The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (6 page)

O, Castile in August was a heat greater than that of tanning beds and Finnish saunas, equatorial sands and the orange, overfried skin of reckless eastern Europeans on vacation. It was so hot that the tires on automobiles actually melted while driving the road north, the road known as National Highway One, the main-trunk highway that ran up the gut of the country, through Burgos, the capital of the province, and onward to Basque country, to San Sebastian and the Atlantic Ocean. We had the windows up, air-conditioning cranked, and, still, it felt as if we manned a lunar module heading into the sun.

The Meseta is comprised of two tiers, bisected in part by the Sierra de Guadarrama, a barren, jagged escalation with all the charm and invitation of the Funeral Mountains rising from Death Valley. The British writer Richard Ford, whose 1846 masterpiece,
A Handbook for Travelers in Spain
, sounded a starting gun for English tourists, claimed the country was one huge mountain of “dreary and harsh character, yet not without a certain desolate sublimity.” (Madrid itself is Europe’s highest capital, if you don’t count Andorra la Vella—and really, who counts Andorra la Vella?)

Geologically speaking, we were traversing one of the world’s most intriguing hinterlands, the country littered with rock dating back to the Ediacaran. And grinding north up the Guadarrama, we drove toward the sky, it seemed, until we split the last, ear-popping
puerto
, or mountain pass, and saw there below us, like something from those Bible movies, the great expanse of the upper Meseta, the silted land
glinting with flecks of red, gold, and green as we hovered momentarily between two worlds, ghosts rising from the
páramo
below in siroccos that swept from the northwest, the direction of all significant weather here. In that moment, it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising to have seen the entire flow of history illuminate that stage: megaraptors skittering after prey followed by savage packs of prehumans;
^‡
the Romans building their roads and the Visigoths plotting and conniving; and, after them, the marauding Moors and marauding conquistadores, pillaging in the name of Allah, God, or chivalry; and then the huge, undulating flocks of sheep, whose wool became the source of Spain’s wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, spurring grand imperialistic designs that brought galleons to the New World … and so on.

Into this drama we now descended, the road melting in black goo beneath the vicious eye of the sun. Roadblocks were set up on the highway because, as we’d find out later, Basque separatists had, in rapid succession, blown up a mayor, shot a police officer, and detonated a car bomb in the capital. Diverging from the national highway at Aranda de Duero, then heading west, the road went from four lanes to two—and finally from two to one-and-a-half, which is when we found ourselves lost. The village of Guzmán may as well not have existed at all. There were no signs for it. So we started asking directions—seven times in all. After a while we just left the windows down, allowing in all that sun and swelter as we rode a swerving incline through browned vineyards, barley fields, and sunflowers, hundreds upon thousands of them, heads tilted like so many furry satellite dishes to the mother source.

We turned right, then left, another right, and again. We looped back to the crossroad that looked like a facsimile of the other crossroad where we’d just been—stone buildings like all the others except for an awning and a sign that read
BAR
—then we looped out in the opposite direction, back into the fields again, until we were returned to another pile of identical pale stone.

Was this a joke?

Finally, three old men perched on a bench, each sporting a black beret, pointed us down a road that ran among acacia trees, then upward toward another jumble of pale-angled edifices. By the time we passed the first building of the village, we seemed to be driving out of town.

“Was that it?” Carlos asked, jerking his head around to catch one last look.

Our first visit to Guzmán was over in less than twenty seconds.

A
FTER NEARLY RUNNING DOWN
a sheep, a cat, and a cavorting hen and then reversing direction, I carefully guided the car back into the village, gliding down past the first barn and the second, past a large, newish home on the left (that of the baker, as I’d later find out) and then a hivelike cluster of older stone homes that signaled the heart of the village itself. Guzmán, improbable Pleistocene city on the hill! Or: just more imploding Castilian rock. The village was a warren of these homes, a collection of cul-de-sacs and tight alleys that broke off between houses, leading, one imagined, to more of the same, or perhaps some secret altar. The whole place seemed chipped and faded. Next to intact houses were half houses that seemed to have been cracked open like eggs. It was startling to see a crushed roof, broken beams, the early afternoon sun filtering down on an abandoned pair of leather shoes, strewn books, someone’s bloomers.

