Saihōshō kaitenki

The key to the sacramental-bread chest is the small, indispensable instrument of Lázaro’s struggle to eat while serving the miserly priest. It opens a hidden store of votive loaves, but it also becomes evidence against him: concealed beneath his mattress and finally held in his sleeping mouth, it produces the whistle that brings the priest’s club down on his head and reveals how he has been entering the chest.

The Key and the Chest

Lázaro first claims that he has lost a key to the chest, asking a travelling tinsmith to try the keys he carries. As the tinsmith tests them one by one, Lázaro helps with silent prayers. A matching key finally opens the chest, exposing its loaves. Unable to pay money, Lázaro lets the tinsmith take a votive loaf as his reward; the man leaves pleased, and Lázaro is more pleased still, now holding a key that fits the priest’s lock.

The key makes the chest accessible without making the theft immediately visible. Lázaro initially leaves the loaves untouched, both to avoid drawing notice to their absence and because the sight of so much food briefly makes hunger seem powerless. Once the priest leaves the house, however, he opens what he calls his bread paradise, devours a loaf in moments, and carefully shuts the chest again. The key thus enables a brief interval of secret plenty, dependent on the priest failing to count what remains.

Concealment and Escalating Suspicion

That interval lasts only a few days. On the third day, Lázaro sees the priest bent over the chest, turning the loaves and counting them again. The priest’s attention transforms the key from a quiet means of access into a danger that must itself be hidden. Lázaro fears that continued searching will expose the key beneath his straw mattress, where he has kept it, and chooses to carry it in his mouth during the night.

The choice draws on Lázaro’s earlier experience with the blind man, whose relentless searches for coins had taught him that money could not safely be kept in a pocket or a seam. He recalls having accumulated twelve or fifteen maravedís in halves of blancas without preventing himself from eating, yet says that the blind man would search every stitch and patch until he found even a single blanca. Against that remembered vigilance, the mouth seems a secure hiding place—until sleep turns concealment into an involuntary signal.

The Whistle and the Blow

One night, the key settles inside Lázaro’s open mouth so that the breath he exhales passes through its hollow shaft and whistles loudly. The priest, already alarmed by the supposed snake near the chest, hears the sound and believes it is the creature’s hiss. With a club in hand, he follows the whistle quietly, convinced that the snake has crawled into the straw mattress to warm itself against Lázaro. He raises the club and strikes with all his strength, splitting Lázaro’s head and leaving him senseless.

The key remains in Lázaro’s mouth through the blow. When the priest returns with a light, he finds the injured boy groaning, the key still partly inside and partly outside his mouth. The priest pulls it free, studies its teeth, and recognizes that they match the lock on the chest. Testing it confirms the theft. The object that had opened a hidden food supply has become a visible, physical answer to the priest’s suspicions.

From Useful Object to Evidence

The key’s changing role gives the episode its sharp reversal. At first it is an ordinary tool, useful because it fits a lock; then it is a concealed resource that protects Lázaro’s access to food; at last its hollow channel betrays him by turning his breathing into a whistle. The very ingenuity that makes the key valuable also makes it dangerous: the mouth can hide the object from a search, but cannot control the sound produced when Lázaro sleeps.

The priest’s mistaken pursuit of a snake links the key to the other imagined intruders he believes are consuming his provisions. When he discovers the key, he identifies Lázaro as the mouse and snake that have been warring against him by eating his goods. The episode therefore makes the key more than a means of entry: it is the material clue through which a hidden contest over hunger becomes legible to the person guarding the food. The access it grants is temporary, and its exposure comes at the cost of Lázaro’s severe injury.