The Best American Travel Writing 2014 Page 16

  But most memorably I walked amid crushing crowds—rarely with a tangible destination. Wholly, thrillingly anonymous, a singular cell pulsing through a giant throbbing organism, I was carried along for hours, relieved of individuality. Smells—cumin and excrement, frying grease, jasmine and human sweat—registered and dissipated without consequence. Images—perilously thin men squatting atop idle rickshaws, naked children peeing in the gutter, stunning young women—all unfurled as I was swept onward. Thoughts slipped past without relevance—my mind rested. Decisions were unnecessary. Life amid so many was cheap. And imperative, the sensation made even stronger at night, when the heat would soften and the dim, straining streetlamps left Calcutta’s darker corners to mystery while a gauzy mist hung in the air as people sought respite from overcrowded dwellings.

  During the best of my travel, I’ve felt the relief of locating myself by losing all sense of the familiar. Nowhere did I experience that more than in those swollen masses of humanity.

  An introvert by nature, I wasn’t a born traveler. Rather, I took to the road as a path away from a natural timorousness—an active effort to move more fully into the world I knew I wanted to inhabit. So when a long-familiar timidity came sneaking back to reassert itself in the instant the machete came sweeping down toward the goat’s vulnerable neck outside the Kali Temple, I knew that I would need to return to the site.

  Just as years before I had coaxed myself to climb aboard a listing riverboat headed down the Amazon while fear seized me, and as I had marched on through the wheat fields of northern Spain when internal voices urged me to retreat, I was compelled to take one more step in a lifelong journey away from trepidation.

  The following day I approached the enclosure behind the temple of the Hindu goddess of destruction. The area was riotous in preparation for the impending Kali Puja Festival. Throngs of the devout were lined up to gain entrance to the temple. Drums were pounded, chanting filled the air. Just as I arrived, a black goat was being led to slaughter.

  It strutted confidently through the crowd at the end of a short rope. Between an old man with a long white beard and a black-haired woman in a bright sari, I stood just beyond the sacrificial area—a 10-square-foot pen with burning incense and flowers littering the ground beside the altar. The animal was taken in hand by two men in sweat-stained T-shirts. Its head was shoved down between the pillars, exactly as I had seen done the day before. The condemned goat bleated once. The crowd surged forward. The machete was raised, then quickly brought to bear. The head fell, the body was hurled aside. And people—as by now I knew they would—rushed in to anoint themselves with the sacrificial blood.

  My eyes were wide open.

  MICHAEL PATERNITI

  This Must Be the Place

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  I.

  THE A-1 NATIONAL HIGHWAY in Spain heads north from Madrid straight over the Guadarrama Mountains, the peaks jutting like jagged shark teeth that cut the rest of the world away. And then you’re floating, up through one last ear-popping puerta, or pass, perched above the upper Meseta Central, the football-shaped highlands that cover most of the country’s northern interior, the silted land below glinting with flecks of red, gold, and green.

  In that moment, you’re no longer American, or anything at all. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the entire flow of history illuminate that stage: megaraptors skittering after prey; savage packs of prehumans hoarding meat; the Romans building their roads across Hispania, and the Visigoths plotting and conniving; and, after them, the marauding Moors and marauding Christians, pillaging in the name of Allah, God, or chivalry; and then the huge, undulating flocks of sheep, whose wool became a source of Spain’s wealth in the 15th and 16th centuries, spurring the grand imperialistic designs of Isabella and Ferdinand that brought the first caravels to the New World . . . and so on.

  Harsh and given to extreme weather, the meseta of Castile isn’t exactly Tuscany or Provence. It doesn’t welcome a traveler with the same fecundity and open arms. From a tourist’s perspective, it’s a little like visiting South Dakota. You can drive miles on the meseta wondering if you’ve landed on the most lonesome patch of flash-baked clay in the world—past an abandoned car in a field, past a single tree in an ocean of nothingness—and then from a far hill comes the outline of a church tower, the silhouette of a castle (the reason that this land is called Castile), the clustered homes packed tightly together against what the wild night might bring.

