Angela Vicario is in many ways the main character of the story. She is the most quoted character in the novel, and has the strongest narrative voice. In addition, she is center of the mystery that the narrator is trying to unravel, since she is the only one who knows whether or not Santiago was truly the one who took her virginity, and she remains enigmatic at the end of the story because she never reveals whether or not he was guilty.

Angela Vicario is a distant cousin of the narrator. As a young girl, she was the most beautiful of her four sisters. However, the narrator says she had a "helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her." She used to sit in the window of her house, making cloth flowers, and the narrator thought she looked more and more destitute every year. He says that her "penury of spirit had been aggravated by the years," so much so that when people discovered that Bayardo San Roman wanted to marry her, they thought it was an outsider's plan.

Angela says she did not wish to marry him because he seemed like too much of a man for her. She thought he was stuck up, and that he was a Polack. She also felt that he did not court her, but merely ingratiated himself with her family, and that also irritated her. However, her parents would hear none of her objections; her mother told her that love could be learned.

Her mother appears to have been right, though not in the sense that either she or Angela expected—Angela fell in love with Bayardo San Roman after he returned her to her house. When the narrator went to visit her years later, she answered all his questions "with very good judgment and a sense of humor." He says that "she was so mature and witty that it was difficult to believe that she was the same person." When he asks he once again if Santiago Nasar was the guilty party who had taken her virginity, she replied, "Don't beat it to death, cousin. He was the one."

Her inexplicable obsession with Bayardo San Roman takes the form of a ritual: she begins writing letters to him, and it becomes a weekly habit of hers for seventeen years. The fact that he ultimately returns to her is no stranger than the act of writing a letter a week to someone who does not respond. Because he does come back to her, Angela Vicario triumphs in a sense-she has found the resolution she desired in her life. However, the conclusion of her love affair with Bayardo does not shed any light on the murder of Santiago Nasar-in terms of him, she would never say anything save to name him as the one who took her virginity. Though she seems like an honest person, it is difficult to tell whether she would have been willing to reveal the name of the man who truly took her virginity, especially if she still had feelings for him.

Previous section Santiago Nasar

Popular pages: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Take a Study Break