The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (7 page)

“You start by eating good beans and a good lettuce salad with olive oil and tender lamb chop or fresh rabbit,” Ambrosio explained. “Everything is accompanied by a good piece of wheat bread and a good wine and good friends and, at the end, a sip of brandy. Oh how happy you are—and your body’s happy! And it begins to digest. You ask,
Now?
And your body says,
In a half hour
. And so, eventually, your intestines tell you: This is the moment! You can’t lie, it’s an honest moment.
If you go to a meeting or work on the computer or drive your car, you’re going to miss one of the best events of your life. You’re surrounded by the wonderful aromas of the earth—the sage and chamomile—and you can see the village and your home and your entire life down here below Mon Virgo. In this moment you could say to your friends, ‘Look where we are! Look at how incredible this is! Look how happy!’ It’s as if you’re seeing God in this moment.”

Carlos translated with a Gettysburg Address kind of seriousness, while I subtly raised my eyebrows, as if to say:
Are you kidding me?

But Ambrosio was dead serious. He rose from the table and drew back the shutter that opened to the east, revealing yet another little old man, who stood there blinking and startled in his beret. Had he been eavesdropping?
“Tomás,”
Ambrosio bellowed, as if expecting him. “He’s a cheesemaker, too!” he said. He returned to the table, uncorked another bottle of wine, filled the
porrón
, and offered it to Tomás, who grabbed hold and downed a quarter of its contents.

Ambrosio pointed in the direction of a celestial mass, a mesa that rose out of the burnt earth a few miles from Guzmán. “That’s Mon Virgo,” he said. He allowed that, over the years, he and his friends had dug holes all through the fields—while out hunting, walking, harvesting—and that Mon Virgo really was the five-star. “It’s the most perfect place on earth to take a shit,” he said.

I wondered for a moment just who Ambrosio thought I might be, what he saw in me. I mean, he now knew from the skimpiest of banter that I was an American journalist, and he knew, too, that I’d come, like others in another time, for his cheese. But did he see me as yet another person from the modern world in need of this sideways proselytizing, this one-way lecturing? In his telling room that day, I was left wondering: What man tries to convert you by sharing the details of his private bodily matters?

Ambrosio asked Tomás in, but Tomás seemed content to stand beside the window and listen in. Ambrosio left the shutter open, returned to the table. He popped disks of chorizo into his mouth, then took more wine from the
porrón
and passed it along for us to
dribble on our shirts yet again. Watching us do so, he took pity, found two small glasses and set them before us, filling them. “I can tell you exactly when the end came,” he said. “It was a day in the seventies when my friends and I were here at the
bodega
having a meal, and we had a can that read ‘York Ham.’ And, of course, we were all very curious.
^c
Was it ham made in Yorkshire? Or New York? The can didn’t say. So we opened it. And there was something in there, something dead, a color between white and pink. It looked like a tongue. No one was willing to try it, until finally my friend did and nearly got sick. I was next. It was my first industrial product,” Ambrosio said, “and there was nothing positive about it.”

I sat there letting the words wash over me, having a slight out-of-body experience in that hand-dug burrow. I ate some version of that crap all the time! There’d hardly been an Easter from my childhood that hadn’t starred a red-boiled rugby ball of pig from God knows where. And now that he mentioned it, even slathered with mustard, that porcine spectacle
had
been disgusting. “Pigs need to eat beautiful acorns,” Ambrosio said, and then he talked about the importance of slowing down to eat well. He talked about how the impersonal machinery of modernity had destroyed the values and sensitivities, the tenderness and powerful connection that came from living close to the earth. The more he talked, the more I realized that perhaps I hadn’t ever known what I really yearned for, what he made
me yearn for. He was webbed to the here and now, sunk into it, while I seemed to spend a great deal of time racing through airports, a processed cream-cheese bagel in hand, trying to reach the future. Now I sat noticing everything, infused with mindfulness: the pallor of light, the still life of the smooth-glass
porrón
on the wood-grooved table, the oversized man sitting in his shadow, occasionally revealed at angles or by the rumble or raggedness in his voice or the various ways he simply lit a cigarette between big fingers (now with show, now as an afterthought, now with the slinky, fumbling desperation of an addict).

