Torrijos

Torrijos is the village Lázaro reaches after fleeing the blind man, the first master who has schooled him in survival. It is less a settled destination than the threshold of an escape: Lázaro arrives there before nightfall, leaving his injured former master behind and carrying the hard-won knowledge of their contests into the next stage of his life.

Setting and Arrival

The journey to Torrijos follows the blind man’s decision to leave Salamanca for Toledo. He expects richer inhabitants, though he recognizes that they are not especially generous with alms, and trusts the saying that a miser gives more than someone without money. The pair travel from place to place, staying where the welcome and earnings are good and moving on after two or three days where they are not.

Their route brings them to Almorox during the grape harvest. After a grape-picker gives the blind man a bunch of grapes, the pair share it on a low wall. That stop is part of the wandering life that precedes Torrijos: their movement is shaped by alms, opportunity, and the practical calculation of where they can earn enough to continue.

The Escape That Leads to Torrijos

The immediate cause of Lázaro’s arrival is a deliberate trick. After the blind man is injured when he charges into a pillar, Lázaro abandons him in the hands of the crowd that has gathered to help. He runs out through the village gate and, before night falls, reaches Torrijos. The account gives no further description of the village or of what Lázaro does there; its significance lies in the speed and finality of this departure.

The break closes a relationship marked by both instruction and cruelty. Lázaro has described the blind man as the person who, after God, gave him life: although blind, he illuminated and trained him in the craft of living. Yet the same master kept him hungry, struck him, and continually tested his wits. By the time Lázaro reaches Torrijos, he has turned that apprenticeship into an escape, acting without waiting to learn whether the man survives.

A Place at the End of an Apprenticeship

The blind man’s blindness does not make him passive or helpless in the episodes leading to the flight. He is an expert performer of prayers, reciting more than a hundred from memory in a grave, resonant voice and adopting a devout expression that wins the confidence of worshippers. He offers prayers and predictions for women and gives advice for ailments, earning far more in a month than a hundred blind men might earn in a year. His skill and livelihood make him a formidable master, even as his greed leaves Lázaro short of food.

The hunger that drives Lázaro’s evasions gives their conflict its repeated pattern. The blind man locks bread and other provisions in a cloth bundle secured with an iron ring, padlock, and key; Lázaro unpicks and resews a seam to steal substantial pieces of bread, bacon, and sausage. At meals he first steals sips from the wine jug, then uses a long rye straw when the blind man guards its handle, and finally makes a tiny hole in the jug’s bottom, sealing it with wax that melts as he pretends to warm himself by the fire. Each countermeasure prompts another, until the contests culminate in the pillar and Lázaro’s departure.

Torrijos therefore stands at a sharp narrative boundary. The episodic journey has brought Lázaro through a series of local opportunities and clashes, but this arrival is not another temporary change of lodging: he has left his first master for good, as far as his account knows. The village marks the moment when the pupil’s ingenuity becomes decisive independence, while the unresolved fate of the blind man leaves the separation final in action but uncertain in outcome.