With our car windows down, Guzmán smelled salty, an almost sulfuric whiff with a slight bouquet of manure, but as we moved through the alleys, that scent was erased by one of simmering broths
and stews. Somewhere inside all these locked-up fortresses, people were cooking.
^§

The road carried us into a square where to our right loomed the imposing north wall of the town’s
palacio
. Just ahead, the road wish-boned into two extremely tight openings, sluices contained by stone walls with no more breadth, it seemed, than the exact width of our car.
^‖
Now we crawled—through a thin alley, which spilled into another little square, and there before us loomed the church, built in solid, unadorned Romanesque, an oversized rectangle, its bell tower rising at least six stories. Like every other structure in the village, it was bound shut. Even on a Sunday, in a country where they took their Catholicism with the same passion they reserved for bullfighting and football, there was no evidence that the church had ever been in use.
^a

We trawled on, the road doglegging left. The total distance from the first building to the last, from beginning to end through the cubist maze, might have been two hundred yards, past
palacio
and church to the sudden sight of the bar—the same bar we’d telephoned, now shuttered, too, its faded awning rolled up, a chain locked across a metal door. Ambrosio had said we’d find him, but here we were on the third Sunday in August, having burned an unconscionable amount of fossil fuel to arrive at an absolute ghost town.

The car drifted of its own accord, and something serendipitous occurred. A last sharp left appeared before we were ejected out of Guzmán and back into the fields, and I took it—or the car did, for it was now unclear who was steering whom—wiggling past one more derelict home, then switchbacking up a small hill, on a dirt track that lifted us over the red-tile rooftops, a little higher, until hobbit dwellings of some sort appeared before us, each with a thick wooden door. Before one of these sat a group of people,
actual humans
, drinking wine at a stone table. A group of tanned, lined faces, maybe six or seven of them. The palette of their clothing was the same as the earth itself—beiges, duns, and umbers—yet they seemed to have been expecting us. Before we’d even sat ourselves down at their invitation, an old man with a face of parchment thrust a strange object into my hands. It appeared to be a glass decanter with a spout, something from the bong genus, sloshing with red liquid. Were these guys, average age of seventy-five, doing exotic hits?

The device was called a
porrón
, and during George Orwell’s Civil War sojourn here he refused to drink from it, as it reminded him of a bed bottle. Yet the old man instructed us on its wonders: Of Catalan origin, the
porrón
had been co-opted long ago by the rest of the country for communal drinking, the perfect reliquary for the most holy of Spanish libations, wine. Carlos nodded his head while I sat there smiling like an organ-grinder’s monkey, my soon-to-be-familiar pose in this place. According to the unwritten rules of the land, it was an egregious violation of etiquette to suck on the spout with your mouth. Rather, you held the
porrón
aloft and sent the wine arcing down your
open gullet. It was an art form, really. One of the old men—he wore a black beret and a sweater despite the heat—showed us how. He thrust the
porrón
skyward as he simultaneously tilted it. The wine came tumbling even as he spoke, and just before it reached his mouth, he paused, drew back his lips, and snatched the ruby goodness out of the air. When the
porrón
came to me, I made the fatal mistake of all first-timers: I tilted it tentatively, which created a lack of downward pressure, and a limp rivulet flowed through the glass nozzle, missing my lower lip but leaving a jagged red line down the front of my shirt, as if I’d been shot. When everyone laughed, I knew that this was actually happening, that we had indeed arrived.

We chatted amiably for a while—about the weather (
mucho calor
) and the caves in the hill (
muy
antiguas
)—and then, since it wasn’t exactly every day that a couple of stray
americanos
appeared around here in the kiln of August, we told them that we’d come to eat the cheese of a man named Ambrosio. At the name, a few nodded their heads in recognition and a few shook their heads with what seemed to be disappointment. The sweatered old man pointed to the next cave over. “There,” he said, “is the
bodega
of Ambrosio.”

