Lazarillo de Tormes

This comes from a Spanish book everyone in Goya's Spain had grown up on, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes of 1554, the story of a poor boy handed from one harsh master to the next. Goya paints the ugliest moment in it: two hands force the boy's mouth open, checking whether he has secretly eaten a sausage he was meant to be guarding. There is no comedy in the way Goya tells it, only the panic of a child and the grip of an adult who holds all the power. He returned again and again to scenes of the weak at the mercy of the strong, and here the whole story is compressed into a single face and two hands.