The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (45 page)

Next they wanted stories about their grandparents. They wanted the entire story, in exact detail, of their Grandma Peggy, Sara’s mom, who had passed away in a scuba diving accident before they were born. They wanted to know what she was like—and it was hard to remember anything bad, for she was remembered as someone good and generous. Leo, obsessed with war history, wondered if we had any “old heroes” in our family, and while he had two great-grandfathers who’d fought in the First and Second World Wars, respectively, and while we told him what we knew—that tale of my grandfather escaping from a prison camp and riding to safety under a train; Sara’s grandfather landing on Omaha Beach on day two, then marching with Patton across France to the Battle of the Bulge, garnering three battlefield promotions, and on into Germany where it all ended in the most horrible secret of all, the concentration camps—I wondered if we were furthering certain inaccuracies inadvertently passed on to us, all harmless enough but meant in subtle ways to transfigure normal people caught up in events beyond their control into minor deities, to connect ourselves as the righteous ones to the larger river of time and meaning. The stories became legends of history, and at the same time they became explanations about who we were and what we believed.

In this small exchange, our family kept each other alive and close. This is how we stitched the golden thread that connected the past and present, to make the collective coat we wore, how we passed along all
the things that mattered most to us, and hoped to hold the world at bay for the moment it took to tell these stories, our heirlooms, for who knew what awaited beyond the locked doors of our night house, what other errant, whisky-breathed story lurked out there in hopes of undoing ours?

F
OR OUT THERE, IT
was still madness. Never-ending violence. What the pictures showed, what the generals said, how the mullahs responded—war was its own war of narrative. Then came a financial meltdown at home: Americans lost a quarter of their net worth, housing prices dropped 20 percent, foreclosures skyrocketed. And a new narrative: the greedy bankers, the victimized former homeowners. But unlike the boy I’d been in 1991, taking my news from Bill Bonds and his spun Incan-silver toupee, I now wrote about some of that breaking news myself (an earthquake in Port-au-Prince; a revolution in Cairo; torture at Gitmo). If the chimera of objectivity melted in the mouth of the teller, I, too, wondered at myself and the stories I told. The greatness of America, the country perched on its own witness hill—I believed in that legend. Until I realized with some pain that it, too, was flawed.

I’d like to say this is what kept me away from Guzmán after seeing Ambrosio in Manhattan: chasing the big stories of the day and trying to write them. But this was only partly true. Though it was easier to make narratives out of what didn’t leave me stuck, I’d never stopped working on the book. I’d retreat to my attic office and listen to Ambrosio’s recorded baritone over endless hours as if he were a mystic poet, Ambrosio of the Mill and Field, describing the planting process, or the history of wine, or the perils of overwatering. It was a meditation, like the aging of cheese. Hit Play, and I could hear the clatter of a glass or the glubbing of a bottle into a
porrón
, and it all came flooding back: the quenching power of the red wine, the scent of burning grapevines, the taste of grilled lamb, the hard benches in the telling room, the wisps of cigarette smoke. I read and reread the
transcripts I’d collected and had bound like a holy text, poring over the stories he told—the legends, farces, and folktales
^*
—until I’d internalized them. I interleaved everything he’d said about the cheese, trying to square it. Because old habits die hard, and I still needed to believe in the cheese’s purity. Because it was so easy to find myself under his spell all over again.

At the end of my last visit to Guzmán, Ambrosio had dedicated a few days to explaining once more—in technical detail—how Julián had duped him, rebutting Julián’s version, alleging that for his efforts Julián had been enriched to the tune of $100,000 by the ESCOSA partners. He claimed that a check had been written, but it was impossible to prove. On the outskirts of Aranda we sat in a trencherman’s restaurant—a place frequented by truckers and factory workers—as
Ambrosio pulled out a pen, exasperated now by my questions, and scribbled madly on a wine-stained paper tablecloth, boxes and arrows and swirls leading in all directions, showing various iterations of the cheese business, until my head was spinning. Then he tore the paper and handed me his jottings as if delivering the Magna Carta.

“Mira,”
he said. “It’s as clear as day.”

But it wasn’t. At least not to me, who was not great with numbers, either. Eventually my monomaniacal fixation on gathering facts gave way to a sense of stalemate and resignation. Or succumbed to biographical mystique and clashing myths of observation. (It boiled down to the statement:
We cannot send
The Dog
to the museum basement because it was on the apparently nonexisting second floor of the Quinta
.) And yet there was evidence of doubt in Ambrosio’s story, for as his various lawsuits rose through the courts, then flickered and flamed, Ambrosio lost all but one of his cases—and even with that
single favorable ruling, he was never able to recoup the court-awarded money for his lost wages. In the end he’d been left not only with his previous mountain of debt but also a new hill of legal bills. Meanwhile, the bank, with the help of the
guardia civil
, kept hauling away his belongings.