  On my first visit to the area more than a decade ago, I spun off the highway at Aranda de Duero and headed northwest through vineyards and sunflower fields, looking for a village I’d only heard about—a place called Guzmán (population: 80). I asked for directions in one small town from a group of old men wearing black berets on a shaded bench, then proceeded lost for half an hour, eventually cloverleafing back to that same exact spot. Finally, I found a thin serpentine road that narrowed as I drove, leading upward again.

  And suddenly: tiny Guzmán on its hill, its skyline a cubist jumble but for the bell tower of the church and the square turrets of the palacio, as the 17th-century manor house is known. Some of the houses were so decrepit they appeared split open, as if by the fist of a giant. You could see a strewn book, someone’s bloomers, artifacts of a lost life. Let there be no doubt, time had had its way here. You might have looked upon this place—and its detritus—and moved right along.

  But something happened to me. Even now, I’m not exactly sure what. I have a friend who once told me about the first time he ever took a ferry to an island off the coast of North Carolina, and how he knew, right there on the ferry—with the salt spray and the light off the ocean—that he’d come back to this same spot every year. He’d come to relive that feeling of leaving his old self behind. That annual renewal, the reacquaintance with the person he felt himself to be on that island, was something he wanted to organize his life around. Similarly, Guzmán instantly and improbably became my place. It made no sense, practically speaking. Even if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, or if I spoke Spanish, or didn’t have a baby at home, it wouldn’t have made sense. And that was part of its tug, too. I was certain this town had secrets to tell—and that maybe my best self was there to be found. Sometimes, travel is this elemental: the desire to replace the old molecules with new ones, familiarity with its opposite. To find the kingdom on the hill and stand in awe in its gold-paved streets, even if those streets are strewn, as Guzmán’s were, with sheep poo.

  II.

  You may be reading this on a beach right now. Or in a cabin in the woods. You may be visiting at a friend’s cottage. Or you’ve just returned from Montauk, the Adirondacks, Tuscany. Maybe you’re packing to go, checking a list (bathing suits, fishing rods, novels), waiting to board a plane, anticipating what has been a year in the offing: your summer vacation.

  It’s possible you’ve found your “place,” too, the one to which you return, however temporarily, however near or far. When I was a kid, my family made an annual August pilgrimage to Cape Cod, where we rented a cottage in a little colony that brought the same families back each year. For that week, sometimes two, my father didn’t commute or wear a suit and tie to his job, didn’t wash the cars or regrout the shower on weekends, or sit at his desk on Sunday afternoon, paying bills, listening to opera. My mother didn’t have to pack lunches or crisscross the county with her four sons, ferrying us to practices and music lessons and school events.

  Even at the time, I realized my parents were somehow different on vacation, airier and at ease, youthful in their goofiness and laughter, more attentive to us—and each other—for during that one time of year, we mostly had ourselves, without distraction.

  There were familiar vacation rites, too: the Sunfish we rented, the board games we played, the custard stand we walked the sandy road to each night. During the day, my father sailed with us, played football on the beach with us, swam with us. We, his sons, would ride his back into the piling waves.

  What I
now realize as a parent myself is just how much was really at stake on those getaways. And what inordinate disappointment could be evoked if things went wrong. I understand now how desperate my parents, like all parents, really were to “get away,” to hit Reset and slip into new skins again—and then bring those people back in the Ford LTD station wagon with us. They talked about their hopes. They read the Cape real estate flyers, dreaming of ownership. And it was sort of the same with us kids: we banded together, arguing less, wore sailor hats bought at some taffy shop, found ourselves jumping off the dunes with other kids from other families. And the picture taking was another cue: this was who we were on vacation—happy, absorbed, alive—lest anyone forget.

  And then, it was over.

  At the end of the vacation, on the last night, we always built the same UFO. Two thin pieces of wood nailed into an X, candles affixed to the crossbeams. A plastic dry-cleaning bag was attached at the four points of the X. The candles were lighted, filling the bag with hot air, and then the whole thing rose and was blown out to sea, all of us on shore watching it go.

