Lázaro–the squire of Toledo: master–servant relationship

The relationship between Lázaro de Tormes and the squire of Toledo turns service upside down. The squire appears to offer the hungry boy a new master and the promise of respectable provision; instead, Lázaro discovers that he must beg for both of them. Yet this is not simply another contest between a starving servant and a cruel employer: seeing that the squire has nothing, Lázaro pities him and shares what he can. Their attachment makes the master’s performance of honour inseparable from material dependence, until debt drives him away and leaves his servant to face the consequences.

A New Master, an Old Hunger

After the earlier masters who had kept him hungry, Lázaro is once again told to find someone to serve. In Toledo, he meets a neatly dressed, well-groomed man walking with a dignified bearing. The squire asks whether the boy is looking for a master and presents their meeting as a stroke of good fortune. Lázaro follows, trusting the outward signs of gentility and hoping that this master will provide what the previous ones withheld.

The hope falters as they pass through markets where bread and other food are for sale. The squire walks on without stopping. When he asks whether Lázaro has eaten, the boy says no; the squire replies that he himself has already breakfasted and will not eat again until evening, so Lázaro must manage as best he can. The arrangement is disclosed almost at once: the new master has taken on a servant without being able to provide for him. Lázaro’s distress is sharpened by the memory that leaving a miserly master might have led him to someone worse.

Service Reversed

The squire’s poverty makes the relationship unlike Lázaro’s earlier struggles with masters who possessed food but denied it to him. Here there is no hidden store to outwit and no well-stocked purse to exploit. The squire cannot maintain the boy because he cannot maintain himself. Lázaro returns to the house expecting his master to bring food, waits in vain, and eventually goes out to beg, drawing on the skill he learned under the blind man. Before four o’clock he has secured bread through alms and received cooked ox-foot and tripe from a woman near a tripe shop.

Back at the house, Lázaro eats from his shirt, which serves as a dish, while the squire watches. He feels compassion because he recognizes in the man’s gaze the same hunger he has known himself. At first he hesitates to offer food, having been told that the squire has already eaten; nevertheless, he wants his work to relieve the other man’s need. The squire praises the grace with which Lázaro eats, and the boy’s meal becomes an indirect invitation. Their roles have shifted: the servant’s begging sustains the household, and the master receives food through the servant’s labour.

For eight or ten days this pattern continues. The squire goes out each morning with a measured step and his nose in the air, while Lázaro begs for him. The boy recognizes the injustice of having to support someone who should support him, but does not turn that recognition into hatred. When he finds the squire’s velvet purse limp and empty, he concludes that the man is poor and cannot give what he does not have. Lázaro contrasts this helplessness with the earlier masters who had money yet let him starve: those men deserve his anger, whereas this one deserves pity. He sometimes brings home enough to feed the squire only by leaving himself less.

Honour and Material Need

The squire explains that he left his home in Castilla la Vieja because he refused to remove his hat first before a local gentleman. To Lázaro’s practical objection that the other man was both richer and more powerful, the squire answers that honour is the capital of decent men. He recounts avoiding a count who failed to take off his hat properly and rebuking a craftsman for addressing him with a blessing he considered insufficiently deferential. His account shows how closely he ties status to gestures of recognition and how much effort he devotes to preserving the appearance of rank.

That account stands in stark contrast to the household’s actual economy. The squire’s dignified dress and bearing cannot put food on the table; Lázaro’s alms do that. The squire can speak as though an hidalgo owes nothing to anyone but God and the king, yet in practice he depends on the boy whose labour he cannot repay. Lázaro listens from a position formed by hunger and necessity, and answers the squire’s elaborate rules of precedence with a simpler question about ordinary courtesy. The relationship thus exposes the gap between honour as a social performance and the resources required to live. The squire is not presented only as an object of ridicule: his poverty and occasional gentleness make him pitiable even as his insistence on status appears hollow.

Flight and Abandonment

Their fragile arrangement ends when a man and an old woman arrive to collect rent for the house and the bed. The amounts owed for just two months exceed what the squire could have raised in a year. He tells the creditors that he will go to the market to change a coin and asks them to return in the evening, but he never comes back. Lázaro waits, becomes afraid to remain alone in the house, and spends the night with neighbouring women. In the morning the creditors return and find only the boy and the key.

The squire’s flight reverses the usual pattern once more. As Lázaro observes, masters ordinarily abandon servants; in this case the master abandons him. The boy is left to answer for a household that was never truly supported by its supposed provider. His compassion had made him more than a resentful dependent, but it could not overcome the squire’s debts or make the relationship secure. The episode gives their bond a concrete, abrupt ending: after days in which Lázaro’s begging sustained them both, the squire disappears rather than confront those to whom he owes money.

A Turning Point in Lázaro’s Formation

The episode belongs to the early sequence of Lázaro’s first three masters, whose differing forms of deprivation shape his education. The blind man teaches him directly; the miserly priest trains him indirectly by forcing him to devise ways to survive. The squire offers a failed lesson in the rules of honour, because those rules are detached from the practical conditions of life and remain alien to Lázaro’s experience. The boy can understand the squire’s misery without accepting his code of dignity as a viable guide.

The relationship also marks a change in how dependence works. The earlier masters initiate the bond by seeking out Lázaro, whereas after this formative period the direction begins to turn: he increasingly seeks masters or takes up work for pay. From the sixth chapter onward, his engagements are described less as master–servant dependence than as subordinate economic relationships, with money in place of the occasional piece of bread. The squire’s household is therefore a transition, not a route out of poverty. Lázaro has already acquired the practical resourcefulness that lets him beg and provide, but he remains exposed to the choices and failures of those who command a place in his life. Their brief bond captures both sides of that change: dependence can be reversed in practice, while the servant still bears the consequences when the master disappears.