Tejares

Tejares is the village near Salamanca from which Lázaro de Tormes’s parents, Tomé González and Antona Pérez, came. Although Lázaro is born beside the Tormes rather than in the village itself, Tejares anchors the family’s origins before his account follows him into the hardships that propel him through the wider world.

Setting and Family Origins

Lázaro introduces his parents as natives of Tejares, near Salamanca. His birthplace is elsewhere: he says he was born in a mill on the bank of the Tormes, where his father worked as a miller. The distinction makes Tejares a point of family origin, while the river and mill supply the name by which the narrator is known and the scene of his birth.

The village belongs to the brief geography of Lázaro’s childhood, before his family’s circumstances draw them into the city. His father is imprisoned after being accused of taking grain from the sacks brought to the mill; later, he serves a knight in an expedition against the Moors and dies alongside his master. These events leave Antona widowed and without protection, setting the conditions for the family’s departure from its original circumstances.

From Origins to a Life of Service

After her husband’s death, Antona moves to the city, rents a small house, cooks for students, and washes clothes for stable boys. Her relationship with Zaide brings food and fuel into the household, but his thefts from the stable lead to punishment for both adults. Antona is forbidden to return to the commander’s house or to receive Zaide, and she finds work at an inn, where she continues raising her children.

It is at the inn that a blind man asks Antona to place Lázaro in his service. She entrusts her son to him, and Lázaro begins the sequence of master-and-servant episodes that defines his life. Tejares is not revisited as a setting in these episodes; its significance lies in the contrast between an identified family origin and the itinerant, precarious existence that follows.

Narrative Significance

The village’s brief mention gives Lázaro’s opening account a concrete social and geographical point of departure. His parents’ origins are named, but the narrative quickly shifts to the mill, the city, the stable, and the inn, where work, prosecution, bereavement, and hunger shape the family’s fate. Tejares therefore functions less as a developed locale than as the starting marker in a life narrated through successive displacements and dependent relationships.