  Even the next day, as our packed station wagon followed the jammed highways home, I kept envisioning that UFO aloft, off the coast, over an island, alighting in some foreign country, England, maybe, where everyone wore Beefeater costumes and said, “Pip, pip!” I remember my childish defiance, and having a thought that would return to me over and over as an adult, though now that small loss was connected to a much larger one. The question was, Who says this has to end?

  III.

  How I came to touch down in Guzmán, Spain—and to think of it as the place where there would be no end—is, like all good travel stories, a tale of going in search of one thing and finding something else, of what happens when you become the UFO and allow yourself to float away.

  In 1991, I picked up some part-time work proofreading a monthly newsletter at Zingerman’s Delicatessen, an exalted foodie haven in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the rabid clientele lined up early on football Saturdays to buy their corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. In that era before we could carry on deep conversations about the virtues of Humboldt Fog versus Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, the newsletter was a gourmand’s playground—and an argonaut’s, too. Ari Weinzweig, the author and one of the deli owners, spanned the globe finding unusual and delicious victuals—and the newsletter was packed with culinary stories and histories. October of that year turned out to be “Spanish celebration month” at the deli, and the newsletter sang the praises of various olive oils, sherry vinegars, and Sephardic Jewish cooking, but there was one entry that seemed most remarkable, about a unique, otherwise anonymous Spanish cheese called Páramo de Guzmán. Until that time, it was the most expensive cheese the deli had ever sold, a house cheese from Castile that tilted toward Manchego. “Rich, dense, intense,” Weinzweig wrote. “The result is . . . sublime.”

  According to Weinzweig, it was entirely handmade from an old family recipe, by a farmer from the small village of Guzmán named Ambrosio Molinos. He produced the cheese from the milk of his herd of Churra sheep, in a stable across from the house in which he was born (and his father before that, and his father before that). Ambrosio cut the curd into very small pieces, a time-consuming process that increased the density of the cheese, then aged it in a cave for up to a year, eventually drenching it in olive oil. In keeping with its idiosyncratic, outsider status, the cheese came sealed in a white tin.

  At that time, I was monastically broke, too broke in my mind to try even a smidgen of this cheese, but I did rip out and save that four-paragraph entry, and nearly a decade later, in the year 2000, working as a magazine writer, I carried that ripped piece of paper on assignment to Spain, where I went to profile the futurist chef Ferran Adrià, whose culinary innovations and 30-course meals, each new dish served in three-minute intervals, seemed to embody the digital speed of our times.

  On that trip, I had Sunday off, so I flew from Barcelona to Madrid, then drove up the gut of Castile and back in time to the cheesemaker’s village of Guzmán. It was a lark, perhaps, but it was also a pilgrimage of sorts, my adult self enacting a dream of my younger, poorer self, to try that fabled cheese in that little Castilian village. As I drove, the radio reported more Basque bombings, and the day was so hot, the car tires actually began to melt on the pavement.

  I found Ambrosio in the cool of his family cave, or bodega, the place where he aged his cheese. In Guzmán, there existed two dozen or so caves burrowed in the hill that marked the village’s northern boundary. Some of the bodegas were said to date back as far as the Roman occupation of Spain. In a time long past, the fruits of the harvest were brought to the caves and stored—grain, apples, and, in particular, cheese and wine, the latter transported in casks made from cured goat carcasses—to be accessed during the harsh winter and spring. Legend had it that a man would sit in a room built above the cave and itemize what went down into the cellars, to report it all back to the lord of the land. This room became known as el contador, or the counting room.

  As the families in the village built or inherited bodegas, they also added to these counting rooms, sometimes sculpturing a foyer and perhaps stairs that led up to a cramped, cozy warren that included a fireplace. Soon, people gathered at the bodega to share meals around a table and pass the time. And as the centuries unfolded and the caves came to serve a purpose less utilitarian than social, the room took on the other definition of contar, “to tell.” The contador, then, became a “telling room.” It was the place where, on cold winter nights or endless summer days, drinking homemade red wine and eating chorizo, villagers traded their secrets, histories, and dreams. In this way, the bodega, with its telling room, became a mystical state of mind as much as a physical place, connecting the people here to their past.

