Lázaro–the priest: master–servant relationship

Lázaro’s service to the priest at Maqueda is a prolonged contest over food in which the master’s religious office stands beside extreme private stinginess, and the servant’s hunger becomes the force that sharpens his ingenuity. The relationship begins when Lázaro, seeking alms, says he can serve mass; the priest hires him, making use of a skill learned from the blind man who had previously mistreated him. What follows is not protection or sustenance but a struggle over bread, keys, and survival.

Beginning the Service

The priest takes Lázaro into service at Maqueda after finding him begging and asking whether he knows how to serve mass. Lázaro answers that he does, a practical lesson acquired under his previous master despite that man’s cruelty. The new position proves worse rather than better: Lázaro compares the change to falling from the frying pan into the fire, describing the priest as more miserly than the blind man.

The priest keeps the votive bread from the church in an old chest secured by a padlock, with its key tied to his cassock. He personally puts the bread away and locks it up. Elsewhere in the house there is no store of food to soften Lázaro’s deprivation: no bacon by the chimney, cheese on a shelf, or leftover bread. Even the onions are kept locked in a room under the roof, and Lázaro receives only one every four days. The key is lent with strict instructions to return it immediately and not give in to appetite; the priest keeps such close count that exceeding the ration would bring punishment. Lázaro’s position as servant leaves him in the household, but not entitled to its food.

Hunger and Unequal Provision

The priest’s control of food extends to what he eats himself, but it does not make his treatment of Lázaro more generous. Five blancas’ worth of meat covers the priest’s daily expense between lunch and supper. He shares the broth, yet gives Lázaro no meat and less than half the bread the boy needs. On Saturdays, when the local custom is to eat a sheep’s head, the priest sends Lázaro to buy one for three maravedís. He devours its eyes, brain, and meat around the jaws, then leaves his servant the picked bones, presenting them as though they were a lavish meal. The household’s meagre provisions thus become a visible measure of the gap between master and servant: Lázaro is present at the table but remains hungry.

The priest also watches the offertory closely. He keeps one eye on the congregation and the other on Lázaro’s hands, counts every blanca placed in the collection basket, and takes it to the altar as soon as the offering ends. Lázaro says he never managed to steal even one coin during his service, and the little wine the priest receives at the offertory is locked away and rationed to last the week. To explain his restraint, the priest invokes the expectation that priests should be moderate in eating and drinking. His conduct elsewhere exposes the excuse: at confraternity meals and funeral vigils, where someone else pays, he eats voraciously and drinks freely. The contrast turns pious moderation into a cover for private hoarding rather than a consistent discipline.

The Locked Chest and Lázaro’s Countermeasures

The old chest becomes the physical center of the relationship: to the priest it is a guarded store of votive bread, while to Lázaro it is the only possible answer to hunger. When a tinsmith happens to come to the door, Lázaro asks him to repair the lock and lets him take a loaf as payment for a key. He does not immediately touch the remaining bread. First he savors the knowledge that the chest is accessible and that hunger may at last be held at bay. The next day, while the priest is out, Lázaro takes a loaf, eats it quickly, relocks the chest, and sweeps the floor in relief. That brief reprieve ends when the priest counts and recounts the loaves, alert to the loss.

Lázaro shifts to subtler theft, removing only small pieces from bread the priest believes mice have gnawed. The priest searches for the supposed pests and tries to secure the chest, while Lázaro continues to find ways to feed himself. He explicitly presents need as his teacher: hunger, rather than comfort, keeps his thoughts working and drives him to devise one expedient after another. At night, while the priest sleeps, Lázaro uses a knife as a drill to cut a hole through the chest’s rotten, worm-eaten wood, then reaches inside for bread already broken. The damaged chest is more than a container in this struggle: its weakness makes the priest’s attempt at absolute control vulnerable to the resourcefulness that deprivation has taught his servant.

Discovery, Injury, and Dismissal

The contest ends not because the priest discovers the chest’s hidden hole, but because Lázaro’s method of guarding the key turns against him. Afraid the priest might find it beneath his straw bed, Lázaro keeps the key in his mouth while sleeping. One night his breath passes through its hollow shaft and produces a whistle. The priest, already troubled by the supposed snake in the chest, follows the sound with his club, believing the creature has entered Lázaro’s bedding. He strikes the boy on the head with such force that Lázaro is knocked unconscious and left bleeding, the key still lodged partly in his mouth. The object that had protected his access to food thus gives away his hiding place by accident.

After Lázaro regains consciousness, the priest’s household turns his injury into a story to laugh over, while Lázaro weeps. He is fed, but after fifteen days he is only partly recovered and still hungry. The next day the priest takes him by the hand, pushes him outside, and tells him he no longer belongs to him but to himself; he should find another master. Making the sign of the cross as if Lázaro were possessed, the priest shuts the door. Their service ends with expulsion rather than reconciliation: the master rejects the servant whose ingenuity had repeatedly breached his control of the food chest.

Meaning of the Relationship

The episode develops a sharp contrast between religious office and household conduct. The priest’s control of votive bread, offertory money, wine, and even a single onion is paired with his professed moderation, which gives way to appetite when food is paid for by others. The narrative’s anticlerical force lies not simply in portraying a cruel cleric, but in making the language and practices of religious life sit beside relentless deprivation. Lázaro’s hunger exposes the difference between the priest’s public claims and his private choices.

At the same time, the master–servant bond repeats a pattern already established under the blind man: a dependent child receives too little, learns to outwit a stronger keeper, and suffers punishment when the struggle is exposed. Under the priest, the conflict narrows around the locked chest and its bread, while the household’s keys, rations, and repairs give deprivation a precise material form. Lázaro survives by turning scarcity into instruction, but the blow and dismissal show the cost of that education. His departure closes this particular service without ending the larger cycle of hunger and dependence that shapes his life.