Katherine Anne Porter (1890 – 1980)
American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet, and political activist, best known for her best-selling novel Ship of Fools. In 1966, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Maria Concepción was first published in The Century Magazine in December 1922 and in Flowering Judas and Other Stories on January 1st1935.
Available to read online here.
This is the first of three stories in the volume Points of View to be given the style classification by Moffett and McElheny of Anonymous Narration – Dual Character Point of View. Their introduction begins: “The narrators of the next three stories continue to offer the kinds of knowledge that a confidant, eyewitness or chorus might supply, but they expand the confidant’s role as informer by presenting the inner life of two characters.”
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t read the story yet and want to before you read the summary of it below, stop now!
Maria Concepción
A proud, strong, assertive, Christian woman, 18-year-old Maria Concepción makes her way to market, quietly excited about the baby she is carrying which, together with husband Juan Villegas, will make her family complete. A desire to eat some honey causes her to stop at the house of old Lupe and her daughter, 15-year-old Maria Rosa, a beekeeper from whom she has often bought honey in the past. She hears laughter from within and is amused to discover Maria Rosa has male company. However, when she realises the man is her own husband, Juan Villegas, her marital idyll is shattered.
She continues with her day, stupefied and under a cloud. We soon discover that Juan has run away with Maria Rosa and abandoned Maria Concepción, and that four days after she gives birth to her baby, it dies. She lives a solitary, bitter existence. Juan, meanwhile, had gone to war, but had deserted, and he and Maria Rosa are captured by military police; only an intervention from a senior officer, who recognises Juan from his work at the archaeological dig, where the officer’s friend is in charge, saves him from being shot.
Juan has lost his initial infatuation with the talkative Maria Rosa but he still prefers her company; nevertheless, he returns to Maria Concepción because they are married and he looks forward to having a relationship with both women. Maria Concepción is unmoved by his return, but realising she is now in a position of power, she murders Maria Rosa. Juan has no choice but to accept this; he and the whole community come together to protect her from the police questioning. The police know she killed her but cannot prove it. And, in her final act of revenge against Maria Rosa, she takes her baby as her own.
Dense and intense, this short story is notable for its intricate characterisations, powerful use of language and its cunning, seamless integration of narrative with conversation. Even from its first paragraph, the writing is sensuous and slow to read: “the white dusty road, where the maguey thorns and the treacherous curved spines of organ cactus had not gathered so profusely.” When describing Maria Rosa and Lupe’s jacal, Porter’s description is rounded and heavily visual: “The leaning jacal of dried rush-withes and corn sheaves, bound to tall saplings thrust into the earth, roofed with yellowed maguey leaves flattened and overlapping like shingles, hunched drowsy and fragrant in the warmth of noonday. The hives, similarly made, were scattered towards the back of the clearing, like small mounds of clean vegetable refuse. Over each mound there hung a dusty golden shimmer of bees.”
When Maria Concepción realises that her husband is having an affair with Maria Rosa, the sensual language reflects the physical effect it has on her body: “María Concepción did not stir nor breathe for some seconds. Her forehead was cold, and yet boiling water seemed to be pouring slowly along her spine. An unaccountable pain was in her knees, as if they were broken.” Porter says that Maria Concepción is lost under a “heavy cloud”, before she can gather her senses about her and carry on with her day. “She burned all over now, as if a layer of tiny fig-cactus bristles, as cruel as spun glass, had crawled under her skin.”
Porter also uses sensual language to describe Juan; pleased with his exploits, “he was walking in the early sunshine, smelling the good smells of ripening cactus-figs, peaches, and melons, of pungent berries dangling from the pepper-trees, and the smoke of his cigarette under his nose. He was on his way to civilian life with his patient chief. His situation was ineffably perfect, and he swallowed it whole.”
The characterisation of Maria Concepción herself is particularly memorable. Upright, Christian – to the extent that she insisted on paying extra to be married in church, rather than outside it, dependable, honest, but “always as proud as if she owned a hacienda”. This pride doesn’t make her unpopular within her community, however; they see her pride as the reason that her baby died shortly after birth, “so they pitied her”. As soon as she realises that her husband has been unfaithful, her motivation is instantly one of revenge: “She wished to sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.”
She makes an excellent contrast with her husband, Juan, who is teased by his boss for his constant infidelities, and who reacts to being saved from being shot, with “a definite air of swagger about him. His hat, of unreasonable dimensions and embroidered with silver thread, hung over one eyebrow, secured at the back by a cord of silver dripping with bright blue tassels. His shirt was of a checkerboard pattern in green and black, his white cotton trousers were bound by a belt of yellow leather tooled in red.” Juan is the embodiment of a vain strutting peacock in comparison with his reserved, quiet, Christian wife. Used to having his cake and eating it, Porter describes Juan’s expression as “the proper blend of masculine triumph and sentimental melancholy. It was pleasant to see himself in the rôle of hero to two such desirable women.”
It’s the character of Lupe, the old pagan woman who believes in superstition, and whose daughter has been murdered, who holds the final power over Maria Concepción’s future; “a glance at the listening circle assured Lupe of their thrilled attention. She enjoyed the dangerous importance of her situation. She could have ruined that María Concepción with a word, but it was even sweeter to make fools of these gendarmes who went about spying on honest people.”
The story itself, of a wronged woman taking revenge and her community supporting her, examines traditional gender roles and societal structure, but is perhaps of less significance than the effective use of language and the thoroughly convincing characterisations that fill the tale.
The next story in the anthology is the second of three to be classified by Moffett and McElheny as Anonymous Narration – Dual Character Point of View, Unlighted Lamps by Sherwood Anderson.
