The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (5 page)

There
.

As exhilarating as this all was, I was driven by the freelancer’s absolute fear of stasis. I became the spun dreidel, dizzy and alive and overadrenalized. And then two momentous things occurred: First—and we’ll return to this—I received a call from a magazine to visit a
chef in Spain, a Catalan who, they said, was reinventing food by mixing science and taste. And second, just days after the new millennium, my wife gave birth to our first son.

While volumes have been written about New Mother, there’s this to say about New Father: As a species, he’s an instant cliché. Gazing upon his progeny, he touches his own mortality. Then a couple of springs pop permanently loose in his head. Even as he acknowledges that there have been billions of fathers before him, and
blah, blah, blah
(camcorder out now, filming Baby), no one, ever, has felt this kind of powerful, blinding paternal love. One moment blushing from fits of overt pride, then trying to show some restraint and circumspection, New Father will go glottal, scrotal, and ballistic on someone driving twenty-seven in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone when Baby is astronauted in the backseat. He’ll crawl on all fours, hand-sweeping the house for tiny beads, crumblets, and quarters, to save Baby from choking. Nothing is rational, for never has he felt this finite, looking upon the infinite. Never has he considered the shape of his legacy—his accomplishments, his bank account, his spiritual life—but now, considering it, he wonders how it all got to be in such a shambles.

Our baby’s name was Leo. He had a dreamy sort of expression and an overbite. He looked as if he were always contemplating something byzantine, and, watching him watch the world, we tried to intuit what he was telling us. He seemed to be telling us so much: We bought a new car, with air bags, at his request. I cleaned the garage, so I could park the car, for him.
What’s that? The back porch is looking a little deshabille?
I cleaned the back porch—and then half-started on everything else we’d neglected for years.

Soon I was emptying closet after closet, donating to Goodwill all the clothes I’d first come by years earlier at … Goodwill. I threw out old cassette tapes of bands that wouldn’t interest Baby, bands like Joy Division or Jesus and Mary Chain. Bach was good for Baby; early Cure, circa
Pornography
, not. I abandoned my plans to buy drums, closed the wood cabinet that held the dartboard. And in this act of editing down my former life, I ruthlessly discarded old files from
every epoch—labeled “Real Estate Ideas,” “Greenland,” and “Other Possibilities,” one that was entirely empty. During this housecleaning, I came upon a folder labeled “Stuff,” with the now-yellowed shred of that old Zingerman’s newsletter, about that expensive Spanish cheese called Páramo de Guzmán.

It felt like so long ago—and then just yesterday. Here now, on my knees in the office, holding the parchment with Leo’s cry rising up from the lower rooms of the house, something dawned on me: My life was over. My new life had just begun, but my life was over. I found myself asking a simple question: Did that mean all of the old vows and dreams were over, too?

The cheese was named after its village—Guzmán. At the very least, before recycling the scrap, I wanted to know where that village was. It was a weekday in midwinter (How do I remember this? A pattern of kaleidoscopic ice on the window, and a naïve thought:
Spain must be really warm
), and I went to the atlas, but the town didn’t appear on what seemed to be a pretty detailed map of the country. So I went directly out and bought a Michelin map (this being the unimaginable days before Google Earth), drove home, and then flipped it open, watching it accordion over half of my office floor, a scroll dotted with unknown places, places where, at this very moment, old men were probably taking their
café
with brandy. I spent a long time hovering over it, squinting at village after village, like a jeweler in search of clarity.
Where was Guzmán?
I started at Madrid, and with my finger I wipered my way north, up through the kingdom of Castile, touching on nearly every town, letting the names play through my mind—La Horra (The Free One), Iglesiarrubia (Blond Church), Fria (Cold), Zarza (Bramble), Pinafuente (Pine Fountain), Pozal de Gallinas (Bucket of Hens)—until, finally, to the west of Aranda de Duero, there it was: Guzmán, a tiny bubble floating in all that emptiness. Besides cheese, I couldn’t begin to imagine what one might find there.

