The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (18 page)

Into the cheesemaking room to inspect the open tanks of coagulating milk, and he grabbed a cheese harp and elbowed his way in between Fidel and José, and combed for a while, harp trawling slowly to and fro, combing to show them, to refine their technique. He was always pointing at something, showing them how to love this cheese, and every moment was a learning moment. His personality was so strong, he seemed to will the forces of nature—the coagulation and ripening—into submission. Everything was symbolic. His task, enormous. Each emerging piece of Páramo de Guzmán had to be coaxed from the earth, from the grass and herbs … that were masticated by the sheep … who made the milk … which came to these boiling pots … to form the curds … that became another individual planet of cheese … that was then set aside, spinning alone in black space for months, aging veinlessly, until it was brought out again into the light, packaged and made ready for the table.

In Ambrosio’s mind, no matter how big the operation grew—no matter how many tins Fidel Castro ordered, or Julio Iglesias, no matter that it was served at Buckingham Palace, to Queen Elizabeth or Frank Sinatra or Ronald Reagan—each wedge was still meant for his father. Each wedge was gratitude and humility, its own reflection of God.
This
was religion—and it was as if with each new batch Ambrosio took his pocketknife and sliced that first piece again, then carried it to the
caseta
as if cradling something alive. On that day when he’d opened his hands and his father accepted the offering and slid it into his mouth, when his father began to chew, lost in the powerful, herbaceous onslaught of the cheese, the old man had been overcome by—what was it? Grief-happiness? Joy-pain? And the son watched his father’s eyes as the memories flooded behind them.

Ambrosio had seen himself as more than a cheesemaker—or less than one. “I’m a middleman in a natural process,” he liked to say to visitors at the factory. “I’m just the person who receives in his hands what nature gives. The cheese makes itself. I just put in that little piece of myself. If I’m going to make a cheese for my son, I’m not going to cheat him. If there’s a pail of milk that’s no good, I’m going
to throw it out. That’s the love and care that comes to us from the past, that you carry into the present. That’s what you’re tasting, and feeling, when you eat this cheese.”

The
queso
had been a bold gambit, carrying with it a certain nationalistic fervor, which was also a legacy of the Molinos clan. Until this time, what the world had tasted of Spanish cheeses was limited to Manchego, Zamorano, and not much else. Unlike the French cheeses that came with their own reputation, Spanish cheese had no legend.
^*
And then, suddenly, along came this aggressive, artisanal
queso de Castellano
, made from sheep’s milk, exploding with taste. It was a bafflement, a pure delight, a cheese on the leading edge of Europe’s burgeoning Slow Food Movement.
^†

Ambrosio saw himself as the needle and thread, stitching backward in time, unifying epochs. The awards had validated the idea that you could still make old food, the old way, and enthrall. When
The Independent
had described Páramo de Guzmán as a wonderfully “eccentric cheese,” he took it to mean a cheese that brought forward a lost taste from the past, and so created a synaptic connection between generations.

At lunch he drove to Guzmán, to check on the sheep. The Churra sheep were famous for the quality of their milk, not the quantity, producing about half of what other breeds did, which was an ongoing problem. He had words of advice for the shepherds, too, about where to steer the flock (the Barco de Valcabadillo possessed the most aromatic caches of herbs), about an exact method of milking (he swore the fingers had to be positioned just so on the teat), even about the wine they brought with them to the fields for refreshment (Hombres, too acidic! How can you show these sheep your love if you drink this wine?).

There was no time to rest, of course—and resting wasn’t something he did anyway. He ate and jabbered, laughed and sang, but rare were the moments when his body reclined horizontally for even a quick siesta after the
comida
. He stayed up late, rose early. He drank coffee and smoked his Camels; for him, red wine seemed to act as a stimulant. On this day he skipped the
comida
altogether, riding down from Guzmán to Roa on the high road—up over the
páramo
itself, in that thin, ecclesiastical light, then down through the villages of Villaescusa and Pedrosa—which brought him past Bodegas Viña Pedrosa, one of the largest wineries on the Meseta (of course, he stopped in on his friend Pascual, which meant a little snack of chorizo and a glass of wine, and he, in turn, supplied the cheese, warming it over a flame until it perspired, then slicing the wedge in clean rectangular wafers), and when he returned to the office, feeling a certain amount of contentment, that’s when the secretary came to him, and said, “We have a problem.”

