Escalona is where two episodes involving Lázaro de Tormes and the blind man who was his first master acquire lasting force. In a tavern there, Lázaro’s hunger drives him to exchange a sausage for a rotten turnip; years later, a hanging in Toledo makes him understand a warning the blind man had made beneath Escalona’s porticoes. The town thus marks both a breach between master and servant and Lázaro’s belated recognition of what he learned from him.

Setting and Episodes

At a tavern in Escalona, described as a city belonging to the blind man’s duke-master, Lázaro is told to roast a piece of sausage. His master eats bread soaked with its dripping fat, then gives Lázaro a maravedí and sends him to fetch wine. With no one else present and the smell of the sausage intensifying his hunger, Lázaro takes it from the spit and puts a small, elongated, sodden turnip in its place. He eats the sausage on the errand; the blind man, unaware of the swap, bites into the turnip between two slices of bread and is disgusted.

Escalona also appears in an episode preserved in an appendix as an apocryphal addition found only in the second printing of the Alcalá edition. Passing beneath the town’s porticoes, Lázaro and the blind man come upon a shoemaker’s shop displaying ropes and other objects made of esparto. Some of the objects strike the blind man on the head. He reaches up, feels them, recognizes what they are, and urges the boy to hurry away from the ominous objects before they can strangle him.

Hunger, Deception, and Separation

The sausage exchange is a small, calculated theft prompted by immediate hunger. Lázaro acts while his master is occupied with the money and fire, taking the food and leaving an inedible substitute where it had been. The blind man’s failure to discover the trick by touch gives way to the shock of biting into the turnip; the reversal turns Lázaro’s quick opportunism into a comic humiliation of the man who had trained him to be wary.

The episode helps settle Lázaro’s decision to leave. He recalls the blind man’s cruel tricks and says he had already considered separation, but this last deception removes his remaining doubt. The following day, as they go out to beg in heavy rain, the blind man shelters beneath porticoes and, when evening approaches, proposes that they take refuge at an inn. The escape itself unfolds after this exchange, but the events in Escalona supply the final impetus for Lázaro’s resolve to break away.

Retrospective Meaning

Lázaro later recalls that the blind man had predicted he would make his fortune through wine. Those washing him laugh at the prediction, but Lázaro tells his patron that it proved true and that the prophecy came back to him often. He regrets the harm he had done his former master, even while acknowledging that the man had made him pay dearly for their conflict; what the blind man foresaw, he says, was to happen in his own later life.

The appended rope episode gives that retrospective connection a darker edge. Much later in Toledo, Lázaro sees a thief being hanged with a strong esparto rope around his neck and understands the blind man’s warning in Escalona. He then regrets having repaid his former master so poorly, crediting him—after God—with the skill that enabled him to reach his present position. Escalona therefore survives in Lázaro’s account not just as the place of a trick and a separation, but as the point from which the lessons of his first apprenticeship become legible only in retrospect.