Lazarillo de Tormes Summary: The Blind Man, the Stingy Priest and the First Picaresque Novel
A hungry boy serves a blind beggar, a stingy priest and a broke squire. What happens in Lazarillo de Tormes and why Spain banned it.
Lazarillo de Tormes is the story of Lázaro, a poor boy from Salamanca who survives by serving one master after another, starting with a cruel blind beggar, and who learns to be as cunning as the people who exploit him. The short Spanish novel first appeared in 1554, with no author's name, because its picture of the clergy was too sharp to sign. It is considered the book that established the picaresque novel, the tale of a rogue who wanders through society and shows its ugly side.
A book with no author and four first editions
The oldest surviving editions all date from 1554 and were printed in four different towns: Alcalá de Henares, Burgos and Medina del Campo in Spain, and Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands. Scholars think a now-lost earlier edition probably came first, and the Alcalá version adds episodes that a second writer most likely wrote. One copy of the Medina del Campo edition was only found in 1992, walled up inside a house in the town of Barcarrota.
The whole book is written as one long letter. Lázaro addresses an unnamed social superior, "Vuestra Merced" ("Your Grace"), who has asked him to explain a certain scandal, which the text simply calls "the case". Everything we read is Lázaro's own version of his life, told to defend himself, and that is part of the joke.
Childhood by the river Tormes
The boy gets his surname from the river. His father ran a mill on the Tormes, and Lázaro says he was literally born on the river, in Tejares, then a small village and today a neighborhood of Salamanca. The only characters with names are Lázaro and his family: his mother Antona Pérez, his father Tomé González and his stepfather Zayde. The father is accused of stealing and dies in a military campaign; later the stepfather is caught stealing to feed the family and is whipped.
"Lazarillo" simply means "little Lázaro". Critics still argue about which biblical Lazarus the author had in mind: the man Jesus raises from the dead, or the beggar at the rich man's gate in the parable in Luke.
The blind man: a hard first lesson
His mother hands him over to a blind beggar as a guide. The very first lesson is brutal: the old man tricks the boy into banging his head against a stone bull, a cruel joke meant to knock the innocence out of him. That trick wakes Lázaro up to the wickedness of the world. From then on the two compete in cunning in famous scenes, such as the bunch of grapes and the jug of wine.
The blind man feeds him badly, so Lázaro steals food and drink and is often beaten when he is caught. In the end he takes revenge with a trick of his own: he makes the old man jump straight into a stone pillar, and then he runs away. It is a dark mirror of the first scene: the student has learned the teacher's lesson.
The priest and the bread chest
His second master, a priest from Maqueda, feeds him even less than the blind man did. The priest keeps his bread locked in a wooden chest, so Lázaro gets a copy of the key from a travelling tinker. He nibbles the loaves and makes holes in the chest so that the priest blames mice; when the holes are blocked, the priest decides a snake must be getting in.
Lázaro hides the key in his mouth while he sleeps. One night his breath whistles through it, the priest thinks he hears the snake, strikes in the dark, and finds the boy and the key instead. Lázaro is beaten and thrown out of the house.
The proud squire and the other masters
Next he serves a squire, a ruined gentleman whose only treasure is his idea of his own honor. The squire treats him kindly but has nothing to eat, and he ends up sharing the bread Lázaro begs in the street, until he finally leaves the city. The author is mocking a nobility that cared more about looking rich than being able to feed itself.
Then come shorter chapters. A friar who hardly stays in his convent walks so much that Lázaro wears out the first pair of shoes he ever owned. A seller of papal indulgences stages a fake miracle with the help of the local constable to trick a whole town into buying. He goes on to serve a tambourine maker, a chaplain and a constable, works as a water seller, and finally gets a public post as a town crier in Toledo.
How does Lazarillo de Tormes end?
The archpriest of the church of San Salvador in Toledo helps Lázaro get his job, gives him a house and arranges for him to marry one of his own servants, in order to quiet rumors about the archpriest's relationship with her. The rumors do not stop after the wedding, and the reader understands that the wife is still involved with the archpriest. Lázaro, though, presents his life as a success story. The boy who starved now has bread and a position, and the price is pretending not to see. That bitter, ironic ending is why the book still feels modern.
Why was Lazarillo de Tormes banned?
The Spanish Crown banned the book, and it was placed on the Spanish Inquisition's Index of Forbidden Books, at least partly because of its anticlerical tone. Five of Lázaro's masters serve the church, and the book attacks the church's hypocrisy rather than its basic beliefs. In 1573 a censored version was allowed that cut the chapters on the friar and the pardoner; the complete text did not appear again in Spain until the 19th century.
Abroad, the uncensored Antwerp text spread across Europe, translated into French in 1560, English in 1576, German in 1617 and Italian in 1622.
Who wrote it?
Nobody knows. In 1605 the monk José de Sigüenza named a friar, Juan de Ortega, as the author; soon after, others credited the diplomat Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Documents published by the palaeographer Mercedes Agulló in 2010 support the Hurtado de Mendoza theory, while two researchers argued in 2023 for Juan de Valdés. The author was probably sympathetic to the ideas of Erasmus, which helps explain the trouble with the Inquisition.
Why it matters today
Before Lázaro, popular fiction was full of superhuman knights such as Amadís de Gaula; this book looked at society from the bottom up, through the eyes of the poor and the petty thief. The genre it started runs through Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) in Spain, and later through Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even Cervantes nods to it in Don Quixote, where a convict boasts that his own life story is better than Lazarillo de Tormes.
The book even changed the Spanish language. Because of the boy who guided a blind man, lazarillo came to mean "a guide for a blind person", and a guide dog is still informally called a perro lazarillo. A 1959 film version directed by César Fernández Ardavín won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Learn with Lazarillo de Tormes: English expressions
| Expression | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| live by your wits | survive by being clever, not rich | Lázaro had no money, so he lived by his wits. |
| bite the hand that feeds you | hurt someone who supports you | He stole from his master, biting the hand that fed him. |
| turn a blind eye | pretend not to notice | In the end Lázaro turns a blind eye to the rumors. |
| from rags to riches | from poverty to wealth | His story is not quite from rags to riches. |
| learn the hard way | learn through painful experience | He learned the hard way at the stone bull. |
Practice: Write three sentences about a time you learned something the hard way, using "live by your wits" and "turn a blind eye".