Almorox is the setting for one of the encounters through which Lázaro’s travels with the blind man are narrated. During grape harvest, a vine-grower gives the blind man a cluster as alms; because the ripe grapes are already coming loose and would be crushed if carried, the two sit on a low wall and eat them together. The gift becomes a test of fairness: each is to take one grape at a time, but both soon abandon the agreement and try to outwit the other.

Setting and Encounter

The visit belongs to the pair’s journey from Salamanca toward Toledo. The blind man has chosen Toledo because he expects its people to be wealthier, though not especially generous with alms; he relies on the saying that a miser gives more than someone who has no money. Their route and length of stay depend on their reception: they remain where hospitality and earnings are good, and move on after two or three days where they are not.

At Almorox, the harvest explains both the gift and the decision to eat it immediately. The grapes are very ripe, and the cluster is coming apart in the blind man’s hands. Storing it in his pack would turn it, and anything it touched, into must. The blind man presents the shared meal as a gesture of generosity, following a day on which he had filled Lázaro with knee blows and slaps.

The Grape Agreement

Seated on a low wall, the two agree to take turns plucking a single grape at a time until the cluster is finished. The blind man proposes the rule as a safeguard against cheating, and Lázaro accepts it. Yet the arrangement lasts only until the second round: the blind man begins taking two grapes at once, suspecting that Lázaro is doing the same.

Lázaro notices the breach and chooses not merely to match it but to exceed it. He takes two grapes at a time, or three whenever he can. The meal thus becomes a contest in which each man treats the other’s anticipated dishonesty as permission for his own. By the time the cluster is gone, the blind man is left holding its stem and shaking his head—a small, physical trace of a bargain neither has kept.

Narrative Significance

The scene turns an ordinary act of almsgiving into an episode of reciprocal suspicion. The blind man’s supposed generosity is qualified by the recent blows he has dealt Lázaro; the agreed measure of one grape is quickly displaced by calculated advantage. Lázaro’s response shows the resourcefulness he develops under his master, while also revealing how their relationship makes trust difficult even in a meal they ostensibly share.

The place is therefore remembered not through a change to its landscape or an extended description, but through a specific harvest encounter. Almorox anchors the grape contest in the pair’s itinerant life, where charity, hunger, and opportunism meet in a moment of comic escalation.