Contrary to what the retroactive translations above would lead you to believe, the sum total of my Spanish education came from old
sitcom episodes of
Chico and the Man
. Having verified the existence of Guzmán, I found myself calling my friend Carlos, a high-school Spanish teacher who lived down the street. Carlos had been born of Colombian parents, and grown up bilingual. When he arrived, I gave him the whole backstory—the deli, the cheese, the dream I had of eating it. I showed him the map. I was unshaven, hadn’t been sleeping much, enslaved to Baby. Unfazed, he suggested we call the international operator and ask for any listed number for Guzmán, which we did.

There seemed to be only one, for the bar. So Carlos punched out a dozen digits or so. While it rang, he cleared his throat. And then someone answered. Carlos’s eyebrows shot up, and he introduced himself by saying, Hello, good afternoon, he was calling from America and was hoping to speak to the man who made the famous cheese, Páramo de Guzmán. I could hear a woman’s voice in response from across the room, exploding, lacking all romance, jamming short, staccato paragraphs down his ear canal. Carlos listened closely, murmuring
“Sí, sí,”
then her voice broke off altogether, even as he offered a halfhearted goodbye. The entirety of their conversation had lasted about twenty seconds.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She hung up,” said Carlos.

“But did she seem friendly?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What did she say about the cheese?”

“She said it’s not made there anymore. Or she said, ‘The
man
doesn’t make it anymore.’ And then she hung up.”

“The man? Did she say anything else?”

Taking in my disappointment, Carlos said, “Sorry, man.”

Another little death. I felt as I’d once felt at fifth-grade catechism when, out of the blue and even as I stood there dreamily at recess staring at clouds, Joe Ursone indiscriminately roundhoused me. One minute I was swaying in awe before the possibility of the universe, channeling universal love, religious zealot that I momentarily was,
and the next I was in a slo-mo crumple, clenched over with that sudden, prickly radiation of pain from my jaw, eyes welling with tears, swearing revenge.
^*

Ari’s words echoed: “Rich, dense, intense … sublime … discovered it by chance in London … made with love.” What was so crazy about believing in purity—and then going to find it?

A
STORY IS TIME
itself, boxed and compressed. It is the briefest entertainment and simulacrum of real life, which is big and messy and requires a strange kind of endurance. The story is stylized for that flash of laughter and pain, thwarted desire and odd consummation, while life waterfalls with it—all of it—every day: prodigious, cloying, in decay. And when the story is finally over—even if the protagonist survives a spray of gunfire and goes on living—it’s over. Meanwhile, life carries on, river-swift.

As, of course, did mine.

I made plans to see the iconoclastic Spanish chef for my magazine story, but it was the cheese I couldn’t let go of. It rang now in my head as a question:
Man makes world-famous delicacy from ancient family recipe, then just stops. Why?
It didn’t seem like the end of a story, but the beginning of one. I rang Carlos.

“Do you think we could call the woman at the bar again?”

Carlos hesitated. “You think that’s a good idea?”

A few minutes later we were in my attic office, Carlos dialing the number. This time a man answered. If he was a bit gruff, at least he
didn’t hang up. Our cheesemaker wasn’t there, he said, but since we’d called during a quiet moment, he was willing to give us a number. He acted as if he was doing us a favor, one that might have been a violation of local etiquette. Carlos asked why the cheese was no longer made in the village.
“Una historia difícil”
—a difficult story—said the man with a sigh that signaled the totality of what he had to say about it.

Now we had a number. Carlos dialed again. A woman answered. Carlos explained that we were from the United States, and that we were looking for a man who kept cheese in a cave, a cheese called Páramo de Guzmán. The woman listened. Then, after a long hesitation, she said we’d called the wrong number. “The cheese wasn’t made by her husband …” Carlos began translating, even as she was finishing her sentence: “… anymore.”

Had she just said
anymore
? She’d said
anymore
! The cheese wasn’t made by her husband
anymore
.

Carlos asked if there was a good time to call back, to talk to her husband. She said he was traveling. She seemed so uncertain. Carlos asked for his name, and that much she allowed.

“My husband is Ambrosio,” she said.

Ambrosio
. The name beamed up, bounced off a satellite, and fell to our ears. Ambrosio, the Maker of the Divine Cheese.

Over the ensuing weeks, whenever I could get Carlos over, we called that same number. Mostly the phone just rang. But then one night a man answered. He spoke in such a forceful baritone that Carlos, not expecting a voice at all, literally had his head snap back.

“A ver,”
Ambrosio said, as if to say: Yes, you have my attention, now what do you want? The words were almost a growl, the grinding of tectonic plates.

