Authors: Michael Paterniti
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (4 page)
Later, Julián would be there when Ambrosio met his wife; and Ambrosio was there when Julián met his. They attended each other’s weddings. Julián had a standing invitation to eat at Ambrosio’s house every Wednesday. And often, as young men, they sat on a Sunday afternoon, up at the
bodega
, in the telling room, staring out across the
vast tablelands, sharing red wine. To Ambrosio’s mind, Julián was a master storyteller, even better than he, and he reveled in his friend’s ability to weave a yarn, his recall for detail and syntax. As they’d shared so much together, and because they spoke a secret kind of shorthand language, there was nothing in these moments they needed to keep from each other. While their interests became the foundation of conversation—the system for growing the best grapes, say, or a particular misadventure in the fields—the real stories that animated their lives, the deepest dreams and fears and feelings of men, are what became their bond.
A
S
A
MBROSIO REACHED HIS
teenage years, the modern world, as it existed beyond the primitive dreamscape of Guzmán, began to move more quickly: mechanizing, industrializing, mass producing. In the end, a village like Guzmán offered little to hold its inhabitants except the rhythms of habit and nostalgia. With her husband’s blessing, the matriarch, Purificación Molinos—for Molinos was their last name—had sent her children far and wide for their education. Roberto, the oldest, was smart and studious, and over time he developed his own artistic sensibility and became a photographer in Madrid. The second son, Angel, studied engineering, while his fluency with people led him to a successful career working for an energy company that took him to Buenos Aires. And then came the third son of Purificación Molinos, the would-be doctor, the ribald heretic, the untamed horse who was Ambrosio. He was kicked out of school in Burgos, where he rebelled against the priests, and was sent to Madrid, where he rebelled again. Living with relatives, he left the house each day for school but never made it, stopping off at bars and pool halls, sharing stories and drinks, showing no interest in books or in making good.
It was now 1972, three years before Franco’s demise. Ambrosio was seventeen, a man in size if not maturity walking the barrios of Madrid, killing days, pausing before trees to look up into their branches at their living blossoms and dying leaves, among the dirt
and exhaust fumes, if only because they brought back memories of Guzmán. November came and his uncle appeared at the door one evening, saying that he’d come to bring Ambrosio home. A blizzard descended, huge white snow-moths inundating the road. Nothing was discernible. Up the national highway to Aranda, through Roa, and on to Quintanamanvirgo—he was lost, and he still had no idea why he was headed back to Guzmán.
When Ambrosio burst through the downstairs door to the house and climbed the stairs three at a time, with that hulking, prodigal body of his, he rushed past his mother to his father, who lay in bed, pale and motionless, covered in oozing sores. Everything about the room—the stench of putrefying flesh, the lack of light—seemed like a death chamber. As a salve, Purificación had taken a cream made of sheep’s milk and rubbed it on her husband’s sores, a folk remedy practiced in Guzmán. But it hadn’t helped. It had made things worse. Ambrosio’s father descended into delirium. His bones were losing calcium and had literally started to bend. He could no longer stand.
“When I saw him,” Ambrosio would remember, “I knew that I was never going back to the city, that this was my moment to shoulder the load. I heard a voice that said,
Ambrosio Molinos, it’s your time to kick ass!
”
For months the doctor made house calls, confounded by his father’s illness, expecting him to die by week’s end, but for months Ambrosio’s father dimly struggled. He was only forty-five years old; until now, it had never occurred to his son that death might separate them at so early an age. The rugged farmer, salt of the earth, his idol: He couldn’t imagine a day in the fields, around the dinner table, up at the
bodega
, in the telling room, without his father. The old man had shown him everything: how to wake early and work, how to fix a tractor, how to swear with panache. He’d shown him how a grape grows, and, in that moment when the purple clusters are flooded with sugar on the vine, how to harvest them. He’d taught his son how to make and drink wine, because wine had to be drunk carefully, with joy. But it was more than that, more than the constant tutorials and
stories, the easy joking and shared rituals. His father had all along been silently teaching him to be an Old Castilian by being one himself, guided by a chivalrous code long past. He’d taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity.
