Ángela’s “Gift” of Perception

Ángela’s “Gift” of Perception is a bodily form of empathy that lets her experience another person’s pain through touch and diagnose the condition behind it. It makes her a trusted source of guidance in her town, but its effects reach well beyond diagnosis: Ángela is depleted by the suffering she takes on, her neighbors’ gratitude helps shape Irene’s political fortunes, and Bea grows up wondering whether the ability is a gift, an illness, or an explanation for her own guardedness.

What the Gift Does

Ángela can feel pain by touching another person’s hands or another part of the body, and the sensation gives her a precise sense of the symptoms involved. Her diagnoses range across markedly different conditions: she may detect a stomach tumor, chronic depression, an anxiety crisis, tuberculosis concealed behind a respiratory allergy, or kidney stones. The ability is not presented as a power to cure. Ángela does not offer home remedies, invoke pagan gods, or claim to heal through laying on of hands; she identifies the problem and directs the patient to the relevant medical specialist.

The distinction between detecting illness and treating it defines how Ángela uses the gift. Her guidance can prompt someone to seek appropriate care, but diagnosis remains the limit of what she offers. She accepts no money, partly because she does not want legal trouble, and takes food instead. Since she is a terrible cook, the patients’ contributions also feed the household. Their pots of food acquire a second life as containers to be returned: Ángela labels each with its owner’s name and address in permanent marker, and Bea spent much of her childhood and adolescence cycling around town to deliver them. Through that errand, Bea came to know nearly everyone in the community.

A Gift That Exhausts Its Bearer

The ability is unusually demanding because Ángela diagnoses by feeling what others feel. Bea describes her mother as giving herself so completely to patients and neighbors that little time remains for her own needs or for a more conventionally involved role as a mother. The gift’s public usefulness therefore has a private cost: other people’s pain occupies Ángela’s body, and the care she extends outward can leave her depleted at home.

Irene often took Ángela’s place in the family. That detail connects Ángela’s empathy to the sisters’ upbringing without suggesting that the ability makes her an uncomplicated or constantly attentive parent. The same quality that earns the town’s devotion can draw her away from her children. It is a capacity with consequences on both sides of the household door: neighbors receive attention and direction, while her daughters grow up around the demands that attention places on their mother.

Bea’s Doubt and the Search for an Explanation

As a teenager, Bea tried to determine whether Ángela truly felt other people’s pain or whether her apparent gift was extraordinary diagnostic intuition. She encountered the account of a woman with a neurological condition in which the senses crossed: what the woman saw, she experienced through touch. Seeing someone embrace another person made her feel the embrace; seeing someone complain of leg pain made her feel that pain; even watching someone eat made her feel food enter her mouth and pass down her throat. The woman eventually withdrew into her home because sharing other people’s experiences had become exhausting.

Bea could not remember whether she had found the account in a book by Oliver Sacks or elsewhere. What mattered was the resemblance and the possibility it raised: Ángela’s ability might be an illness rather than a supernatural gift. Bea told her mother because, if it were an illness, perhaps it could be treated and Ángela might escape what Bea regarded as an oppressive condition. Ángela did not want to be cured. Even if it was a disease, she chose to live with it because it allowed her to help people, whose affection for her had become a defining part of her place in town.

The account also altered how Bea thought about inheritance. The woman in the neurological case had a daughter with the same condition, though the daughter responded differently: rather than retreating from other people, she maintained an intense social life and tried to disregard what she felt. Bea began to wonder whether she, one of her sisters, or León might have inherited Ángela’s ability. The possibility became an obsession that, she says, she imposed on her siblings as well.

Family Tests and the Limits of Empathy

From time to time, the siblings tested whether they could feel one another’s pain. Their experiments gave them the same result: each felt only what they themselves felt, and touching one another did not transmit another person’s suffering. The tests did not establish that Ángela’s ability was an illness or explain how it worked; they established only that her children could not reproduce it.

Bea later wondered whether her effort not to feel what others felt had made her more selfish, and whether she had withdrawn too far into herself. She connected that possibility to her character and to the way she related to other people and romantic partners, but qualified the explanation: perhaps it was only a way to justify her character. That hesitation matters. The gift becomes a lens through which Bea interprets her own distance, not a proven cause of it.

Affection, Warning, and the Gift’s Ambivalence

Ángela’s standing in the town gives the ability a public and political consequence. The townspeople adore her, and Irene received immediate support when she ran for mayor because she was Ángela’s daughter. Irene made use of that advantage, then worked hard as mayor to demonstrate that she deserved the trust placed in her. The gift thus passes influence to a daughter even though it is not inherited as a demonstrated power: Ángela’s service creates a reputation that helps open a political path for Irene.

Within the family, however, Ángela’s diagnoses can be less reliable in tone. Bea says her mother does not lose the ability when assessing her children so much as exaggerate their symptoms. A simple cold can become the beginning of pneumonia in Ángela’s account. One of these exaggerated warnings helped reveal Irene’s ovarian tumor in time, but Bea says that, more generally, Ángela takes such symptoms out of proportion. When Ángela places a hand on Bea’s back, Bea recoils at the prospect that her mother will amplify her pain and anger: Bea attributes the pain to a muscle contracture from carrying a heavy suitcase and considers it minor, while anticipating that Ángela might call for her to be admitted to López Ibor. The moment concentrates the concept’s central tension. The same touch that can make Ángela a precise guide for strangers may feel intrusive to her daughter, who does not want her discomfort magnified. The gift offers a means of attending to suffering, but neither its usefulness nor the love it earns makes that attention effortless for the person who feels—or the people who live with her doing so.