The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (28 page)

“I’ve seen a big deterioration in humanity,” he said, warming to one of his favorite themes. “People don’t know how to raise a chicken from its egg. Or how to hold an animal. How to go to nature for answers. Today, we’re dependent on medicines and hospitals. We’re victims of illnesses that never existed before. And do you know why?”

I pretended to consider. “Um—people don’t know how to shit anymore?”

“Exactly!”
boomed Ambrosio. “You
are
listening, aren’t you! And this isn’t a rumor, hombre. There are three highest things in life: to eat, to make love to a woman, and to shit. You can say one is more important than the others, but they are all pretty much the same. What happens when you shit is that your body has taken the most important parts from the food—the nutrients—and the rest is waste.
Claro?
”

Yeah, this sounded right. “So it’s the opposite of eating,” I said. “It’s the end.”

“It’s not the other side of eating,” said Ambrosio, “it’s not the contrary. Otherwise it would be called ‘de-eating,’ or ‘not eating.’ The opposite of eating is to vomit.”

“Then would it be part of the evolution of eating?”

“Yes, in a way,” he said. “It’s part of your own life, a biological act that belongs to your own life. And yet it’s the most spiritual moment. It’s the moment when people can’t lie. When the death of food makes you most alive.”

He again conjured the beauty of collective
cagando
on Mon Virgo. Of having the whole world laid out below you and your friends as you shat. But I was wondering how one was supposed to eat—let alone evacuate one’s bowels—with such a fastidious fixation on purity and with such inspiring vistas, when society had become so frantic that we were human versions of Marx’s time-saving machines. Yes, of course, with a little burble in the belly, it would have been nice to take an hour or three up on Mon Virgo, shitting it out with friends … but seriously. We didn’t all abide in slow-moving, single-minded Guzmán. Sometimes, Ambrosio sounded as if he lived in a plastic bubble.

When I told him so, he wagged a finger. “Shit how you must,” he said. “I can’t do that for you, but it’s not hard to eat well.” He pointed to the almonds on the table before us, sloshed the wine in the
porrón
, took a drag. “These are almonds that are from the field here,” he said. “My father took the time with a hammer to deshell them, and later my mother preserved them by submerging them in salt water. Then, in an old pot, she heated a few drops of olive oil, added the almonds, and stirred with a spoon for a couple of hours—and this is the result.”

He handed me one. I slid it between my teeth, salt sprinkling my lip, the hard hull poised, then cracked by molars. Its flesh—the nut itself—was soft and gave, and the wood and mineral was instantly transformed into something very sweet, spreading to the far reaches of my mouth. “Mmmm,” I mumbled.

In Ambrosio’s presence, under the spell of his words, food had this way of ascending to sublime heights. Chorizo,
lomo
, stews, olives, fish, wine, nuts,
aguardiente-soaked
cherries, lamb, fresh lettuce,
bread, cheeses, flan, paella, tomatoes, peaches—in the context of the telling room, around that ancient wooden table, on those hard seated benches, it all set a mouth watering, a body thrumming, and it left an afterglow on those gathered, one illuminated by the same food, the same nutrients, the same molecular transformation that now occurred inside our bodies, while the words washed over us.

“But for me, it’s not special or unusual,” said Ambrosio. “The biggest satisfaction is to offer a wine from these fields or a little piece of cheese or some of these almonds from my mother. It’s another concept of life. It’s another way to plant your existence on this earth.” He pointed to the jar of almonds. “That’s about six hours of work right there.”

“Six hours in that jar,” I said.

“Six hours by our hands,” said Ambrosio. “It sounds like a lot if you’re rushing, but in the context of life here, it’s nothing.”

A
MBROSIO HAD BEEN ITCHING
to take Carlos and me to the town of Haza, another field trip to have a drink. “The place is essentially abandoned,” he said as we drove late one afternoon beneath a chiaroscuro sky. The wind had picked up, some sort of front approaching from Galicia, pushing hot gusts past the window with an occasional burst of cold air that sliced sheets of silt from the
coterro
and set them loose in tornadic rotations. When the weather came on the Meseta, it never meandered in milquetoast indecision but barged forth in ominous combinations: huge orange clouds, winds from competing directions, lightning in the distance forking the earth until the land opened to the faraway rain.