Ambrosio, the son, took to carrying talismans of his father now, wearing the old man’s black beret, conscripting his walking stick. And then there was his mother, who would soon be a widow, who kept on with her daily routine of running the house while wearing a brave face, washing the breakfast dishes that clattered in the sink, making shopping trips, preparing the
comida
, sweeping and polishing and watching the news. Sometimes he might find her sitting before the bleak headlines of that year—plane crash on Ibiza, killing a hundred; train accident near Seville, killing seventy-six—in a catatonic state. The pain he felt for her was unbearable. But at least she had church, and her God there. Ambrosio’s God was the wind rushing over the Meseta, and the silence of stars at night. To the voice that came from the ether, urging him to “kick ass,” Ambrosio eventually spoke back, offering a trade: my life for my father’s. And then he waited.
I
N THE MEANTIME, THERE
was work to be done. Come morning he rose in darkness, went to the kitchen, ground some coffee, brewed and drank it. Fully awake, he walked in his father’s footsteps, pulling on his boots, zipping into his blue
mulo
, emerging into the cool morning air, dogs running loose beside him as if borne along by a stream, in that high, thin atmosphere laced with the scent of loam and faint pig shit. He made his way to the barn, below which spread the sweeping
coterro
, the elevated farmland of Castile.
This was an age-old ritual practiced by the Molinos clan, to see what one’s hands could turn of this patch of earth. Planting in the spring (
trigo, uvas, habas
—wheat, grapes, beans), watering against the horrific dragon-fire of the summer sun, timing the harvest in those
September days before the frost came to kill everything: The farmer’s life was days of repetition, of wary watching (not just the crops in the field, but weather forecasts and other farmers and the rise and fall of prices), of constant mending (tractors and sheep pens, rotors and ripped sweaters), of eternal hope and leveling reality. One took one’s solace in the little things.
“There’s immeasurable glory in riding a tractor,” Ambrosio would say. “You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it’s opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat,
Is it time?
And the wheat says,
Yes, friend, it’s time
. And then you know to begin the harvest.”
By the time of that first harvest, a second doctor had diagnosed the senior Ambrosio with a disease transmitted by livestock. Brucellosis, or Bang’s disease, is characterized by fevers and excessive sweating that smells like wet hay, followed by intense joint and muscle pain and eventually, if left untreated, the erosion of vertebrae, the loss of vision, and a breakdown of the autoimmune system. Made of unpasteurized sheep’s milk, the cream meant to heal his wounds had nearly killed him. And if that wasn’t enough, cancer was metastasizing in his stomach. A course of treatment was settled on, and over the slow passage of months, he recuperated, could sit upright, then stand with a wobble, then walk again, Lazarus-like. The first time his father stepped from the house under his own power, Ambrosio felt an overwhelming sense of relief. But why had he been spared? And what could Ambrosio offer the universe in return for the miracle?
*
“Country, religion, family—this is our eat and drink,” Franco says in stumbling English in a newsreel from the time when it’s estimated that there were as many as 200,000 deaths in Spain due to hunger. Franco, who himself was a strange kind of cipher (depending on accounts, a homicidal kleptomaniac or the father of new Spain), became enamored of a cockamamie scheme to feed Spain’s population of 30 million with sandwiches made of dolphin meat to be pulled from local waters. It wasn’t until 1959, when economic control was wrested from Falangist ideologues, that fortunes changed and the seeds of the “Spanish Miracle,” a period of intense growth, were sown.
†
This would have been in the days before the Civil War, when there lived in Roa a priest of such arrogant demeanor that he would never allow himself to be seen without his collar. If confronted with bad behavior—excessive drinking, children fighting in the street—he badgered people with his Bible. Catching sight of him from afar, the townspeople dodged into alleys to avoid His Holiness. In short, he was a priggish, pious bore whose biggest problem was that he’d never been laid.
