Maqueda is the setting of Lázaro’s second service, where the hard lessons learned under the blind man meet a new and more punishing form of deprivation. The town marks a decisive turn in his early life: he arrives seeking alms, is taken on by a priest, and discovers that a household with a locked chest of consecrated bread can be more merciless than the road.

Arrival and a New Master

After leaving the blind man, Lázaro reaches Maqueda and approaches a priest to ask for alms. The priest asks whether he can serve at Mass; Lázaro says yes, a skill the blind man had taught him despite his mistreatment, and is hired. The change of master does not bring relief. Lázaro describes the move as falling from the frying pan into the fire: beside this priest, even the blind man had seemed generous.

Maqueda is thus less a resting place than the threshold of another episode in Lázaro’s precarious life. The journey from one master to the next continues the book’s pattern of successive service, in which each new arrangement promises subsistence but exposes the boy to another kind of control.

The Locked Chest and Household Hunger

The priest keeps the bread offered at church in an old chest secured by a padlock, carrying its key tied to his cassock. He puts the offerings away himself and locks the chest at once. Elsewhere in the house there is no food to be seen: no bacon hanging by the hearth, cheese on a shelf, or leftover bread in a basket. The locked chest concentrates the household’s food and makes its scarcity tangible; even the sight of ordinary provisions, Lázaro says, would have comforted him.

The priest’s handling of offerings sharpens the contrast between religious office and private conduct. During the offertory he watches both the congregation and Lázaro’s hands, counts every blanca, and removes the collection as soon as it is over. He claims that priests must be restrained in eating and drinking, yet at wakes and confraternity prayers, where others pay for the food and drink, he eats like a wolf and drinks heavily. The discrepancy turns an ostensible rule of clerical moderation into an excuse for withholding food at home.

Narrative Significance

The Maqueda episode develops the book’s hunger motif through a new material obstacle: not merely an ungenerous master, but a locked store of bread that Lázaro cannot freely reach. The boy’s earlier experience of deception and scarcity has prepared him to treat survival as a contest of observation and ingenuity, while the priest’s control of the key gives that contest a sharply defined object.

The episode also contributes to the work’s anticlerical satire. The priest’s religious role does not restrain his avarice; instead, the ceremonial collection of offerings and the language of moderation stand against his appetite when someone else bears the cost. Maqueda consequently becomes a compact setting in which the book links hunger, service, and the exposure of pious appearances by their material consequences.