Lhasaero replaces sausage with radish

In Escalona, Lázaro’s hunger drives him to swap the sausage he is roasting for a spoiled turnip, and his blind master exposes the theft in a humiliating scene that ends their series of adventures on a note of violence and public comedy. The stolen food does not simply disappear: the blind man’s nose finds the evidence, and Lázaro’s own stomach returns it to its owner. The episode turns a small act of survival into a contest of wits, a beating, and a story performed for the people who gather to watch.

Setting and Circumstances

The incident takes place in an inn at Escalona, a town belonging to the blind man’s master, the duke. The blind man has given Lázaro a piece of sausage to roast. After eating slices of bread soaked in its dripping fat, he takes a maravedí from his purse and sends Lázaro to the tavern for wine. The exchange leaves Lázaro alone by the fire with the food and the money, while the master turns back to tending what remains on the spit.

Beside the fire lies a small, elongated, rotten turnip, abandoned as unfit for the pot. Lázaro has smelled the sausage and knows it is the only part of the meal he expects to enjoy. His theft is therefore not an elaborate scheme but a hurried response to acute appetite: while the blind man reaches into his purse, Lázaro snatches the sausage from the spit and puts the turnip in its place. He then leaves with the money to fetch the wine.

The Substitution and Its Discovery

When Lázaro returns, the blind man is holding the turnip between two slices of bread. He has not noticed the exchange by touch, but bites down expecting sausage and recoils at the foul substitute. He asks Lázaro what it is. Lázaro claims he has only just come back from the wine seller and suggests that someone else must have played the trick. The blind man rejects the excuse: he says he never let go of the spit, so no one else could have made the substitution.

Lázaro swears he had nothing to do with it, but the blind man tests the lie by taking hold of his head and smelling his breath. He then grabs Lázaro and forces his mouth open, thrusting in his long, sharp nose to confirm what the smell has already suggested. The narrator dwells on the physical indignity of the search: the nose reaches deep into Lázaro’s throat, while the stolen sausage has not yet settled in his stomach. Fear, the rapid sequence of events, and the pressure of the blind man’s nose converge. Lázaro retches, and the sausage comes back out of his mouth together with the blind man’s nose.

Exposure, Violence, and Public Laughter

The failed concealment ends in a beating. The blind man is so furious that Lázaro believes he might have killed him had people not rushed in at the commotion. They pull Lázaro from his grasp, leaving the blind man with some of the hair still remaining on Lázaro’s head. Lázaro is left with a scratched face and a scraped, bleeding neck and throat. The comic reversal is bodily and costly: the stolen sausage is recovered, but only after the attempted theft has made the boy’s hunger and deception impossible to deny.

The beating becomes a performance for the inn’s other occupants and passersby. The blind man recounts Lázaro’s misdeeds to everyone who arrives, repeating the story of the wine jug and the earlier grape episode before adding this latest trick. His lively narration draws such general laughter that people enter to see the spectacle. Lázaro, though battered and in tears, feels almost that he wrongs his master if he does not laugh as well. The crowd’s amusement does not undo the violence; it folds Lázaro’s suffering into the blind man’s successful retelling of their contest.

The Final Episode with the First Master

The narrator explicitly presents the sausage-and-turnip theft as the last episode he will tell about his first master, ending a larger sequence of adventures by selecting this encounter as its closing example. Its shape gathers their recurring struggle into a compact reversal: Lázaro acts on hunger, tries to exploit a moment when the blind man cannot see, and is caught through the master’s acute senses and experience. The boy’s resourcefulness is real, but it does not make him invulnerable; this time his ingenuity fails, and the exposure brings immediate physical punishment.

The scene also recalls earlier episodes because the blind man himself places the theft beside the wine-jug and grape stories. His catalogue makes Lázaro’s tricks part of a continuing public anecdote, not isolated private victories. Lázaro’s remembered, self-mocking narration adds another turn: even while describing his injuries and humiliation, he conveys how the blind man’s storytelling can make the victim seem implicated in the joke. The episode thus closes the first master’s portion not with a clean escape, but with their unequal intimacy still intact: hunger provokes the trick, the master detects it, and the defeated boy is made an audience to his own exposure.