Blind person

The blind man, Lázaro de Tormes’s first master, is at once a formidable practitioner of streetwise ingenuity and the first force to strip the boy of childhood innocence. He teaches Lázaro how to survive, but does so through deception, blows, and deliberate deprivation. Their contest over food and money turns apprenticeship into a struggle for bodily survival, and ends when Lázaro uses his master’s blindness against him to escape.

Identity and Introduction

A blind man lodging at the inn where Lázaro’s mother works asks her to entrust the boy to him, judging him suitable for training. She tells him that Lázaro is the son of an honest man who died in a campaign at Gerba, asks him to treat the orphan well, and hopes the boy will prove no worse than his father. The blind man promises to receive Lázaro not as a servant but as a son. The promise of familial care is therefore present from the beginning, but the life that follows makes the difference between the two roles plain: Lázaro is expected to guide and serve him, while having to find for himself much of what he needs to live.

After several days in Salamanca, the blind man decides that the earnings are insufficient and prepares to leave. Lázaro visits his mother before they go. They part in tears; she blesses him, urges him to be good, and tells him to look after himself. The boy then returns to the master waiting for him. The separation from his mother gives the new bond its force: Lázaro enters the road without family protection, dependent on the very man who will teach him to distrust appearances.

The Lesson at the Stone Bull

As they leave Salamanca, the pair reach a bridge with a stone animal almost shaped like a bull at its entrance. The blind man tells Lázaro to put his ear close and listen for a great noise inside. When the trusting boy bends toward the stone, the man strikes his head against it. The pain lasts more than three days, and the master laughs at the trick. He caps the blow with a lesson: “Sciocco, impara, ché il servo del cieco deve saperne una più del diavolo”.

Lázaro describes the moment as waking from the innocence in which he had slept as a child. He resolves to keep his eyes open and stay alert, because he is alone and must work out how to get by. The lesson is not a conventional instruction in a craft: it is delivered as an injury, and its subject is the need to anticipate deception. The blind man’s disability does not make him helpless. His keen perception and command of a trick turn the boy’s literal trust into a liability, while his own blindness becomes the setting for a lesson in watching and suspicion.

On the road, the master teaches Lázaro the jargon of their trade and takes pleasure in the boy’s quick understanding. He says that he cannot give him gold or silver, but can give him many lessons in how to live. Lázaro later credits him, after God, with giving him life: though blind, the man illuminated and trained him in the business of living. That gratitude sits beside the violence of the initiation rather than erasing it. The master’s instruction is effective precisely because it prepares Lázaro for a world in which survival depends on reading other people’s habits and exploiting their openings.

Piety, Skill, and the Economy of Hunger

The blind man is presented as exceptionally successful in his profession. He knows more than a hundred prayers by heart and recites them in a grave, measured, resonant voice that makes the church ring. His face appears humble and devout while he prays, without the gestures or facial contortions attributed to other practitioners. He also claims prayers for a range of needs: women who cannot conceive, women about to give birth, and wives in unhappy marriages who hope to win their husbands’ love. He predicts the sex of unborn children and gives remedies for ailments, naming herbs and roots and claiming expertise in teeth, fainting, and women’s complaints.

People, especially women, believe him and follow his advice. The services bring him substantial returns: he earns more in a month than a hundred blind men earn in a year. The gap between the appearance of devotion and the business it supports makes his piety part of his professional skill. His authority is performed through voice, expression, memorized prayers, predictions, and remedies; the text shows those practices drawing an audience and income, without treating the man’s blindness as proof of incapacity.

Yet Lázaro says that he has never seen a man so miserly. Despite what the master earns and possesses, he gives his servant less than half what he needs and leaves him close to starvation. The contrast between public success and private withholding defines the apprenticeship’s material terms: the boy is expected to guide the man and assist his work, but cannot rely on him for adequate food. Lázaro counters with cunning, usually securing the larger and better share, though not without risk. The master’s tricks and the boy’s counter-tricks become a repeated contest, not a single theft or lesson.

The master keeps bread and other provisions in a cloth bundle closed by an iron ring, padlock, and key, handling it with such caution that no one could steal a crumb openly. Lázaro accepts the meagre portion he is given, then unpicks and resews a corner seam while the master is distracted. Through the hidden opening he takes pieces of bread, bacon, and sausage, treating the bundle as a resource to drain against the rising tide of hunger. The careful lock protects the food from ordinary access; the servant’s knowledge of the stitching supplies another route in.

Wine prompts a similar escalation. At meals, the master first leaves a small jug beside him, and Lázaro quickly takes it for silent sips. When the man notices the level falling, he stops leaving it unguarded and keeps it by its handle. Lázaro then drinks through a long straw of rye inserted into the jug’s neck. The blind man changes his practice again, setting the jug between his legs and covering it with his hand. In response, Lázaro makes a tiny hole in its base, plugs it with a thin layer of wax, and waits until the heat of the small fire melts the wax. Pretending to be cold, he sits between the man’s legs and catches the wine as it trickles into his mouth. The successive devices show how each improvement in the master’s precautions elicits a new attempt by the hungry boy.

Road, Rivalry, and Escape

The pair travel toward Toledo because the blind man expects richer people there, even though they are not especially generous with alms. He trusts the saying that a miser gives more than someone with no money. They stop where the reception and earnings are good and move on after two or three days where they are not. At Almorox, during the grape harvest, a vine grower gives him a bunch of grapes. Since the ripe fruit would be crushed in the bundle, the blind man proposes that they eat it together, taking turns to pick one grape at a time so neither can cheat. The arrangement makes their rivalry explicit: even a shared meal is organized as a test of whether either can gain an advantage.

Lázaro eventually decides to leave, after the master’s bad treatment and tricks have made the relationship intolerable. One rainy evening, as they seek shelter and must cross a swollen stream, the blind man asks him to find a place to jump. Lázaro positions the man directly before a pillar, then steps behind it and urges him to leap farther. The blind man takes a run-up and charges into the pillar headfirst. The impact makes the structure resound; he falls backward, nearly dead, with his head broken. Lázaro taunts him about having smelled the sausage but not the pillar, then leaves him among the people gathering to help. Before nightfall, Lázaro reaches Torrijos. He never learns what became of his former master and says he did not care to find out.

The escape reverses the opening encounter at the stone bull. There, the master uses a stone obstacle to hurt a trusting child and announce the rules of survival; here, Lázaro directs his master into a stone obstacle and turns the lesson into a means of breaking free. The boy’s ingenuity has grown from defensive theft into a decisive act against the man who taught him to expect deception. The ending is not reconciliation or a report of the blind man’s recovery, but separation and deliberate uncertainty about his fate.

Narrative Role and Significance

The blind man gives the early narrative its first sustained pattern of exchange: the master takes alms through performance and controls the household provisions, while the servant responds with stealth, improvisation, and calculated retaliation. Food, wine, and access to money are not incidental details in their relationship; they measure the difference between what the master can earn and what he is willing to provide, and they determine the risks Lázaro must take. His schemes develop in steps as the blind man closes each opening, making material deprivation the direct pressure behind the boy’s resourcefulness.

As Lázaro’s first teacher, the blind man embodies an education that is both useful and cruel. His blow at the bridge teaches vigilance; his profession demonstrates how speech and the appearance of piety can secure trust and profit; his miserliness teaches that a servant cannot assume an employer will meet his needs. In retrospect, Lázaro presents the master as someone who helped make his survival possible, even while recounting the hunger and injuries inflicted on him. That double judgment gives the relationship its lasting tension: the man who wounds Lázaro also equips him, unwillingly or not, to navigate the succession of precarious masters and livelihoods that follows.