Character Profile
AngelaVicario and Bayardo San Romάn
In the novel Angela Vicario is the ‘youngest daughter’ and ‘prettiest of the four’, it
seems there are great expectations for her as in her mother’s opinion, ‘there were no
better reared daughters’. It’s clear that her life is centred around marriage as ‘the girls
had been reared to get married’, she doesn’t have anything else to fall back on which
is what makes her wedding all the more important. 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.
Bayardo San Roman is a ‘track engineer’ that traveled ‘from town to town
looking for someone to marry’. He is extremely successful and used to getting his
own way, he ‘was not only capable of doing everything, but had access to endless
resources’. Angela says she did not wish to marry him because he seemed like ‘too
much of a man’ for her. She also felt that he did not court her, but ‘bewitched the
family with his charm’, and that also irritated her. However, her parents would hear
none of her objections; her mother told her that ‘love can be learned too’. This shows
how attitudes have changed, rather than fall in love Angela Vicario is expected to
marry whoever her family decides is suitable for her. It seems that women didn’t have
much choice or power over their own lives and their sole purpose is to marry and have
children.
Bayardo San Roman is a determined character who uses money as power.
Though the widower Xius makes it clear that his house is ‘not for sale’, Bayardo San
Roman looks past morals and is adamant that he will reach a price that can’t be
rejected. He doesn’t take no for an answer laying on the table ‘ten bundles of
thousand-peso notes with the printed bands of the State Bank still on them’. It is clear
he is a proud man; therefore we know that he would never accept that ‘Angela Vicario
wasn’t a virgin’.
In the novel Angela Vicario ‘dared put on the veil… without being a virgin’, seen
as ‘a profanation of the symbols of purity’. She is judged for disrespecting marital
honors but perhaps the reader can look over this with sympathy. We know the
pressure she was put under and even wanted ‘to tell her mother the truth’, she had
good intentions as to not shame her family yet felt like she couldn’t let them down.