The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (35 page)

I
MAGINE THE DEAF PAINTER
F
RANCISCO
L
UCIENTES
G
OYA NEAR
the end, living beyond the city gates of seventeenth-century Madrid, by the lazy Manzanares River, rising each morning to his lover, Leocadia Zorrilla, who putters in the farmhouse where they live, movements he can’t hear so much as sense in vibrations through the timbers. In the first light of day, the deaf painter shifts off the bed, hikes on his trousers, tucks his shirt over his paunch, looping leather suspenders over sloped shoulders, and reaches for his badger-hair paintbrush, a habit of his seventy-two years.

I picture the view from the deaf painter’s window as it once must have been, before Madrid sprawled to devour its outer edge: meadows and farmland rolling to some local infinity. An arid breeze stirs, carrying a faint whiff of manure. Flashing through that window, too, are the apparitions of Spain: its kings and queens, marauders and plotters, victors and jesters. The wooden-handled brush records it all, is the deaf painter’s hoe, his ax, his pen. When he paints, he holds history
in his hand. Now, near the end, the images appear to him from some dark dream-river: witches and monsters, the wretched and doomed. And he paints them without a canvas, in a frenzy it seems, directly on the plaster walls.

As a feckless, brawling young man, Goya had a fantasy: to paint the king. It seemed absurd, for he was twice rejected from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, had no contacts at the royal court, grew up in a relatively obscure, lower-middle-class family of artisans in Zaragoza, and seemed an erratic womanizer who enjoyed song and drink as much as art. He went away to Italy in 1770, where he traveled from town to town with a
quadrilla
of bullfighters, placed second in a painting competition sponsored by the city of Parma, and returned home to marry the daughter of his art teacher.

In Zaragoza he found work painting a church cupola, then some frescoes, and eventually won a commission to paint designs woven by the Royal Tapestry Factory, some of which were hung in the royal residence at El Escorial, which is how he came to the attention of the royal family. At the age of thirty-seven he did a portrait of the Count of Floridablanca, a chief minister to the king, then painted Crown Prince Don Luis. Within three years he was named court painter, a position he held for nearly four decades, until his death in 1828. He painted canvas after canvas of the king and queen in various aspects: posed in drawing rooms, eating, seated on horses, if not comely people then surrounded by the finery and glamour of wealth.

One of his most famous paintings, entitled
The Family of Charles IV
, depicts the royal couple, inflated by arrogance, striking a weak-chinned, toadlike pose with their brood. From our vantage, it seems an almost merciless rendering, the frog who became king without first having transformed into the handsome prince. The nineteenth-century French writer Théophile Gautier saw in Goya’s handiwork a royal couple who could be “the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery.” And yet as Goya’s biographer Robert Hughes points out, the king was lucky to have Goya’s talents—for perhaps Charles was even uglier in real life—and asks, “Did ever so dim a monarch
deserve such virtuoso treatment?” He describes the painting as “a free, spotted, impasted crust of pigment that keeps breaking into light,” and “an exciting defense of kingship.”

It is indeed stunning, on many contradictory levels, but what always draws my eye is that figure in the shadows at the back of the room: Goya, paying homage to Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
by painting himself into the scene at his easel, grinning as if to say,
I alone consign these people to history
.

When I imagine the deaf painter in that farmhouse at the edge of Madrid, that’s who I see: the storyteller who’s lived a teeming double life, remunerated for trying to glorify a drab king in his portraits even as he takes to the streets and fields with his sketchbook to paint the king’s subjects. One moment he’s worrying over the fabrics and dispositions of his royal subjects, the next he’s drawing the lowly and defenseless (children and women in rags, the insane), as well as the repugnant (murderers, pederasts, and rapists, in full pillage). He paints massacres in war, and on one canvas of a mother and child on the verge of falling prey to a vengeful mob, he scrawls the words “I saw it,” placing himself at the scene of the crime as a documentarian.

I picture the dabbed paint on the walls of the farmhouse that will make twelve images known as the Black Paintings. In one, two boys flail at each other with cudgels, lumped up to their knees in Iberian earth, as if sprung from it like stalks, doomed to bash each other to bone and viscera. In another, Saturn, huge and monstrous, gray haired and bone colored, appears possessed by a carnality so overpowering that he seems shocked to find himself gnawing on his son’s headless cadaver. Here are witches in icy blues, the devil in dark shadow, the Fates in dun-colored ugliness. And then the head of a helpless, wide-eyed dog, just above what appears to be rising water. Here near the end, Goya paints the most terrible reflection of his home country, and the most truthful. The deaf man, who usually signs his paintings with his name, leaves these allegories blank.

Soon, after a quarrel with the king, Francisco Goya flees to France
for his safety, leaving everything behind, including the Black Paintings. Whatever his disenchantments, he paints on. In one of his last works, that of a milkmaid reflecting youth and beauty, he eschews his brush altogether, using only his fingers, his palette knife, and rags. Before his death at the age of eighty-two, before his body is transported back to Spain and interred in a chapel a short distance from the monsters on the walls of the stone house, he pens a letter to a friend. “Pardon me infinitely for this bad handwriting,” he scrawls. “I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything—all I’ve got left is will.”

