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Thursday, November 5, 2015

A story about peasant life with not a note of condescension: Maria Concepcion

Katherine Anne Porter's story - her first published story (1922), in fact, Maria Concepcion - is quite the masterpiece, a flawless work of traditional story crafting, material worthy of a novel, of an epic, told swiftly and efficiently in about 20 pages: set in Mexico in the early 20th century (the war for independence, Pancho Villa, I guess, is going on - I wish I knew my history and could place it better). We're in a small village and as the story opens the title character is carrying a bunch of live fowl, bringing them to the archeological dig in her village (one of the fine touches is how the peasants whom the scientist hires to work on the dig are completely puzzled as to why he should be excited every time they find an old piece of broken pottery). En route, she passes the house of a young (15) beekeeper and finds the girl is having an affair w/ her husband. On confrontation, the two run away - he serves in the army and she follows the troops, we don't learn much about that nor do we need to - but a year passes, he deserts, and he and the young woman (Maria Rosa, I think) return to the village - and he moves back with Maria Concepcion. But she exacts her revenge - neatly foreshadowed by the earlier scene of her killing and dressing one of the live fowl. Oddly, the husband, although he has no intention of being faithful, develops a plan - they both lie and say they were home all night, they can't imagine who killed Maria Rosa, the investigators don't really give a damn they just want to wrap up the case and go home. Maria Concepcion (her name interesting here), who has lost her child by her legal husband, takes Maria Rosa's newborn child as her own, their own - a very strange and sorrowful ending with a bit of uplift, and the story itself a vivid portrait w/ not a note of condescension of life in this remote village. It would take a lot of fleshing out, as there is relatively little dialogue in this story, much of it interior, and a fairly large caesura, but I think this could be - and maybe has been - a good short film.

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