Something about money, was it? Or the lack of it? Even as buyers
called in orders from near and far, and even as enthusiastic fans sometimes came to the factory directly, drove right up from Madrid to try it, Páramo de Guzmán was running up unsustainable debts.

On the spot, Ambrosio began his own inquiry, which led him to review the documents, proffered by Julián, that he’d signed without reading. What he found there was nearly impossible to comprehend, a contract bearing his signature, giving controlling ownership of the company not to the Molinos family, whose cheese it was, but rather to two investors, friends of Julián’s, who had been conscripted when the company had left Guzmán and moved to the new factory. He checked the contract with his scribbled name there, squeezed his eyes shut, and when he reopened them it was plain to see: The company didn’t belong to him anymore—and hadn’t for some time.

He went to see Julián in his office, then, needing to hear the truth from his own lips. When Ambrosio burst through the door—waving the papers, booming, “What is the meaning of
this
?”—Julián looked terrified. Cowering, he fumbled his way through an unsatisfactory denial—
huh-huh-huh-huh
, cough and clear,
huh-huh-huh-huh
.… “It was the only way to afford it,” Julián spluttered. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the basic questions, just kept making that drowning sound. When Ambrosio later replayed it in his mind, that sound became, for him, the emptiness at the center of the universe.

So began the humming in his head, a spinning so fast that the blood inside his body centrifuged to the walls, leaving a funnel of hollowness. But what was to be done? There was no script when gravity let go. He immediately went to the warehouse. He thought of the long days he’d worked to happy exhaustion since signing away the cheese, all the times he’d driven the high road from Guzmán to Roa in that holy light, suffering under the delusion that everything was right with the world. He thought about all those days he’d engaged his family—his parents, his wife and brothers—in conversation about the cheese, how it had organized everything. And how meaningless those most meaningful encounters of a life now seemed!

When he returned to the warehouse, he gathered his workers
and addressed them: He, Ambrosio Molinos, the founder of Páramo de Guzmán, the
giver
of cheese, was here to announce—how to say this?—he’d been bamboozled by certain dissolute connivers, purveyors of greed, chop-shop entrepreneurs from a Spain he no longer recognized. There’d been a contract, controlling interests, ownership guarantees. He didn’t understand it himself, he told them, but the company was no longer his. Effective immediately, he was leaving. When he went to go, nearly all of the cheesemakers went with him.

Only one—José—stayed behind.

Then Ambrosio was driving away, hands numb on the wheel, until he came to his home. He passed through the door, unlaced his boots, slouched back down the gray hallway to his bedroom, let his body sit, then recline. He lay in bed, unable to move. Telling his wife and parents was going to be the hardest part, and their pain, which they wouldn’t be able to conceal, would soon exacerbate his own.

At first he did what came naturally. He flailed to build a story, to order these events as they were happening, based on the facts as they presented themselves:
I’m a farmer
, he thought,
and Julián’s rich and educated. I’ve become an authentic person and he’s become a superficial one
. But Julián was his twin, as trusted as his brother Angel. While there’d been so much left to accomplish with the cheese, there’d been so many days of friendship left to share, too.

“The human mind is a very complicated thing,” Ambrosio would later say. “Jealousy is born in the small details. Maybe it started when Julián and I were walking down a street and an old friend came up and shook my hand first. Maybe I danced with a girl he liked. Each man is his own world, and maybe this jealousy grew into the idea that one day he was going to get me. And then he waited for that day.”

But what Ambrosio’s mind kept revolving back to was his signature on the page. The unwitting scrawl of his own name obliterated his dreams and intentions. It undermined his legacy and inheritance. It had robbed him of the most beautiful thing he’d ever made. No, he’d never read the document, just signed it—like all the rest that
Julián had put into his hands. Because Julián had put it there in front of him. Because if Julián couldn’t be trusted, no one could.

