo, May, and Nicholas had learned to negotiate and outwit, to throw tantrums, then curl up on our laps or snuggle into our sides, gangly limbed. We lived the familiar cycles of parenting, dressing the kids until they dressed themselves, reading to them until they could read for themselves, driving them until they wanted to walk or bike, chaperoning playdates until those playdates became pickup games at the local field or epic video-game sessions in the TV room, which parents were asked not to enter. At night they could be found behind the half-open doors of their rooms, reading their books or playing with their Legos—and later, doing homework while binging on hidden cookies—lost in worlds that had nothing to do with their mother or father. And we understood this to be a good thing, which isn’t to
say we didn’t both miss and not-miss the days when they had needed us for everything.

So time was moving, and, contrary to my fears as a younger man, there was much that gave hope. I had been certain that the erasing speed and noise of modern life would consume and separate us, that we would occasionally text each other from adjoining rooms. I wasn’t alone in this fear, of course. As early as 1936, Walter Benjamin had written that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end,” that this oral tradition, which was “the securest among our possessions,” had been taken from us, that we’d lost “the ability to exchange experiences.”

But as our kids grew and acquired more sophisticated language, they became fondest of stories told out loud. At first they loved to hear about the recent past, which for them was deep history, the funny, outrageous things they had said and done when in diapers or as toddlers. Our telling rooms were the car, the kitchen, the dinner table. They were the moments after turning out the lights, when we lay next to each other in bed, in whatever combination of parent-child, in tangles of arms and legs, and poured out the last tales of the day in a hush meant to coax sleep but that often provoked the admonition “One more—
please?
” These were mostly simple entertainments on our part, detailing the way Leo had been generous with his affections at the age of two on an early trip through Spain (so he became “The Bediapered Kissing Bandit of Seville”), or the way May had enthusiastically celebrated big occasions (“The Girl Who Wore Her Birthday Cake”) or could never be held without trying to squirm away (“The Baby Who Wanted to Fly”). They knew they’d briefly lived in Castile at some murky time before their own memories could access those memories, and they wanted to hear those stories—about the giant named Ambrosio, about the little village at the top of the world—while Nicholas (“The Boy Who Visited the Emergency Room Too Often”) might scuff the floor with a kick of his socked foot and burst out, “Aw, why didn’t
I
ever get to live in Spain?”

Soon they wanted to hear stories about the juvenile failures and
humiliations of their parents, to take comfort in the golden oldies while they were sorting their own ups and downs. We trotted out “The Swimmer Who Thought He Won a Blue Ribbon, but Ended Up in Fifth Place,” or “The Girl at Cotillion Who Wore Such an Amazing Poncho She Was Asked to Dance by the Girl-Who-Thought-Mom-Was-a-Boy.” It turned out that there was a very long list of these sorts of stories, and they often contained what Benjamin called “the nature of every real story,” the inclusion, whether “openly or covertly,” of “something useful,” be it a moral or some shred of wisdom, assistance, or warmth. Some way of saying, “History repeats.” And: “You’re going to be all right.”