The Swindler and Lazarillo de Tormes by Francisco de Quevedo

Author:Francisco de Quevedo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ says the proverb, and how right it is. After thinking about it, I decided to be as much a tearaway as the others and worse than them if I could. I don’t know if I succeeded but I certainly tried hard enough. First I sentenced to death any pigs that might wander into the house and any of the housekeeper’s chickens that found their way from the yard into my room. One day two of the finest-looking swine I’d seen came in. I was playing about with the other servants when I heard the pigs grunting, so I said to one of them:

‘Go and see who’s grunting in our house.’

He went and said there were two pigs. I got very annoyed and said it was disgusting and a real cheek to come and grunt in other people’s houses, and I shoved my sword right into them behind closed doors and then slit their throats. They died noisily at our hands and we pretended to sing at the tops of our voices as we did the job. We took out the guts, collected the blood, and half singed them in the yard over a burning straw palliasse. So when their owners came it was all over except for the guts. We hadn’t made the black sausages, though not out of slowness but because in our haste we left half the innards inside. Don Diego and the steward heard about it and were so angry that the other boarders, though they were roaring with laughter, had to stand by me. Don Diego asked me what he could say if I was arrested and prosecuted, and I answered that I would claim hunger, the students’ stand-by, and that if that didn’t help me I would say:

‘As they came in without knocking I assumed they were ours.’

They all laughed at my defence.

‘I say, Pablos,’ said Don Diego, ‘you really are beginning to learn.’

The strange thing was to see my master so quiet and religious and me so rough, that each of us showed up the other’s virtue or vice.

The housekeeper was very pleased because she and I were allies; we had cornered the food supply. I did the issuing, and a right Judas I was, and ever since then I’ve loved petty thieving. The meat always went from greater to less, the opposite of the laws of rhetoric, and if she could serve goat or ewe-meat she never gave mutton. If she had bones, there was never any flesh on them; so she made stews so weak they looked consumptive. If you’d frozen her soul, you could have made glass beads out of it.

At Christmas and Easter she used to throw some ends of tallow candles in her cooking, just for some fat to make a change. When I was present she’d say to my master:

‘You know, you’ll never find a servant like young Pablos. If only he weren’t such a tearaway! Keep him, though, his loyalty is worth the trouble he gives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.