  At that first meeting in the telling room, over the course of eight hours, Ambrosio told me a fantastical story. He was a hulking man with mournful eyes. His voice rumbled along, seemingly without breath. Working closely with his mother, he claimed to have recovered the old family recipe (it hadn’t been written anywhere, of course), and when the villagers first tried that Molinos cheese, they found it so good that they were transported back to their own mothers’ kitchens. As the cheese was passed along, more and more people fell under its sway, until a cheesemonger from Madrid began to sell it in the capital. From there the legend grew: Páramo de Guzmán was sold at Harrods in London, won medals at cheese fairs, and later arrived at Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. It was said to have been served to the Spanish and British royal families, to Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra. Julio Iglesias was a fan, and Fidel Castro liked it so much, he tried to buy Ambrosio’s entire stock.

  As the demand for Páramo de Guzmán increased, it was nearly impossible for Ambrosio to keep pace—milking, boiling, harping the curd, cutting it in fine pieces, etc.—and now there were complicated business concerns imposed on what had, at first, been a very simple act of creation. As Ambrosio unspooled the story that day in his telling room, he said he’d asked his best friend from childhood, a corporate lawyer named Julián Mateos, to help him with the logistical complications of a growing operation, and to help him finance a move to a new cheese factory in a nearby village. Somewhere in all of the expansion plans, Ambrosio, the bohemian creator, claimed (though I would later find out that this claim was contested by Julián with equal insistence) to have been duped, tricked into signing his name to a contract and relinquishing ownership of the company.

  That is, he’d actually had his cheese stolen.

  So, no, I wasn’t going to get a chance to try it, Ambrosio said bitterly. Because he no longer made the cheese.

  And then he said he was plotting to murder his best friend. For that seemed the only fitting thing to do.

  IV.

  There was more, of course. As compelling as the legend of the cheese was (had I really walked into the middle of a murder plot?), and despite the fact that my pilgrimage to eat Páramo de Guzmán had been stymied, I was riveted b
y something else, something that illuminated a deeper need I hadn’t identified before. Ambrosio spoke with such authority, stood so stubbornly in opposition to the world I lived in, that I could feel him lifting me, however momentarily, from the unceasing current of my other life to the shore of his. His words were prophetic, aphoristic, instructive, bawdy, hilarious. He was an amazing storyteller. (I knew this because my friend Carlos had accompanied me there to help translate it all.)

  I left and then came back again, three months later, having roped another friend into playing translator, to make sure Guzmán and Ambrosio were real. There was the village, in its worn, November splendor, the wide, empty fields stretching away in robes of ermine and gray—and Ambrosio was exactly as I’d found him the first time, salt of the Castilian earth, adding more axioms to what he called his filosofía grandísima.

  “The problem with modern life is that nobody knows how to defecate anymore,” he said. “This is the most important thing.” Then he held forth on the topic for an hour.

  “Divinity, not machines,” he said at one point, referring to the need for people to raise their animals with care and love, instead of leaving it to the brutal regime of industrial meat farms.

  “Pigs need to eat beautiful acorns,” he said. “And you need to converse with your chickens.” He talked about how the impersonal machinery of modernity had destroyed the values and sensitivities, the tenderness and powerful connection that came from living close to the earth.

  I couldn’t get enough of this. I returned to Guzmán again—and again—making excuses at home, cashing in frequent-flier miles, or using work as a way to jump the Atlantic, with a side trip to the village. And there I sat for any cluster of days I could get, up in the telling room, like a toadstool, passively absorbing every conversation. The more Ambrosio talked, the more I realized that perhaps I hadn’t ever known what I really yearned for. He was sunk into the here and now, while I seemed to spend a great deal of time in my deadline life racing through airports, a processed-cream-cheese bagel in hand, trying to reach the future. But here in the telling room, I sat noticing everything, infused with mindfulness: the pallor of light, the still life of the smooth glass porrón—the device from which wine was drunk here—on the grooved wooden table, the oversize man sitting in his shadow, occasionally revealed at angles or by the rumble or ragged passion in his voice.