Is that what drives him, then? The will to express truths he’s already found, or has left to find? Does the younger man, ecstatic to be painting at court, worrying over the gold silks and orange velvets of his king, have an inkling, even then, that he will come to see his king as flawed? And if the king is flawed, why did he paint him so beautifully in the first place?

W
HEN
I
HAD FIRST
broached to Ambrosio the idea of my book—a book about him and his cheese—he seemed to take it all in, nodding with understanding, and said that he would do whatever he could for me. I’m sure something in the project appealed to his grandiosity, as it might for all of us. He appreciated the idea of being memorialized, but also perhaps of finding a bigger megaphone for what mattered most to him: his
grandísima filosofía
and setting the record straight about the cheese. (Did storyteller’s revenge factor into it, too?) Thereafter, when he found himself making an important observation, or thought I needed the correct spelling, he’d remove the notebook from my hand as if it were half his, and jot down the necessary information.

Thus, the book became known in Guzmán as AMBROSIO’S BOOK, eventually having little to do with its author, who seemed to take forever in writing it, who seemed to be a hindrance, actually. On occasion I’d be asked by some random townsperson: How’s
AMBROSIO’S BOOK going? Or: When will we see AMBROSIO’S BOOK? Or: Did AMBROSIO’S BOOK get a lot of attention in America?

It was difficult to explain that AMBROSIO’S BOOK was really a pile of half-finished drafts moldering on my desk in the attic back home. In the year after our return, I sequestered myself and wrote, always concluding at those same end-of-the-summer scenes, shipwrecked in that vineyard after the hailstorm with Ambrosio among the bleeding grape-corpses or sharing his last tin of Páramo de Guzmán, and I couldn’t bring myself to push on. What held me back wasn’t exactly writer’s block, because I kept writing, amending, adding pages.

Perhaps it was some underlying complex: I didn’t want to go any further because I didn’t want to add time to the story, to Ambrosio’s or mine, to life itself. (
Add more time and the boy becomes insufferable; the king is made a fool of. Someone calls for everyone’s head
.) At dinner with a friend in Manhattan, I laid out the whole problem, and he suggested taking a page from Philip Roth’s
Operation Shylock: A Confession
, creating a doppelganger in hopes that this might release the
book, that by halving myself, half of myself could stay and half of myself could scout the territory ahead. This made perfect postmodern sense. If not Rothian, I did contain multitudes, didn’t I?

Thus, I embarked on a draft featuring myself and my alter ego, nicknamed Possum, a draft that caromed and cascaded for a couple of hundred pages, and should anyone suggest that the writer’s life is nothing but glory, I’ll never forget a meeting with my editor, who had just returned from Japan, jetlagged and more than slightly irritated by Possum’s impossible megalomania, saying, as she patted the pile of paper that represented months of work, “I think you need to start again.”

And so I did. I wrote the Speed Draft and the Footprint Draft, the Here We Go Draft and Almost There Draft, the I’m In Hell Draft and the Kill Me Now Draft, all of them—
again!
—breaking off at the finale of our Guzmán summer, with May in my arms and the taste of Ambrosio’s cheese on my tongue.
^*

What was my problem?

I missed my first deadline, and was given a new one.
Don’t freak
, I was telling myself.
You’re freaking
.

I tried to work up my own
grandísima filosofía
: Time is irrelevant—and writing a book is like building a house that will be a hundred years old (in book years) before anyone is allowed to inhabit it: entire rooms have to be rewallpapered; wings added and torn down; the chimney clogged with ash swept clean, billowing with smoke. The roof needs repair, the windows need cleaning, and when it comes time to put it on the market, you hustle to create the illusion that it has always been perfect, of a piece, that it was born into the world fully formed—or, at the very least, habitable.

My book advance spent, I traveled for magazine stories—Australia, Ukraine, Afghanistan—living on that familiar adrenaline rush of perpetual deadlines. What made matters worse was that I’d stopped
talking about the book altogether, stashed it away like the obscure tomes in my backpack, as if they were CIA case files:
Gatherings from Spain, Fields of Castile, A Romantic in Spain
. When someone asked after this book of mine and I actually admitted I was writing about cheese, the most common response was, “You mean like
Who Moved My Cheese?
” At first I thought nothing of the analogy, knowing nothing about it, but eventually I visited Wikipedia to find that the book in question was a “business parable” with two mice characters, “Scurry” and “Sniff,” and two miniature humans, “Hem” and “Haw,” who meet at a place called “Cheese Station C” and gobble cheese until it’s all gone, at which point the mice move on to “Cheese Station N” while the miniature humans begin arguing, and hurling recriminations about how the cheese disappeared at “Cheese Station C.”

After that, when people came around and said, “Like
Who Moved My Cheese?
, right?” and started guffawing, I would join them (A-HA-HA-HA …) until they stopped (… HA-HA-HA …) and moved away (… HA-HA-HA …) or, with a look of concern, said they were sorry. And I would say, Oh no, this is not a book about the conceptual, perceptual whatnot of businesspeople and how to build an empire thing: I’m writing the epic history of the ingenious Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, visionary cheesemaker, witch doctor of human truths, and storyteller extraordinaire.

And that usually put an end to the conversation. Occasionally someone would exhibit the kind of bewilderment reserved for the platypus tank at the aquarium, and would raise the question that frightened me most: Why?