How could you not feel damned? How could you not wonder: Why go on?

The only thing Ambrosio Molinos had left, then, the only thing they couldn’t take from him, was his story: the offering, the betrayal, the murder plot. Each time he told his legend, it was as if he indeed
was
amputating Julián. Each time he told the story Ambrosio Molinos became the righteous one again, the chosen one. He stood once more for something great, the immortality of the Old Castilian.

As for me, I probably realized deep in my gut that something terrible had happened to Ambrosio, that by flaw and hubris and other people’s trickery he’d let down his family while putting himself in the mother of all holes, and he’d needed a story that allowed him to live with himself, to reassemble and unshatter himself, to get up and reenter the world. (
We are trying to reanimate Ambrosio
.) Wasn’t it true that there was a place in all of us where we kept our secret under lock and key, vain animals capable of strange, petty, sometimes violent un-predictabilities? It wasn’t just Ambrosio: We all had our secrets, and maybe the most terrible of them was that we weren’t exactly who we thought we were, who we said we were, who we dreamed of being, that we were divided and at war and half made of self-mythologies, too. Sometimes on that staircase spiraling up from the darkness, we met ourselves coming up into the light, not recognizing ourselves or what we might do next.

After so much time trying to uncover the truth, after searching for the cheese and finding it and tasting it at last, I didn’t care who was right or wrong, just as ultimately I didn’t care if El Cid was a rapacious condottiere, or whatever he was. I still liked the poem about him. I would
always
like that damn poem! And if we couldn’t believe
in legends, and a hopeful piece of cheese, then what the hell was left in this world?

O
NE FINAL STORY: ABOUT
how Manuel flew one night. It seemed to be another communal secret. I heard about it at the bar—in yet another congregation of men drinking beer, wine, and spirits—by that Guzmánian tic of identifying a major happening by its proximity to a past weather event. It might have been Carlos the Farmer, it might have been Angel or Pinto or the eight-fingered old man, who said something like, “The storm ripped part of the roof right before the night that Manuel flew.”

“Wait, Manuel
did what
?” And everyone clammed up.

Manuel was a fixture at the bar, a walleyed man in his mid-forties afflicted with mussed hair, persistent blinking, occasional muttering. He sat with his legs crossed and shirt untucked. There weren’t enough beds in the house for everyone, or so it was said, and the family took shifts. Manuel was the late-night guy, waiting for a mattress to come free sometime in the morning hours.

When the bones first began haunting him, the voice came in distant whispers, as a passing presence. Over time the presence grew more intense. Even Manuel’s brothers felt it. A shadow would fall against the wall. Someone would seem to sit at the end of the bed. But no one was there. Manuel became convinced that the spirit was his grandfather—Orel—the man murdered in the fields by Alfonso and his gang during the Civil War. It was Orel’s bones that seemed to be speaking to Manuel, making some sort of indecipherable plea.

At least this is what Manuel told me, in his shy, halting manner. We’d never spoken before except for a passing hello, but when I asked if he’d join me one evening in Ambrosio’s telling room, he agreed. Ambrosio was working late in the fields with Josué, and while I waited for Manuel, I sat with Ambrosio’s father—this being the year before his death—and he told what he remembered of those long-ago times. He said that even though he’d been a small child, he could remember
the sound of the gun that Martínazo, Orel’s brother, had fired, killing the bride’s father at that wedding gone awry. Then there was the war, which started when he was thirteen. And the revenge.

“Of course, I was afraid,” he said. The bombing sorties, the hit squads striking indiscriminately. As for Orel’s murder, he heard about it the August morning after, from field hands employed by the Molinos family. “But it was in everyone’s best interest to stay quiet,” said Don Ambrosio. It was a situation where “they may have killed one of yours, and three of mine,” but there was no real justice to be had. And eventually people had to get on with their lives. “We just tried to forget,” he said, then praised Franco as “the man who eventually fixed everything.”

Manuel arrived, sat nervously, took some wine from the
porrón
. He didn’t make eye contact. By now I’d heard at least six different versions of the story of his grandfather’s murder—and he soon added another. With reluctance. Not everyone in Guzmán was a natural storyteller, and Manuel’s soft-spoken reticence, combined perhaps with fear, meant that I found myself asking question after question, trying to pry loose something he didn’t necessarily want to give.

In his pieced-together telling, both Martínazo, the outspoken Republican, and his brother, Orel, the apolitical nice guy, had fled Guzmán at different times, to different locations, unaware of each other’s whereabouts. There’d been a woman who brought food to Orel. Alfonso and his gang had followed her up into the fields, then killed his grandfather as, by coincidence, Martínazo watched from a far hill.