T
HE ENTRANCE WAS A
weathered oaken door, thick, cross-hatched, and centuries-old. Standing now ten paces from our new friends, I hesitated before knocking. Though I’d had months to imagine this meeting, it crossed my mind that it would have been nice to have prepared an opening statement of some sort. Which is when the door suddenly swung open before us.

“Venga,”
said a booming voice. Come this way. This was the man on the phone, the cheesemaker himself:
the
Ambrosio!
^b
A bulky form
filled the frame, head slightly stooped to fit the opening, then he moved back to make way for us. Through the door to the
bodega
was a narrow entryway with worn stone steps leading down into a murk from which gusts of refreshing, cool cave air emanated; to the right were a few more worn steps climbing to a small room. We followed the man’s broad back as our eyes adjusted from bright sunlight. Inside it was dark, with a fireplace full of ashes and a tangle of dried grapevines. In the streamlets of light filtering through the shutters, a long, wood-plank table materialized, at which another man of about seventy-five was sitting on a bench. “My father,” said Ambrosio, grinning. Another
porrón
appeared on the table, and before we sat he offered it to me, which I accepted, expertly drizzling red wine once more on my shirt. Then he produced a plate of chorizo.

Though I hadn’t a clue what he said at first, his voice echoed in that cramped room like shock waves. I’d expected him to be much older, his father’s age maybe, had envisioned him in his own black beret, maybe even with a cane, small and humped and slightly deaf, but no, here he was, resolving before my eyes into a strapping specimen of ample, Falstaffian belly, in his mid-forties, with a full head of thick, parted hair and mournful eyes. He possessed a broad face, close-set eyes, and a prominent nose, the full effect of which left the impression of a surprising handsomeness. He was dressed in dusty work boots, and the cuffs of his pants were dirty, too. But he also sported an elegant collared shirt with thin navy pinstripes and a pocket embroidered with his monogram,
AM
.

The cheesemaker sat heavily on a chair at the head of the table, offering us the bench across from his father. Lined along the shelves were empty sardine tins, a bottle full of cloudy liquor bobbing with waterlogged cherries, a tin of Colombian coffee. A pack of Camels lay on the table, and Ambrosio drew a cigarette and lit it. He inquired about our travels. He lifted the
porrón
, his head wreathed by smoke, placed the cigarette in an ashtray, and sucked the equivalent of a glass of wine from the air while I told him the tale of how I’d first learned of his cheese during the days of my deli proofreading, how I’d gone on
to become a journalist, and when I realized that I’d be in Spain on assignment, I’d decided to see if I could find him and his cheese. I instinctively pulled a tape recorder from my pocket as if showing my credentials and asked if I could record our conversation.

Ambrosio listened to me intently, replacing the
porrón
before him on the table, and then spoke, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation we’d been having. Or delivering a familiar speech that came as a non sequitur. “The problem with the world,” he said, “is that no one knows how to shit anymore.”

Had we misheard? He’d used a form of the word
cagar
: to shit. There wasn’t a flicker of a smile.

“This is very important,” he said, wagging a finger. “It’s the most important thing. To shit well, you have to eat well. I was born here in 1955, and as a child, I lived an old kind of life. Not like people living in Madrid or Tokyo or New York. It was a way of life that meant you raised chickens from the egg, you had a good relationship with your dog, you held your animals and prepared the animals for your table by giving them your love. It was the end of an era when everything was natural. There were no mad cows, there was no such thing as preservatives here. We ate in an ancient way.”

He stressed that he still tried to eat in an ancient way, and “the act” was nothing to be afraid of. When the feeling struck, especially in the fields, it was natural to unbuckle and squat, and to do so with friends was, well, edifying, equalizing, true. He painted a picture of what it meant to
cagar
on a place he called Mon Virgo. His father sat nodding his head, but it was unclear whether this was, in fact, the delirium of fatigue, because soon he let himself droop on the table and fell to light snoring.