The approach to Haza was a steep climb, a road grooved into a hillside. At the top we passed stone facades of old derelict homes (they were literally only facades, like a stage set), sunlight filtering through the walls in heraldic bolts. A castle stood in disrepair, its turret like a bitten-off Pirouline, its bell tower only a vestige, a half gesture of that word “tower.” Gravity seemed to be the village’s most active citizen,
grabbing down rock and roof, grinding it slowly to rubble. We drove through a cluster of half buildings and parked as cats skittered into a nearby alley.

Leave it to our Ambrosio to have close friends in a ghost town. The bar in Haza was nothing but a small room, cozy in that emptiness. Something about being so high up, with all that weather roiling forth, with all those resident spirits—another town, another legacy: Who had once lived in this castle, and what had befallen
them
?—everything felt more alive, interlinked, interdependent. Carlos and I sat in the warm suburb of Ambrosio, who introduced us to the bartender, and ordered us cold cervezas. “My son comes here sometimes,” said Ambrosio. “When you see this tall guy with a back the width of that doorframe, with really long hair that falls to his shoulder blades, you’ll say, ‘I shit on God, aren’t you Ambrosio’s kid?’ He’s so big he needs to bend down to walk through the door.” I relished Ambrosio’s Bunyanesque descriptions. When Josué took to the fields, his long hair flowing like an Adonis,
^†
the grapes grew larger, more succulent. The sun shone brighter. Ambrosio made no bones about how proud he was, never by saying so, but just in these descriptions of his eldest son as an organic, elemental force of Castile animated by the propulsion of native blood. And this was one form of
enlace
, too, the attachment of the child to the father, and with the passing of time the father
to the child, so that even in death one lived on, carrying the ghost of the other like a baby inside.

There was some talk about crops, and what the year might bring. So far the heat had caused many to hold out hope about the grapes, as the best yields came from that perfect combination of hot, dry days and cold nights, from the punishing extremes that might push the vines to their own extremes, releasing more sugars into the grapes, making for bigger-tasting wines.

After leaving the bar, we strolled a little, ending up on the bluff, looking back across the
coterro
toward Guzmán, under darkening skies. Haza was a village, Ambrosio said, that now had no reason to exist; for all intents and purposes, it was dead. We were walking on a grave, another example of “the remains of Castile.” The only thing left was the nostalgia of a few hangers-on, and the stories about it that had been carried by its scatterlings out into greater Spain. “My fear is that this will be Guzmán in fifty or a hundred years,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s possible, but then probably no one here thought it was, either.”

We piled back into the car at twilight, swooping down through the twilight as if it were a substance. I rode shotgun, and there beyond the windshield was that sky again, purple clouds layered over black ones, and now Ambrosio was really talking, shot through with adrenaline, evoking the crumbled history of Castile between drags on his cigarette. Oh, how they’d grown rich and fat on wool here in the fifteenth century, the best sheep in the world, and how, for that one fleeting moment when everything revolved around Castile, Fernando and Isabella
^‡
had sent Columbus to discover the New World. The
shadows flew outside the metal steed that bore us, and now only the thinnest skin held back the past. Ambrosio accelerated, zooming round dark corners, and orange dirt came up in the headlights, a hare at the side of the road, another imploded outbuilding. Rock and shadow gathered and formed the first words of the story Ambrosio gathered himself to tell now, the ur-story of Castile, really, about the great knight El Cid.

In the romantic rendering of El Cid’s life (one that flourished through ballads and, most famously,
The Poem of El Cid
),
^§
the plotline was familiar: Rodrigo Díaz, a knight of great courage and strength, pledges his eternal loyalty to Sancho, the Castilian king with whom he lived as a boy, and thus becomes the king’s most trusted and fearless defender until that day when the king is killed in a plot by his brother. That brother, Alfonso, then becomes king, and ever distrustful of El Cid, who has nonetheless pledged his loyalty to the new king, banishes the knight from Castile. Distraught, El Cid leaves his homeland, marching down roads lined with grieving well-wishers until he enters the Muslim-occupied hinterlands with a terrible vengeance,
sacking whatever foreign armies and villages stand in his way—the Cross prevailing over the Crescent—in the name of Castile. “Who could say how many lances rose and fell,” reads a typical description of battle, “how many shields were pierced, coats of mail torn asunder and white pennons stained red with blood, how many riderless horses ranged the field? The Moors called on Muhammad and the Christians on St. James. In a short time one thousand three hundred Moors fell dead upon the field.” In episode after episode, he sends heaping tributes back to the king who has banished him, in hopes of one day returning to see his home again.

