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

itself spoke, calling out for a teller and a hero. It craved a dramatic ending, even if the truth needed tweaking or the lead needed revising. It had us, these strangers from across the ocean, listening intently. At last Ambrosio’s words breached the surface, unsure at first and then gaining the strength of a slow-breaking roller. The story burst forth then, over the next eight hours—through the evening and into early morning, with a pause only for dinner.
    By the time it was over, I, too, wanted revenge.
    * Truth is, I plotted for years how I was going to jump Joe Ursone when he least expected it. I would get him in an alley somewhere, with a crowbar to the knees. I would attain a black belt in jujitsu without him knowing, feign fear in his presence, fake-cower, then rearrange his face. I would be, like, all
whassup?
, then knee him in the groin. Actually, not really having a stomach for violence, I wished for an older brother who could just do it for me, but as luck had it, mine were all younger, my revenge nothing more than a phantasm of revenge, these imagined acts committed repeatedly in my mind.
    † Too much? Perhaps, but in the throes of story-making—an act that, by its nature, is hyperbolic, exculpatory, and biased even when tamped down and allegedly made objective—the storyteller can’t always be bound by the
quality
of simile, rather thrills to the music of “burp” and “relleno” a few words apart. Until his editor comes along. And then the storyteller adds a footnote like this one, to acknowledge his too-muchedness, to calm with self-consciousness, to create the smokescreen of restraint and perspicacity that really allows him to continue piling it on.
    ‡ In March of 2008, a human jaw, dated at 1.2 million years old, was found in a limestone cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca, near the city of Burgos, making it the oldest discovery of human bones in Europe. Contrary to expert theory holding that hominids, early precursors of human beings, entered Europe from the east, perhaps through the Caucasus region, the revelation suggested the possibility that they may have simultaneously entered Europe through the Iberian Peninsula from Africa. At the very least, it was proof that the Meseta had been the site of some of the continent’s earliest visitors.
    § Or more accurately, they were cooking the
comida
, the big sacramental midday meal. The sharing of food was so essential to this country that the Spaniards had long ago added two meals to the normal three a day in order to make five. There were the preliminary meals,
desayuno
(breakfast) and
almuerzo
(late-morning snack), the aforementioned
comida
in the early afternoon, and then the latter meals of the day,
merienda
(late-afternoon snack) and
cena
(dinner).
    ‖ Somehow the cramped, jagged openings retroactively explained the obsession of the rental car employee who’d led us to our vehicle at Barajas Airport and then circled it repeatedly with her clipboard in hand, jotting down all the scratches and dents, which were numerous. It was probably a cottage industry: The fine print I hadn’t read detailed hundreds of additional euros in penalties for sandpapering one’s car against the rough walls of villages like this one.
    a I’d later find out that on a typical Sunday the priest traveled from village to village and Mass to Mass, returning for an 11:00 A.M. service in Guzmán, after which he retired to his home, or rather the home of a local widow, for his Sunday meal. Depending on whom you asked—his friends or enemies—the priest either rented a room in that house and was mothered respectfully, or, contrarily, was said to enjoy a more controversial hospitality. If the latter, a long precedent existed in Spanish history for priests participating in worldly pleasures, dating back to the thirteenth century, when concubinage was, according to one history book, “accepted practice among the supposedly celibate clergy.” As it was, the book claimed