Lázaro–Antona Pérez: mother–son relationship

The relationship between Lázaro de Tormes and Antona Pérez joins maternal care to the material pressures that repeatedly narrow their choices. She feeds and raises him after his father’s death, endures punishment for her association with Zaide, and ultimately places her son in the service of the blind man. Their bond is affectionate, but the story gives that affection no shelter from poverty: its most decisive expression is Antona Pérez’s tearful blessing as Lázaro leaves Salamanca, followed by his entry into a life of service and self-reliance.

Family Origins and Early Care

Lázaro de Tormes introduces himself as the son of Tomé González and Antona Pérez, both from Tejares near Salamanca. He says he was born in a mill on the banks of the Tormes, where his father worked, and that the river gave him his name. When Lázaro was eight, Tomé González was imprisoned for taking from the sacks of people who came to grind grain. He confessed, and later joined an expedition against the Moors as a muleteer serving a knight; he died alongside his lord. His death left Antona Pérez a widow without a husband or protection, and made her responsible for sustaining the family.

Antona Pérez moved to the city and rented a small house. She cooked for students and washed clothes for stable hands attached to the Commander of Magdalena, work that brought her into the stables. There she met Zaide, a man who began visiting the household. Lázaro recalls that he first feared Zaide because of his dark skin and appearance; his feelings changed when Zaide’s visits brought bread and meat, and, in winter, firewood. The boy’s account makes the family’s changing fortunes concrete: the food and warmth provided by the relationship gradually outweighed his initial fear.

A younger child was born into the household, and Lázaro remembers caring for him and bouncing him on his knees. In one incident, the little boy, seeing that his mother and Lázaro were white while Zaide was not, ran away from Zaide and called him an apparition. Zaide laughed at the child’s response. The episode places the new family bond within the child’s point of view, but its central measure is practical as well as emotional: Zaide’s presence helped provide for Antona Pérez’s children.

Discovery, Punishment, and Survival

The relationship between Antona Pérez and Zaide came to the attention of an administrator, and an investigation revealed that Zaide had taken supplies from the animals’ provisions: barley, bran, firewood, grooming tools, aprons, and horse coverings, among other things. When there was nothing else, he removed horseshoes. The narrative explains that he used what he stole to help Antona Pérez raise the younger child. Lázaro’s recollection draws a pointed comparison between this poor enslaved man, driven by love to steal, and religious figures who rob the poor or their own institutions.

Lázaro was questioned and threatened, and, still a child, revealed what he knew, including that he had sold horseshoes to a farrier on his mother’s instructions. Zaide was flogged and had molten fat poured on his wounds. Antona Pérez was sentenced to a hundred lashes and forbidden both to enter the Commander’s house again and to receive Zaide in her own home. The punishment broke up the household’s arrangement for survival and exposed mother and son to further insecurity.

Antona Pérez served her sentence and moved with her children to work at the Solana inn, where she continued raising the younger child until he could walk and looked after Lázaro until he was old enough to run errands. He fetched wine and candles for the guests and did whatever else he was told. Her care therefore persisted after the family’s loss of its former support, but it did so through work that drew Lázaro into adult responsibilities while he was still a boy.

Entrusting Lázaro to the Blind Man

A blind man staying at the inn decided that Lázaro was suitable to be trained and asked Antona Pérez to give him into his service. She presented her son as the child of a good man who had died in an expedition for the faith, and asked the blind man to treat him well and care for him because he was an orphan. The blind man promised to do so and said he would receive Lázaro not as a servant but as a son. The promise gave the separation a reassuring form, even as it initiated a master–servant relationship in which Lázaro would have to guide his new master.

After spending several days in Salamanca, the blind man decided to leave because the earnings did not seem sufficient. At the moment of departure, Lázaro went to see his mother. They both wept. Antona Pérez told him she knew she would not see him again, urged him to be good and to take care of himself, and said that she had raised him and placed him with a good master. Her words combine blessing, practical warning, and acknowledgment that she cannot accompany or protect him on the road ahead.

The departure is not simply a change of household: it closes the period in which Antona Pérez could keep Lázaro near her and begins his succession of service under other people. The account makes her decision legible as an act of care within severe limits, rather than as abandonment. Yet the promise of a good master soon proves inadequate. The blind man’s treatment initiates the contests and punishments through which Lázaro becomes more resourceful, while his mother’s final instruction to look after himself anticipates the self-reliance his new circumstances demand.

Significance in the Life Narrative

Antona Pérez’s role is concentrated in Lázaro’s beginnings, but it establishes the conditions that shape his later life: the loss of his father, the household’s dependence on precarious labor, the punishment that removes a source of support, and the eventual handover to a master. In this sequence, family affection is repeatedly tested by material need. Food and firewood first make Zaide’s presence welcome to Lázaro; after the authorities intervene, his mother must sustain the children through service at an inn; and, when the blind man offers a place for her son, she accepts separation as the available path forward.

The adult Lázaro tells these childhood episodes to explain his origins and formation. His account treats his mother with tenderness but also shows how little power she has over the forces governing the family’s life. Her final act of care is to equip him with a blessing and a warning, then send him away. The relationship thus marks the threshold between dependence on a mother who struggles to provide and the independent, often painful resourcefulness that Lázaro acquires in service.