Ángela Tells Her Daughters about Her Past with Tomás and Jonás

Ángela’s disclosure to her daughters overturns the family story about their father’s origins: Jonás was neither an only child nor bereaved of his parents, but had been estranged from his family after Ángela’s affair with his brother Tomás. The revelation turns a moment of sisterly consolation into a reckoning with the secret that shaped the family’s beginnings.

The Family Secret and Its Discovery

The confession emerges as Ángela tries to comfort Débora, who is distressed about her own sexual mistake. Ángela tells her to hold her head high: people make errors, she says, and eventually either move beyond them or learn to live with them; sometimes, what follows can even be for the better. When Débora doubts that her mother’s past could be worse than her encounter with a dwarf stripper, Ángela answers that it was. Her daughters press her, sensing that a much larger story has been withheld.

Ángela asks why they have never met anyone from their father’s family. The sisters repeat what they have been told: that Jonás’s parents died when he was young and that he was an only child. Ángela denies both claims. She explains that Jonás had to break with his entire family because of what happened between them, taking greater blame upon herself even as she acknowledges that the fault belonged to them both. As the daughters react with alarm, she fetches a bottle of herbal orujo and drinks before continuing.

The revelation is specific and startling: Ángela had been engaged to Tomás, Jonás’s older brother. Tomás was about twenty-four, the same age as Ángela, while Jonás was seventeen. Their relationship began before the wedding was called off. Ángela says she had been seeing Jonás secretly for two months; although desire had long existed between them, she had not expected to leave Tomás and initially believed her feelings would pass. Instead, she found that she could not stop thinking about Jonás, and came to understand that he felt the same way.

The Affair, Exposure, and Exile

The affair began to take shape during the village festivities, when Tomás became so drunk that Ángela escorted him home. With Jonás’s help, she got her fiancé into bed. Tomás was asleep and snoring when Ángela and Jonás, unable to contain themselves, looked at one another and touched; she recalls their lips brushing, though she cannot say exactly how it happened. The setting makes the betrayal painfully intimate: the man Ángela was engaged to lay unconscious nearby as she and his younger brother gave in to the desire they had tried to keep hidden.

Tomás caught them a week before the wedding. Ángela does not soften what followed. He was devastated, canceled the marriage, repudiated her and Jonás, and drew the rest of the family to his side. With their place in the family gone, Ángela and Jonás had no choice but to leave. The estrangement the daughters had mistaken for a consequence of death and only-childhood was instead the result of this rupture, and their father’s separation from his relatives began with a betrayal in which both he and Ángela participated.

The confession also reveals how long the consequences continued inside the marriage. Ángela says that guilt tormented her every day and weighed on her so heavily that she could hardly breathe. She believes Jonás’s constant presence beside her kept her from doing something foolish: at the time, she thought she might be unable to live with what she had done or ever get past it. Her daughters had understood the secrecy as an effort to preserve their father’s spotless image; Ángela presents it instead as a history she had been afraid to voice, shaped by shame as well as by the family’s break with Tomás.

From Confession to Encouragement

Ángela’s account changes the terms of the conversation with Débora. The younger woman insists that her own mistake will be paid for by her son, who is blameless; Ángela does not dismiss that fear, but redirects it into a responsibility: Débora must make sure her son’s life does not become a mistake. When Débora asks how, Ángela’s answer is practical rather than abstract. She tells her to keep her head high and go out to work, and Irene echoes the encouragement. The advice links the mother’s private history of guilt to a different choice in the present: not erasing what has happened, but continuing to live and act responsibly.

The sisters’ reactions register how the disclosure shifts the atmosphere. Irene initially resists any story that might lower their father from his pedestal, while Débora jokes that her mother’s past is less troubling because it was a love story that ended in marriage. Ángela counters that the outcome did not spare her the remorse: she remembers the guilt as a daily burden, not a romantic complication made harmless by a wedding. Once she has confessed, however, Irene’s nervous laughter eases the tension, and Débora smiles for the first time in several days. The scene moves from teasing comparison to a more serious recognition that the women have each lived with choices and consequences.

Ángela’s repeated assurance that people can get through their errors gives the revelation its immediate purpose. Her own past is not offered as proof that Débora’s predicament is trivial; it is evidence that a painful mistake need not determine the rest of a life. In the family conversation, the admission therefore does two things at once: it exposes the hidden cause of Jonás’s estrangement and allows Ángela to speak to her daughter without claiming moral innocence. The secret becomes a source of support precisely because Ángela acknowledges the harm, the guilt, and the possibility of moving forward.

Narrative Shape and Significance

The disclosure unfolds through successive corrections rather than a single explanation: Ángela first rejects the claim that Jonás was an only child, then overturns the story that his parents had died, and only afterward names the broken engagement and the affair that caused the estrangement. Bea’s first-person narration keeps the revelation inside the daughters’ changing understanding; their questions and disbelief mark each new version of the family past as it replaces the one they had accepted. Ángela’s pause to fetch herbal orujo, followed by her admission that she needs a drink before continuing, makes the telling visibly difficult. The scene’s movement from family lore to confession gives the old silence a precise cause, while Ángela’s account of guilt prevents the romance that followed from erasing the injury that began it.