Free The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti

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? Orwhy 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 everythinghaving 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