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.
