Antona Pérez–Zaide: partners

Antona Pérez and Zaide: partners is a relationship formed under poverty and sustained through an informal household economy. Zaide’s visits bring food and warmth to Antona’s children, but the thefts that support the family are discovered, and punishment forces the couple apart. Their partnership is brief in the narrated account, yet its consequences shape the household in which Lázaro grows up.

Formation of the Household

After her husband’s death, Antona moves to the city, rents a small house, cooks for students, and washes clothes for stable workers. Through her visits to the stables, she meets Zaide, who tends animals. He sometimes stays overnight; at other times he arrives during the day under the pretext of buying eggs.

Lázaro initially fears Zaide because of his dark skin and appearance. That fear changes as he notices that Zaide’s presence improves the family’s meals: he brings bread and pieces of meat, and, in winter, firewood to keep them warm. The relationship is thus introduced through its material effects on a household living close to want, rather than through any formal account of courtship or marriage.

Children and Domestic Life

As the visits continue, Antona has a younger child, whom Lázaro remembers caring for and bouncing on his knees. One incident captures the family’s differences in appearance: the little boy, seeing that Antona and Lázaro are white while Zaide is not, runs from Zaide in fright and points at him, calling him an apparition. Zaide laughs and answers with an insult. Lázaro, still a child, reflects on how many people flee from others because they do not see themselves.

The episode places Zaide within the children’s everyday household while also revealing the racial difference that marks him as an object of the younger child’s fear. Lázaro’s reflection turns that moment into an observation about perception: those who recoil from another person may fail to recognize their own likeness or limitations.

Exposure and Punishment

The relationship comes to the attention of the stable administrator, who investigates Zaide. He is found to have taken half the barley allocated to the animals, along with bran, firewood, currycombs, aprons, and horse blankets and trappings that he reported as lost. When there was nothing else to take, he removed horseshoes. These goods helped Antona raise her younger child, making the household’s support inseparable from the thefts that brought it under scrutiny.

Lázaro is questioned and threatened; frightened, he reveals what he knows, including that he sold horseshoes to a farrier at his mother’s instruction. Zaide is convicted, whipped, and has melted grease poured onto his wounds. Antona is sentenced to a hundred lashes and forbidden to enter the commander’s house or receive Zaide in her own. The authorities therefore punish not only the thefts but the domestic arrangement through which their proceeds were used.

Separation and Consequences

Antona endures her sentence and, to avoid further danger and malicious gossip, takes service with people living at the Solana inn. There she continues to raise the younger child until he can walk and keeps Lázaro with her until he is old enough to run errands for the guests, fetching wine and candles as required. Their former household has been broken up, but Antona’s labor keeps the children alive and gradually brings Lázaro into paid work.

The relationship’s narrative importance lies in the contrast between private care and public punishment. Zaide’s stolen provisions and fuel materially sustain the family, while their discovery leaves Antona to support the children through service. The later account of Lázaro’s work selling water and his eventual marriage presents different arrangements of labor, provision, and patronage; against those later forms of support, his childhood household shows how survival depended on unstable resources and exposed its members to the consequences of the means by which they obtained them.