What
did
I want?

I stammered for a moment. I wanted to say,
Hola
, my name is Miguel Ricardo, and as a grad student in Ann Arbor, a place in the middle west of our great country of Indians and Cowboys and Pilgrims, I’d come upon his
queso
at a
tienda
named Zingerman’s Deli. Because I’d been a man of meager means and had not actually consumed
his cheese, its
story
was as important to me as the thing itself. I had struggled for years to find myself as a writer, and had, until that time, failed miserably—but then the story of his cheese had struck some deeper chord. Perhaps what I’d seen in his cheese was the reflection of an artist who’d taken the rocky, eccentric path, and my slowly drowning self had been buoyed.

Carlos was waiting for me to speak, and finally said, “What do you
want
?”

“Tell him I’d like to meet him,” I said. “I plan to be in Spain this summer when the baby’s a little older.”

He conveyed this to Ambrosio, who was nothing if not decisive, whose voice could be heard making a basoonlike proclamation. On that April day, he said he could meet us on the third Sunday of August in the village.

“Where in the village?” asked Carlos.

“You’ll find me,” said Ambrosio. And then the line clicked dead.

S
O, ON TO
S
PAIN
it was, to visit the Catalan chef—and this Ambrosio. Because the trip coincided with Carlos’s summer vacation from teaching, and because I beseeched him until he relented, he became my Sancho Panza. We then convinced our wives to come along, tantalizing them with visions of the Mediterranean coast and a stay in the beach town of Roses, a couple of hours north of Barcelona, near the Catalan chef’s Michelin-three-star restaurant.

The chef was a short man named Ferran, with frantic hair and quick, thin lips. He was a voyager in the kitchen, exploring faraway planets. The food was like nothing I’d seen, or eaten: white spoons filled with green jelly and topped with what seemed to be caviar; mesospheric formations in yellow and pink; a plate that, by my best estimation, was covered with orange worms.

The chef said things like: “There’s more emotion, more feeling, in a piece of ruby-red grapefruit with a little sprinkle of salt on it than in a big piece of fish.” Or: “The important thing is the miniskirt, not
what color it is.” In the kitchen he worked hand in hand with chemists and biologists, inventors and engineers; his cooking utensils were doctor’s syringes, forceps, hammers, blowtorches, and fine sewing needles.

A few seasons after discovering the “foams”—what he called “air”—that had made him an international superstar he more or less stopped serving them, frenetically moving on to the next discovery: asparagus ice cream, apple caviar, cotton-candy cuttlefish. “If you want new emotions, and really big emotions,” he said, “you need new techniques.”

He was a man obsessed, sleeping little, moving at the speed of our digitized world, headlong into a fantastical future. It was exhausting to try to keep up.

In our free time Carlos and I went back to our German-run hotel, which seemed more cathouse than auberge, with shiny pillows and ceiling mirrors and a shower stall through which you could watch a bather from the bed, all of which absolutely delighted our eight-month-old Leo. Constellated on the beach in front of the hotel was a whole galaxy of overripe, topless European bathers and lingam-hugging Speedos that made us feel acutely American. And yet the combination of sun, sea, wine, and fine food was a potent antidote to the life we’d just left behind—the frenzied now-now-now of deadlines and credit-card bills, a life led by reflex and stopgap.

On that Sunday—the third in August—Carlos and I flew to Madrid. The flight was a short one, and when I gazed up from my magazine, a radical landscape revealed itself below. Rather than the verdant, tropical, palm-laden one of Catalonia, here was Spain’s Meseta, which appeared like Mars, its red, lifeless dirt stretching the horizon. Here was a vast sea of nothingness floating on top of huge limestone plates, all the more spectacular for its stubborn refusal to reveal life. Along the surface of the crater, one imagined a desiccating heat, a hint of smoke, and the skeletal remains of a hundred spaghetti-Western film crews.

Madrid appeared finally, as a distant mirage out the window of the circling plane, a flash of glass and metal, a jumble of sandstones and lurid reds, and then we were on the ground. At the car rental desk we
procured a shiny compact, and when we stepped from the airport’s terrarium we were met with a blast of heat so stiff and all-consuming it felt like, well, the burp of Hades after a green-chile relleno.
^†