Of course, in these idealizations, the Campeador reigns as a man for all seasons, chivalric to a fault, ever obedient to the crown, brutal when need be, empathetic and humble in turn, and unparalleled as a provider to his wife and two daughters, even in wretched exile. The poem is exactly what it sets out to be, blatant hagiography, mixing fact with a great deal of fictive flourish, invented events, and ersatz characters to further gild El Cid’s every utterance and action.
^‖

Ambrosio was an unquestioning booster, but for me, it was the
way
he told the legend: its immediacy (as if it had taken place yesterday); the emphasis he put on El Cid’s devotion to an ageless code (which was Ambrosio’s code); his admiration for El Cid’s allegiance to first Sancho, and then Alfonso, which was his allegiance to Castile
above all things (for no land in the world was more worthy of such allegiance). Then there was the heartache felt by El Cid at having lost his friend, the former king Sancho—and finally the terrible betrayal by Alfonso that turned him out. To be turned forever out of Castile, out of this land right here before us, the pine forests and plateaus falling away in the dusk as we drove, what an impossible thing to imagine. In that low rumbling baritone of his, Ambrosio described El Cid riding into battle on his giant horse, Babieca, an enormous man towering over mere mortals, bearing a sword that, he said, would take five others to lift.
^a
For a moment, through Ambrosio, El Cid was alive again on these plains, trying to stand up to his betrayal and losses, as Ambrosio imagined himself fighting for that same Castile, the one vanishing out here before our eyes.

“Even after he’d died,” said Ambrosio, “they roped him into his
saddle and sent him to battle at the front of his brigade. The enemy were so petrified, they fled from the field.”
^b
By this time night had fallen, and Ambrosio had moved himself to great emotion. “Look at the hair on my arm,” he said, holding it out in the dark. “This is what happens when an Old Castilian talks about the Cid.”

I’m not ashamed to admit it wasn’t just Ambrosio. In that car I was a boy again, imagining the primeval world in which El Cid brandished a sword that five men together couldn’t lift. I felt the presence of warring hordes, the cloud of rising dust out of which galloped the Campeador, teeth clenched with animal ferocity in defense of his homeland, of everything right. Intuiting my thoughts, Ambrosio said, “I believe he still rides on nights like this.” And I could have sworn that somewhere out there the shadows took shape around the Cid, and he came into view out the passenger-side window, riding astride Babieca at full gallop, his face set in strong Iberian profile, his body in a purple tumult of fury.

A
RRIVING HOME THAT NIGHT
intoxicated by more than a day of intermittent wine consumption and barroom spirits, I found Sara on the
roof patio, bleary after having put the kids to bed. She sat beneath the same sky, too, enjoying the cool air, but when I began to gush about the night I’d just spent, she let me carry on for a while—the ghost town! the sighting of El Cid! the glory of Castile!—and then she cleared her throat as if to announce something important. I stopped short at her expression, which was querulous, squinting at the figure of this man, her husband, standing on a roof patio above the Meseta, in a delusional babble.

She put her hand on mine. “I’m worried,” she said.

“Worried?”

“About your book.”

“
My
book?” I said. She squeezed.

“Well—are you getting anywhere with it?”

“Of course,” I said, “I’m getting
all over the place
with it.”

“But aren’t you writing a book about Ambrosio’s cheese?”

“Yes?” I said, palms up, in messianic pose.

“Yet you aren’t asking any questions about the cheese because you seem afraid to—as you keep saying—
hurt his feelings
.” Obviously, she’d been waiting a long time to spring this, giving me the full benefit of the doubt, observing my comings and goings for weeks now, quietly gauging the material I’d accumulated with the final determination that we had only six weeks left before returning to our American life, and while I could have told the whole history of the farm plow as I’d gleaned it from Ambrosio, I couldn’t have said much more about the cheese than when we’d first arrived over five months ago.