Outside, the light oozed over the fields. At the table, with glass in hand, I found myself gulping wine enthusiastically, like everyone else there. I’d come to think of red wine as something that required age and oaky gravitas, polished wood paneling and shelves of first-edition hardbacks, the perfect pour for cold winter evenings, but this was the perfect pour for
now
—cool and effervescent. Ambrosio allowed that the family harvested their own grapes each fall and made their own wine, a wine free of middlemen, a new wine newly sipped. Nothing had been lost in the translation. There was no need to let it breathe, either: it was already breathing. And it was delicious.

He rose one last time and disappeared down the stairs for a while, then returned with three more bottles, setting them with a satisfying thud on the table, the fine film of limestone dust on each calling to mind that dark entrance we’d seen when we’d first entered, the one leading down into the earth. Was it possible that, along with a cache of wine bottles, the cheese sat waiting thirty feet below us in the naturally air-conditioned chambers of Roman ingenuity?

I waited for a lull—which only took place when Ambrosio drank, it seemed—and opened my mouth to speak. “Can he tell us the story of his cheese?” I asked Carlos to ask Ambrosio.

After Carlos’s translation, there seemed to be a second of shocked silence—had I violated some unwritten protocol?—and then came a palpable exhalation from Tomás, who instantly disappeared from the window with a “
Venga
” and the flourish of a wave. Ambrosio’s father
cleared his throat, grimaced as he stood up, then walked stiffly with his cane to the door. Ambrosio watched them go, his expression unreadable.

There was silence and some uncomfortable shifting (mine). With the three of us alone in the telling room, Carlos and I watched his face transform with the difficulty of what he would say next. He wiped the back of his hand across pursed lips and looked up with those sad eyes. For such a handsome man, his face somehow contained in its lines and loosening flesh both a life of hard-lived mirth and strange tragedy.

In the vortex of this silence, I imagined the strain of a song. The story itself spoke, calling out for a teller and a hero. It craved a dramatic ending, even if the truth needed tweaking or the lead needed revising. It had us, these strangers from across the ocean, listening intently. At last Ambrosio’s words breached the surface, unsure at first and then gaining the strength of a slow-breaking roller. The story burst forth then, over the next eight hours—through the evening and into early morning, with a pause only for dinner.

By the time it was over, I, too, wanted revenge.

A
FTER SPENDING HIS YOUTH IN
C
ATHOLIC SCHOOLS
, A
MBROSIO
had come to despise priests and organized religion almost as much as he did ham in a can and city life.
^*
And yet he believed in a spirit, or Creator, to whom he spoke almost daily—and who sometimes spoke back to him. He listened to the howl of the wind and the groan of the earth, the bleat of sheep and the call of the wheat. If he was patient, the voices sometimes told him what to do next. So he’d waited years to make good on the offering he’d promised that voice from the ether—had it been Death itself?—in exchange for his father’s life.

In the meantime, the gearwheels of the universe worked in mysterious
ways. During his father’s illness, Ambrosio had girded himself for the unimaginable, and when the son went to the fields alone without his father, he declared himself a farmer, accepting the weight that comes with the cycle of life on the Meseta. For better or worse, he’d been consecrated into the ranks of a history that connected him to the first Castilian farmer and the tacit code of his people: chivalry, faith, honor. He’d stepped into the absence left by the senior Ambrosio—and his father had consequently, against all odds, lived. Had risen from beneath wool blankets, body untwisting to life. And then
los Ambrosios
resumed their lives, though eventually in reversed roles, the son in charge where his father once had been.

As much as Ambrosio saw himself carrying forward the old traditions—even as a young man he possessed a certain grandiosity—he was walking into a relatively new world on the Meseta. Not ten years
earlier, in the 1960s, the mechanization of Spanish agriculture had finally, if glacially, reached Guzmán, too, with the arrival of the first tractors.
^†
Meanwhile, the once-robust Molinos empire was now a lesser collection of broken-up parcels, some of them miles apart. There was a vineyard below the village on an L-shaped tract of land, another by the road to Quintanamanvirgo, a third tucked in near the hills. Their wheat- and hayfields could be found in every direction from town,
arriba
, on the high plain above, or on the
coterro
, the lands below.