The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (8 page)

Like the other farmers in town, Ambrosio rose early each morning, scuttling between fields, visiting his grapes, soybeans, and wheat. He collected water at the
fuente
, irrigated, spread manure. His brothers were off, ascending into their successful careers in the big cities, and here he was, living his father’s life, living his grandfather’s life—and the life of other Molinos patriarchs before—in what was known as the
tierras de pan llevar
(the bread-carrying lands) of Old Castile. He might be down at the bar; in a crowd with Pinto, Carlos, and Abel, Antonio, Teo, and Cristian, discussing weather patterns and grain prices; or up at the
bodega
plotting rotations and new seeds (this year, sunflowers; the next, hay). Endurance was one part of being a farmer, as was hope. And because of the harshness and unpredictability of the climate,
^‡
one’s dignity was derived less from results than
from hard work. Could you survive the bad years, the catastrophic, the penurious? What if the bad years lasted decades, as they had during the thirties and forties, upending everything, leaving people only with the by-product of their backbreaking labor, referred to during that time simply as El Hambre, or The Hunger?

As hard as he worked, however—and despite the fact that farmers could turn inward and superstitious under the weight of their anxieties—Ambrosio never had a problem with merriment, welcoming any
porrón
of wine, any plate of food, any fiesta or gathering of friends. And Julián, his treasured
majo
, could often be found by his side. They fit so easily together that their friendship became a photo album of dances and youthful drunks, meals at the
bodega
and vacation double dates. Ambrosio had met a girl, Asunción, from Julián’s town, Aranda, and began courting her as Julián began courting his wife. Eventually Ambrosio married, had a daughter, then a son, and another son. Julián had his own daughter. They would meet on Sundays, sharing
porrones
, discussing their good times and bad. “He’s my blood brother,” Ambrosio said. Remembering those rich hours spent in repose, he described them as “some of the best of my life.”

All the while, he was aware of owing the universe, to the extent that he sometimes grew panicky. A parent himself now, he was reminded of the primordial bond between father and son. And he knew, of course, that time was the great undoer. So how could one slow
that
beast? In some bygone era, he’d have placated the gods, and their death-greed, by trekking up Mon Virgo and putting the flashing blade to the neck of a beautiful lamb or a succulent pig. In this era, he might have been at church each day, saying the rosary. But since that wasn’t possible, he could only wait.

Until there came that fine summer evening, twilight in the offing, dust rising off the earth, sky a Tyrian purple the color of the grapes. Out in the fields together, he and his father had missed their
merienda
, the late-day snack before dinner. They were starving, talking about food. Ambrosio’s father craved some wine, which was typical, and a little piece of something. It was nothing more than a passing statement:
Some cheese would be fine
. It would have ended there. Or more likely it would have ended with the father and son knocking off work, heading up to the
bodega
with a block of Manchego from the refrigerator, filling the
porrón
, and then sitting back and telling stories before the
cena
. But it may have been that sky, illumined with stained-glass light, or it may have been the sound of his father’s voice, with its tenor of youth—whatever the spark, the idea entered Ambrosio’s mind fully formed.

Once there’d been a time when families had made their own cheese, as they’d made their own wine.
^§
Ambrosio had a memory of eating his family’s cheese as a child, and even now could conjure its sharp tang and the images associated with it: his mother’s kitchen, with its gas fires and simmering pots of milk, and the
bodega
shelves, where it was stored—in each case, surrounded by people, warmth, the past. As he understood it, the family cheese had been made for so long there’d never been a written recipe.

Then came the Civil War, mass killing, societal rupture, dictatorship, The Hunger. The government began rationing food; people scrounged for what little could be had. Soon droves abandoned the countryside for the cities, trading fieldwork for factory shifts, killing rural life. With less and less land, and fewer hired hands, the Molinos family found its batches of cheese diminishing, until that time in the 1950s, when Ambrosio was a boy, when they agreed to stop making it. It was another luxury they couldn’t afford anymore.

