La lotta per il pane nella cassapanca del prete

The struggle for bread in the priest’s chest turns hunger into a contest of ingenuity, concealment, and surveillance. For Lázaro, a locked chest of consecrated loaves becomes the focus of an escalating campaign to stay alive; for the priest, small changes in the bread and chest become evidence of an unseen thief. The episode ends not with security for either man but with Lázaro gravely injured, discovered, and dismissed.

Hunger and the Locked Chest

The episode grows out of an established imbalance: the priest keeps food under lock and key, gives Lázaro less than he needs, and leaves him to endure persistent hunger. When the priest happens to be away, a travelling tinker arrives and asks whether anything needs mending. Lázaro asks him to repair the chest, then claims he has lost its key and fears a beating. The tinker tries keys from his bundle until one opens the lock. In return, he takes one of the votive loaves, leaving Lázaro with the key and access to the bread.

Lázaro does not immediately empty the chest. He leaves the missing loaf unnoticed and waits until the priest is out before taking another, closing the chest again afterward. The brief relief is undercut by the priest’s close accounting: within days, he turns over and counts the loaves. Lázaro sees that simply taking whole pieces will quickly be noticed, and begins to look for a way of making his theft resemble damage caused by something else.

From Missing Bread to the Mouse Story

The old chest itself supplies Lázaro with a plausible explanation. It is worn and has small holes, so he reasons that the priest might believe mice have entered and gnawed the bread. He crumbles several loaves onto nearby cloths, then eats the pieces. When the priest finds the damage, he suspects mice and examines the chest for holes. Lázaro’s trick succeeds briefly because the scattered crumbs make the imagined explanation convincing.

The priest responds by removing nails from the walls and using boards to plug the chest’s openings. The repair closes off the route Lázaro had hoped to exploit, but not all the bread is gone: he carefully nibbles at already-broken loaves through the key. He then shifts from using the existing defects to making his own. At night, while the priest sleeps, Lázaro takes a knife he had set aside and uses it like a drill against a weak part of the aged, worm-eaten wood. The hole lets him reach the bread again, but the priest notices the new damage the next day.

Rather than accept that mice could account for everything, the priest borrows a mousetrap and baits it with cheese crusts obtained from neighbours. This measure inadvertently gives Lázaro another source of food: he takes the cheese from the trap while continuing to gnaw the bread. The priest finds the bread eaten and the bait gone, although the trap has sprung without catching a mouse. Neighbours propose that a snake might be able to take the cheese without being caught. Their explanation gives the priest a new suspect, and his fear of the supposed snake makes him restless at night.

The Key Gives Lázaro Away

Lázaro fears that the priest will discover the key, which he has been keeping beneath his pallet. He begins sleeping with it in his mouth for safekeeping. One night, while he sleeps with his mouth open, his breath passes through the hollow shaft of the key and whistles. The noise sounds to the priest like the hiss of the snake he has been trying to catch.

The priest rises quietly with his cudgel and follows the sound toward Lázaro’s bed, believing the snake has taken shelter in the pallet. He raises the cudgel and brings it down with force on Lázaro’s head. The blow leaves him senseless and his head badly injured. When the priest realizes that he has struck Lázaro rather than a snake, he finds the key still lodged partly in the boy’s mouth. Examining it, he recognizes that its teeth match the key to the chest. Trying it in the lock confirms the theft: the object Lázaro had hidden to protect his access to bread has exposed him.

Dismissal and the Episode’s Reversal

The blow ends the theft, but not Lázaro’s hunger. He remains unconscious for several days and takes fifteen days to recover enough to get up. He is still not free of hunger when he does. The priest then takes him by the hand, pushes him outside, and tells him that he no longer belongs to him and must seek another master. He rejects Lázaro as a servant who has proved too resourceful, adding that the boy must have been the blind man’s pupil. The priest crosses himself as if Lázaro were possessed, then closes the door.

The episode’s reversals are built from ordinary provisions and household objects: the locked chest, its damaged boards, the borrowed trap, and finally the key. Each new precaution changes the conditions of Lázaro’s survival, but his ingenuity also increases the danger of discovery. The supposed mouse and snake are interpretations imposed on the evidence by the priest and his neighbours; the actual contest is between the priest’s control of food and Lázaro’s attempts to circumvent it. Hunger teaches Lázaro to improvise, but the key that lets him reach the bread also makes the cost of that improvisation unmistakable.