Manuel claimed that his family had known where his grandfather’s remains were buried, and eventually, they’d purchased the plot of land and put a special stone there. But then Manuel’s mother—Orel’s daughter—had approached the church to see about burying him in the cemetery. It was very important to her that he be buried there. According to Manuel, the priest, for reasons of his own, said it would be complicated, too much paperwork.

And that was that.

Until the night in question. It was Holy Week, just before Easter, two or three in the morning. Manuel said he felt antsy as he headed west out of town, walking the road, then veered into the fields. Suddenly he felt something pushing him from behind, shoving him until he began to run, or “some kind of running—I don’t know—because my feet didn’t touch the ground and I traveled three kilometers in two minutes,” leaving him off about five hundred yards from his grandfather’s bones. He heard the words “Get me out,” and then a great peace fell over him.

He said he went to find his brothers back at the house and told them of the amazing happening, and they hurried to the spot where the words had been spoken, to see what else needed saying, but the spirit was gone. So in the morning they found the priest and told him in no uncertain terms that they would be bringing their grandfather for burial that day.

And that’s what they did. Dug up his bones, put them in a box, and carried them to the cemetery, where the priest waited.

When Manuel had finished with his story, he looked nervously at the door, and said, “Can I go now?” But Ambrosio burst in, bringing a night chill that clung to his corpulent body. His cheeks were ruddy, and he blew on his hands.
“Joder,”
he boomed. “It’s as cold as a witch’s tit out there.”

When he saw Manuel, he said, “Hombre, have you had enough wine?” He clasped Manuel’s shoulder, pinning him, reached over to the table, took up the
porrón
, and thrust it back into his friend’s hand.

Now Manuel looked absolutely trapped, uncomfortably shifting on the hard bench. Ambrosio sat, listened for a moment, picked up the thread, and started grilling him as if I hadn’t spent the last hour doing just that. He wanted Manuel to walk him through the incident again, and seemed to correct little details. “You said it was cloudy,” Ambrosio declared, “but then you could see the land. We’ll have to presume it was a half moon that night.” He went on in this vein, interrogating, reformulating, expanding, until he seemed satisfied.

By now we’d been in the telling room for more than three hours,
having seen Ambrosio’s father off to bed. It was after midnight, but Ambrosio wasn’t yet done. He’d read my interest in this matter, and he wanted a satisfactory outcome. And since it seemed that every story in Guzmán was sooner or later delivered by its Storyteller-in-Chief, he declared that we would now drive the route by car. Manuel said he thought it was too late, but Ambrosio was hearing none of it. Soon we were all stuffed into Ambrosio’s Pathfinder, Manuel in the front, me behind, leaning over the seat back as Ambrosio narrated while following the path of Manuel’s peregrinations:

“This is a story from the recent past. It was a half moon, maybe quarter—and Manuel couldn’t sleep. He started out on a walk from his house right here, on this road out of town.
Arriba
. To the
páramo
. He was walking, smoking a cigarette, thinking his own things when he veered off onto a royal road, the dirt sheep path. He’d walked this path hundreds of times. It was familiar. There were rabbits everywhere, like there are now, breaking in all directions. I shit in the milk: Why are there so many rabbits? The ground was very muddy, the path impassable, really. This is where the event began: Manuel feels the spirit of his grandfather pushing him, saying, ‘Come, son, you will learn something now.’ He feels something shoving him, and he begins to run. He jumps over rocks, never tripping, and then leaps the fields. He’s transported over the streams and rivers. He never tires. He sprints, then flies from this moment to another, three kilometers apart, back past the village. He lands at this crossroad, a place known as Canada Bola, not so far from the edge of the village. His feet are dry, not muddy. His legs are fresh and nothing on him is soaked from sweat. See, he’s flown. And standing here, he understands the message: His grandfather wants to be buried in the cemetery
this
day. He’s filled with peace, and walks calmly down this trail, back into Guzmán, the tower of the church coming into view. And now his shoes get wet and muddy. He finds the priest, who is an idiot to the core—and Manuel is reduced to threatening him to get permission to disinter the bones and rebury them in the cemetery. Manuel takes a wooden box up to the field, and a shovel, digs up his grandfather’s remains—all
that’s left are the rags, bones, and decayed shoes—and brings them to the cemetery where the priest says a prayer. The box is put in the ground, and Manuel shovels again. He’s never revisited by the spirit, the shadow or presence that came to his bedroom and haunted him. He walks home, up through the village, and tells his mother, ‘It’s done, he’s buried now, go see for yourself if you want.’ He goes to bed, feeling monumental, liberated. He is free—and so is his family at last.”