But standing in that twilight field with his hungry father, Ambrosio Molinos had a revelation:
why?
Why had they stopped making it? Or
why couldn’t they make it again? That very same cheese. He had no clue how to do it, but it was something his father craved. And his father was still standing here, alive and able to crave it. And here was Ambrosio the son, breathing and alive and able to give it. And to the son’s great, backward-reaching brain—the fantastically impractical dream device between his two ears—the thought arrived as if by directive. There were no
what ifs
or
let’s sees
, just that Iberian blast of confidence (the same that set Spanish galleons sailing to the New World):
we will
.

We will
 … commit an act of sheer folly, with money we do not have, with time we can ill afford, with equipment we no longer possess, all in the name of resurrecting a cheese for which we have no recipe.
We will
 … rise early in the morning and work late into the night, scribbling notes, racking our brains, acting on hunches, trusting fate.
We will
 … give everything of ourselves to this cheese, so that we may become bigger than any rational thing that stands in our way.

And with this line of thought, with this altruism and bravado, Ambrosio had his offering. He would make the family cheese again. So his father could eat.

T
HE REASON
P
URIFICACIÓN
M
OLINOS
de las Heras never touched a glass of wine was that the sight of blood-red liquid brought back that distant afternoon when her beloved
abuelo
had drowned in a vat of fermenting grapes. “Drowned” was not exactly the proper word for what had become of her grandfather—“desiccated” was more apt—and the vat was a stone cistern, measuring fifteen feet deep and twenty across, housed in a stone
caseta
that was used expressly for winemaking. After the grapes had been picked in the vineyards and destemmed, they were dumped from straw baskets into the cistern and crushed by foot or with large wooden paddles, and then punched down and stirred three or four times a day into a must, or juice. Yeast was added, catalyzing a fierce chemical reaction. Sugars transformed to alcohol, releasing clouds of carbon dioxide that hovered over the foaming must like a storm front.

In those days much time was devoted—and still is—to everything
having to do with the grapes. In the spring the vines were clipped, tied, and tended to. With the appearance of the first hard green bulbs in summer, a grower’s life became one of vigilance and prayer: against fungus and drought, plagues and storms. The men watched the skies, looking for ragged clouds on the horizon, for signs and comings.
^‖
They watched the green bulbs grow, become fleshy and pendulous, and then one day near the end of August turn purple. Until this time the grapes were bitter, but when the sugars of the vine were released into the fruit itself, the crucial decision of when to harvest came down to one man’s intuition about late-season storms and a willingness to gamble for the perfect wine.

Purificación Molinos de las Heras grew up eighteen miles from Guzmán, in the lower lands of La Aguilera, just outside of Aranda. Later, after marrying, she’d moved directly to the other side of Mon Virgo, exchanging one small village for another, but it seemed like a different country in Guzmán, up there on the hill over the
coterro
, beneath the bell tower of the limestone church, strange and charmed, if equally full of death. She was the middle child of five brothers and sisters, nicknamed Puri (pronounced pure-
ee
). Even as a girl, she possessed a dignified beauty, her acumen glinting behind wide-set eyes. Her displeasure was a wincing grimace; her joy was a laugh that, as she aged, came in a girlish register higher than her voice. She was at once warm and a bit apart—aloof, some said—but most of all, she was sensitive. From the beginning, church was a place to reclaim one’s faith in humankind.

Her grandfather had been relatively young for a grandfather—and able. The fields had a way of breaking a person; by fifty, if injury hadn’t already curtailed the body, there came a slow resignation to the new, more able-bodied generation. But he was as active as ever, involved in every last decision, up on the gangplanks that crisscrossed the bubbling stew of fruit skin and guts, punching down the must.
Working alone, he must have slipped, leaned too close for inspection or reached out with his paddle only to have found no bottom. Then he was in the air, suspended above the grape slurry.

