Indulgence

The indulgence is presented as a sacred document promising spiritual benefit, but in Lázaro’s account it also becomes the commodity around which his fifth master builds an elaborate fraud. Its apparent power is manufactured in public: a staged accusation of falsity gives way to a supposed divine judgment, a ritual healing, and a rush of purchasers. The episode makes the indulgence at once a religious object, a sales instrument, and the focal point of a performance whose success depends on the crowd mistaking spectacle for evidence.

The Indulgence as a Commodity

Lázaro describes his fifth master as a shameless, exceptionally resourceful seller of indulgences, always searching for new ways to secure a sale. The object does not reach the faithful through preaching alone. Before presenting it in a town, the seller gives local clergy small seasonal gifts—lettuce, lemons or oranges, a peach, quinces, or a green pear—so that they will favor his business and encourage parishioners to buy. The indulgence is thus introduced through a network of reciprocal favors as well as through religious instruction.

The seller adjusts his speech to the clergy before him. If they claim knowledge of Latin, he avoids speaking it rather than risk exposing his own mistakes, and instead performs an elegant, fluent Spanish. If they seem to have obtained their positions through money and deference rather than scholarship, he adopts the posture of a learned theologian and speaks what merely sounds like Latin for hours. His command of the indulgence’s presentation is therefore not grounded in learning: it lies in reading his audience and furnishing each group with the signs of authority it expects.

When persuasion fails, the seller resorts to artifice and pressure. The text distinguishes this fraud from routine promotion by showing how deliberately he engineers a particular sale. In a village in the Sagra of Toledo, two or three days of preaching have produced no purchases. He announces that he will withdraw the indulgence the next morning, setting up the occasion on which the entire community will gather to hear it presented again.

A Public Performance of Proof

The previous evening, the seller and the constable stage a quarrel over drinks. They trade accusations of theft and fraud, reach for weapons, and draw the attention of guests and villagers. The crowd intervenes before they can attack one another. In the commotion, the constable calls the indulgences false. By morning, the village is already discussing the accusation, and suspicion has further reduced its willingness to buy.

The seller nevertheless has the church bells rung and begins his withdrawal sermon. At its height, the constable enters, prays, and publicly claims that the seller had proposed they collaborate and divide the proceeds. He says he has repented because the scheme would harm both his conscience and the villagers’ purses, declares that the indulgences are false, and throws down the staff that symbolizes his official authority. His apparent renunciation makes the charge seem costly and therefore credible: the man who helped enforce authority now seems to risk his standing in order to expose a fraud.

The seller does not have the constable removed. Instead, he allows the accusation to continue, then answers it with a carefully composed prayer. He asks God to reveal the truth through a visible judgment: if the seller is the liar, the pulpit should sink seven fathoms into the earth with both men upon it; if the constable is lying, he should be punished so that the villagers can recognize his malice. The challenge turns the dispute over the indulgence into a test the audience can supposedly witness for itself.

Immediately after the prayer, the constable falls full-length to the floor. He strikes it hard enough to make the church echo, foams at the mouth, twists his face, kicks, punches, and thrashes about. The assembly sees a body in apparent distress at the precise moment when the seller has called for divine judgment. The performance converts an accusation into an apparent sign, supplying the crowd with a dramatic event where it had previously heard only competing claims.

Ritual, Recovery, and Collective Confirmation

The seller directs the response as carefully as he has directed the confrontation. He prevents those who would remove the constable from intervening and then urges the villagers to pray for the man’s forgiveness and recovery. The people kneel before the altar and sing a litany with the priests. Carrying a cross and holy water, the seller approaches the constable and performs another long prayer, asking for life and redemption for the supposed demoniac. The scene borrows the forms of communal worship and pastoral care, turning the seller’s role from accused dealer into apparent healer and intercessor.

He then orders that the indulgence be brought and places it on the constable’s head. The man gradually recovers his senses, falls at the seller’s feet, and asks forgiveness. He confesses that he spoke under the devil’s influence: first, he says, to hurt the seller in revenge for their quarrel, and above all to prevent the good that would come from the villagers’ purchase of the indulgence. The object is now made to appear not merely compatible with the miracle but instrumental in reversing the supposed possession.

The seller forgives the constable, and the two publicly reconcile. The assembled crowd responds with a rush to obtain the indulgence; almost no one in the village, from adults to children, is left without one. The sequence has moved from a failed market to mass acquisition not through new information about the indulgence itself, but through a staged chain of accusation, prayer, collapse, recovery, confession, and forgiveness. Each turn lends apparent confirmation to the one before it.

Sales, Rumor, and Lázaro’s Recognition

The story does not end with the village church. News of the event spreads to neighboring towns. When the seller and Lázaro arrive there, the reputation of the miracle has already done the work of a sermon: the villagers come to buy the indulgence at the inn, as if the documents were free pears being handed out. Across ten or twelve nearby towns, the seller disposes of thousands without preaching a single sermon. A performance witnessed by one community becomes a portable sales argument, repeated through rumor until the object’s supposed efficacy seems established in advance.

Lázaro initially accepts the episode as true and admits that he was astonished along with many others. His understanding changes only when he sees his master and the constable laughing heartily over the affair. That private aftermath reinterprets the public ritual: the quarrel, the accusation, the fit, the recovery, and the confession were coordinated parts of a deception. Lázaro, still a boy, concludes that such tricksters must perpetrate many frauds against simple people. The indulgence has not changed; what changes is the narrator’s ability to read the machinery that gives it persuasive force.

Law, Authority, and the Manufactured Miracle

The fraud relies on recognizable forms of authority rather than on an unstructured appeal to credulity. The constable’s staff signifies governmental office, and throwing it down acts as a visible renunciation of the role that might otherwise align him with the seller. The seller, meanwhile, uses the church, the pulpit, the bells, the clergy, the altar, the cross, holy water, and collective prayer to frame the disputed indulgence as a matter of public religious consequence. The crowd is not simply told to believe; it is assembled, given a conflict to judge, and led through a ritual that appears to settle it.

The compulsory character of the withdrawal sermon sharpens the seller’s advantage. A contemporary rule required the whole community to attend the two sermons at which indulgences were presented and withdrawn. Calling the villagers together to hear the withdrawal therefore guarantees an audience for the very occasion the seller has designed. The scene’s apparent spontaneity depends on institutional arrangements that make attendance predictable: the staged quarrel supplies the rumor, and the required gathering supplies the witnesses.

The episode’s irony lies in the distance between the indulgence’s sacred appearance and the commercial performance built around it. The seller’s prayer invokes a God who sees what is hidden, while the trick depends on the villagers seeing only what has been staged for them. Yet the deception is not exposed by the crowd’s worship or by the object itself. Its workings become clear to Lázaro only afterward, when the conspirators’ laughter gives away the gap between the miracle presented in public and the fraud they privately understand. The indulgence’s power in this episode is therefore social and theatrical: it sells because a coordinated performance makes its claims look witnessed, confirmed, and shared.