G
RIEF IS AN IRRATIONAL
force. Under its sway, we are given to wild leaps of mind. The cord of life is broken and so goes one’s grip on sanity as we begin to revolve. “Round and round,” writes C. S. Lewis of his own grief after the death of his wife. “Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

“But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”

Ambrosio claimed that the loss of his cheese was like “a death in the family”—and afterward, he took the downward spiral. He became listless, drank too much. Where he’d once been a strong 260 pounds, he became bloated and physically weak. He withdrew from his family, filled with shame, then fury. He’d staked not only his name on the cheese, but his entire
patrimonio
, or inheritance, on it. And he now stood to lose that, too, as creditors kept turning up at the door, demanding payment. They came for everything he owned. He entered the years of what he called his “crazy nightmare brain.” He couldn’t find work, let alone the desire to do work, especially when recent evidence suggested that it all came to naught. When people asked why not make another cheese, he couldn’t explain how impossible, how inconceivable, such a thing would be. He’d given everything to
this
cheese—and now he was broken, if not broke and in debt. At night he went to the top of Mon Virgo and, fueled by wine, bellowed and raged on his heath.

Here was a man who once had a story for every day of the week, every person passed on the road, every field and landmark. He loved the toothless misfits and defenseless children. He could sit and listen all day to the stories of old men. Soon he found himself telling only one story, obsessively—how he’d been set up by his best friend, betrayed, stripped of the family cheese. In this tale he was always the chivalric defender of the past’s honor. But the story had no ending. He needed an ending. On Mon Virgo, he sat at the edge of the precipice, smoking and drinking.

What was the ending?

The wind lashed, and he could always hear it, that drowning sound. The factory was just over there, down to the south, in the bundle of darkness at the edge of Roa, tucked in against the ramparts of the village. His lost kingdom, there in the dark. He smashed his empty wine bottles on the rocks.
Huh-huh-huh
. Cursed Julián.
Huh-huh-huh
. And as the drowning sound reached its pitch, he had an inspiration: He would hold the head down, push it down, until the drowning noise stopped. Until there was complete silence.
^‡

This thought gave Ambrosio a new sense of purpose, and in its way organized his descent—just as the cheese had organized his ascent. Suddenly, the world held so many inspiring options. He would burn Julián in the fields, hang him from a tree in the vineyard. He would take his powerful hands and wrap them around the man’s Adam’s apple, crushing ligament and muscle, popping spine bone and windpipe.
Huh-huh … arghhh
. He would shoot him. Catch him unaware, put the bullet clean between his eyes, drop him in front of the factory or in the driveway of his house or in a bar before his friends. He knew Julián’s every move. It was an unfair advantage, like following the tracks of a paralyzed body pulling its sickly way through the dust, following the arroyo of his deceit.

Now Ambrosio would think,
I want to kill him but I don’t want to. I can’t do it, but I might have to
. And then:
I will
.

He began to study military manuals at home, by the desk lamp where he’d once studied ways to optimize the taste of his cheese. He feverishly researched the end of his story. It took a long time—hundreds of pages—but then he came upon the perfect resolution. It would involve
telling
cuentos
, and then some prolonged suffering. (“Torture” seemed the wrong word; perhaps “justice” was better.) He would cast himself as Scheherazade in an upside-down version of
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
. In the trunk of his car he placed a rope, a candle, and a cutting knife. He planned to justice Julián.

And then he waited.

S
OON IT SEEMED EVERYONE
in the Duero Valley not only knew Ambrosio’s tale of woe, but whispered of what he might do to Julián. In fact, there were those who lived by the old code, too, who wondered how they might “assist” in the matter, but Ambrosio waved them off as a point of pride. This was his alone to resolve.

Though it had been a relief to distract his mind with a murder plot, it wasn’t lost on Ambrosio that he was contemplating a transgression from which there’d be no recovery. Yet what would have been considered illogical under most circumstances made a crystalline sort of sense now. The faster he spiraled, the more urgent it became. No one could console him, not Asun, not Angel, not his mother or father. He drove by his factory every day—“to take his poison a little at a time,” as he put it.
^§
But in certain moments, his delusions led him to believe the factory was still his. He stewed and boiled while living in his parallel mind, the one in which he could be found driving to work at the factory again, now harping the cheese, and now taste-testing another batch before it was tinned and set loose in the world. He called out to Orencio, greeted Fidel. But when he came to the factory entrance, he never slowed or braked. He drove on, powered by his fury.