Now, one day came word of a man suddenly dying in a nearby village, perhaps six miles away. The priest was needed at once to administer the last rites. The priest owned no horse of his own, so he began knocking on doors: the right-hand neighbor’s mare needed new shoes; the left-hand neighbor’s stallion was already in the fields; and on and on. Finally the priest found a man who had a donkey—and who was only too glad to be of assistance. “May the Lord have mercy on you,” the priest said, clambering aboard, making the sign of the cross. And off he rode at breakneck speed.
Not long into his ride, his holiest thoughts were penetrated by a faint braying sound. With slight annoyance, he ignored it. Still, as he rode the braying intensified and became a strange, frantic chorus. Irked now, forcibly distracted from his prayers, he peered behind and to his alarm discovered a pack of donkeys in hot pursuit. The villagers along the road saw a vision they’d never forget—a wild pack of male donkeys chasing a female in heat, the priest with an expression of alarm. The priest did the only thing he could do: He urged his mare on at a greater clip even as the male donkeys became more aggressive, bumping up hard against one another. Finally, one was able to launch himself forward, attaching to the haunch of the lady burro, landing with either hoof in the priest’s pockets, pinning him there, in the middle of what soon became donkey in flagrante.
Those who saw the unholy act say that had the priest’s garment been less well made, he might have escaped with fewer injuries. As it was, the priest rode on, head whiplashing, pretending that none of it was happening, making the sign of the cross. By the time the priest arrived, the sick man had miraculously recovered, and the priest took to his bed, some say so traumatized he never returned to Roa—or its asses—again.
THE TELLING ROOM
“Into this drama we now descended …”
I
N THE RUSH OF MY OWN LIFE, THE CHEESE FADED FOR A WHILE
—until it asserted itself again, with an exclamation point.
After Storytelling School—and my part-time proofreading stint at Zingerman’s—I worked for a few years as an editor, for a literary journal and then a glossy outdoor magazine, where it occurred to me that turmoil in Tibet or wild isolation in Patagonia might hold interest equal to Foucault and Sartre. The boon of the job was that I saw stories of all shapes and sizes. Soon I began writing them myself, for different magazines. I traveled on assignment, yo-yoing out into the world, revolving back. I spanned Asia, took a road trip across America, saw Kilimanjaro. I published a book, interviewed the president (Bill Clinton), went to Cuba, where in one of the stranger moments, I found myself embraced and lifted off the ground by Fidel Castro, who smelled like soap. I paid quarterly taxes, and after a string of slightly better apartments, called home an old Victorian that I shared with my wife, Sara, a writer herself who’d graduated from the same Storytelling School and now did the same work as I. Most days
I woke, slurped cereal, and went straight to my office in the attic. When it came time for a break, I might have stepped out onto my front porch at eleven, yawning wide, in my buckskin-colored L.L. Bean slippers and baggy pajama bottoms, to get the mail, which I’m sure set our neighbors’ tongues wagging. If they thought of me as a crackpot stoner or woolly Hugh Hefner wannabe, I thought of myself as living a rich, secret life of stories. I sallied forth, temporarily occupied whatever foreign country, then came home in the back of an airport taxi with a mess of scribbled notebooks, trying to find the narrative line in all the facts and quotes. I’d finish one story in a hotel room as I started reporting the next.
Perhaps my gallivanting was less gourmet than Ari’s had been, but ten years from my deli days, I was living a life I’d dimly imagined. I said yes to everything, and every place—then found myself in a backpacker’s hotel in Burma, a five-star in Ho Chi Minh City, a
tukel
in Sudan, awakened by the muezzin’s call in Jakarta, or the cries of a pig in Irian Jaya as the poor beast was shot through the heart with an arrow by a man wearing only a penis gourd. On the phone with my editors, I found myself muttering Ari-like proclamations: “I met the most fascinating snake charmer in the bazaar at Marrakech.” Or: “Whale meat, not so bad.” Meanwhile, I was accused of being monosyllabic—or worse, “evasive”—in describing the details of my work to friends and family. I often shied from the great American question: What do you
do
? After all, was I really expected to say with a straight face that I was a collector of stories? That I hunted and gathered them—and then tried to write them down? Wasn’t it enough that when they were done, people could read them? Or not? At least I could mutely point to words on a page as proof I’d been up to something.