The mixture was like quicksand. Perhaps he might have been able to stay afloat for a moment, or even touch bottom, but because he was now down in the clouds rather than above them on the gangplank, and because the relentless fermentation process wouldn’t end until the last of the sugar had been converted to alcohol, he stood no chance. His turgid realization probably occurred the moment he lost his footing and lasted until he was asphyxiated. Then the grapes ate his body. He was found slopped in the must, as if he’d been dealt an unexpected blow by some invisible hand.

Puri initially absorbed the event through the despondency of her own mother. She noticed how the townspeople, with their red-rimmed eyes, consoled her. She deduced that her
abuelo
wasn’t coming back, and because theirs had been that special grandfather-granddaughter bond, she felt that she’d been eaten by grapes, too. The irony of the incident came years later, from a totally different perspective of time, when the children of Purificación Molinos de las Heras joked in her absence that dying in a vat of wine would be the most perfect death. But to the citizens of La Aguilera, her grandfather’s passing was an occupational hazard, really. Her people, like everyone in this part of Spain, were grape people. Making wine was a way of life for them. Accidents happened.
^a

With her move to the village, Puri inherited a wine-loving husband and his vineyards. She inherited streets that ran uphill and a tall villa, across from
la ermita
, the hermitage, that demanded much of her attention. Despite her almost aristocratic bearing, she was a farmer’s wife, and so her place was in the home, preparing food, cleaning, tending to the children.

It was in those early days that she’d been put in charge of making
the family cheese—and then, at some point during Ambrosio’s childhood, she’d stopped. Years later, when her son came to her in hopes that she might remember the recipe, she was fuzzy on the details. One thing she would never forget, however, was its taste.
^b
Although it was a
queso tipico
, what the Castilians called a “house cheese”—which meant it had always been there, on a board set on the kitchen table, to be sliced and nibbled on at all hours—the Molinos cheese, as she recalled it, was much stronger than Manchego, almost piquant, with an earthy vein and nearly overwhelming tang. She remembered that the cheese was often heated slightly before it was served, to soften it and let it perspire, in order to release its flavors. The cheese had been like the first of all cheeses,
^c
a mistake, an improvisation, a reflex, and then, under the watchful eye of the Molinos matriarch—depending on the era, it could have been Candida, Felipa, or Tomasa—a fine evolution. It was a hard cheese—hard to cut, hard to categorize—the kind that forced you to savor each bite. So powerful was this cheese that even
the members of the Molinos family could eat only a few slices at a time.

Making it again soon became Ambrosio’s overriding obsession. He purchased a dozen or so Churra sheep,
^d
a hardy Iberian breed whose grazing habits had, in part, laid the Meseta bare. Space was cleared in the
caseta
, pens were repaired, cobwebs swept away, windows washed, floors cleaned, feed bins built. Besides the dogs and cats, the mice and moles, it had been years since honest-to-goodness farm animals had abided here. In that shadowy, nearly forgotten place came new blades of light, freshly mown hay, the happy, daily whistling of Ambrosio. The sheep huddled there, bumping bodies, masticating in wonder, Jesus-faced and smelling of Rasta wool. The idea was to let the sheep graze freely by day over the expanse of the Meseta under the watchful eyes of some local shepherds, to gather and milk them by hand at the barn and then transport the milk in canisters a quarter mile up the rough, rocky road to a small building that had once been a horse stall across from Ambrosio’s childhood home. The stall soon looked like the lab of a mad scientist, strewn with ladles and measuring spoons, knives and triers, cheesecloth and wax, molds and presses, vats and thermometers.

Ambrosio also implored their old family friend Tomás to share his wisdom, which he gladly did. First there was the matter of the milk, for all good cheese begins with good milk, not just fresh and full but carrying with it a resonance of the earth and air where it’s made. Ambrosio kept a detailed journal, marking the locations where the sheep grazed and what they ate. For instance, if the sheep munched on thyme and chamomile, common herbs found especially in the
barcos
below town, that taste came through in the milk—which then created pleasant hints in the cheese. Conversely, if the sheep grazed on weeds and dirty shoots, the cheese-milk might result in a bland or even sour product.