Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

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After a while I hear the staircase creaking, and then Miss Mamie comes in. She is wearing a soiled white nurse’s uniform, with a narrow white leather belt dangling around her waist, white cotton stockings, and soiled long white shoes. Her gray hair is cut very short, her face is full of indecipherable lines, and many of her teeth are missing. She always stands very close to me with one hand on her hip and the other usually on my shoulder, smiling, but watching my face closely like a doubtful child.

“My, how you keep plump,” she says and gives me a leer and a pinch. “I wish I could.”

We talk for a while about the weather, about how she would like to get out for a drive some evening soon but doesn’t think she’ll be able to, how she has been there for thirty years, and how the “Collector” is in Cuba on a little visit to her relatives, leaving her with more work to do than usual. The “Collector” is a very old lady, supposedly the superintendent of the hospital, who goes slowly around town from door to door, with a black imitation-leather market bag over her arm, begging money to add to the one hundred and thirty dollars a month.

After the “little talk,” we take a tour around the ground floor to see the “patients.” There are only four today, and three of them are permanent residents. First comes Mr. “Tommy” Cummers. Mr. Tommy has lived at the Mercedes Hospital for fourteen years, and his cousin Mr. “Sonny” Cummers has lived there for three. Miss Mamie always uses the Mister, and although they are both over seventy they are called “Sonny” and “Tommy.” (It must be the idea of the helplessness it implies that makes the southern use of childish names so sad. I hear old men speaking of “my daddy,” and another man I know, aged sixty, was found dead drunk under the counter at the fish market, just two days after he had left his house, saying, “Mama, I’m going to be a good boy from now on.”)

Mr. Tommy is singing hymns as we step across the patio to his room. His feet and ankles are paralyzed; he sits in an armchair beside the door with a sheet over his knees, and sings hymns, out of time and out of tune, in a loud rough voice all day long. He keeps a large Bible and two hymnbooks beside him and is rather inclined to boast that he reads nothing else. He sings the hymns partly to spite Mr. Sonny, who is sitting in the next room just behind the folding doors and who, before he came to Mercedes Hospital, was not able to lead as sheltered and virtuous a life as Mr. Tommy has for the last fourteen years.

While we are there, the housekeeper comes in. She is a plump little Cuban lady with little gold earrings shaking in her ears. She brings three cigars in a paper bag for Mr. Tommy, who takes a dime out of his breast pocket and pays her for them. As soon as we leave, he starts singing again, and while we call on Mr. Sonny, he is almost bellowing.

Mr. Sonny is dying of dropsy; we merely say good afternoon. He sits at the far end of one of the long side rooms, all alone, on a straight chair with his feet on a little footstool. His swollen body is wrapped in a gray blanket and his head is done up in a sort of turban of white. He bows to us indifferently; his thin pointed face is dark brown. He looks so exactly like an eighteenth-century poet that although Miss Mamie is chattering away to me about his desperate condition, I can’t pay much attention to her. I’m expecting to hear him declaim from the shadows:

Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife.

In another large room lies a tubercular Negro named Milton, here for the third time. Miss Mamie says, “We don’t exactly take them, they have a place. But he is so sick and we have so few patients.” She pulls me past the door, but I see a large black man with long thin legs stretched out on an iron cot under the mosquito bar. The walls of this room are ashes-of-roses. There are six beds but only Milton’s is made up. It is on the sunny side of the building, it is hot, it smells strongly of disinfectant, and the long black legs look strange, seen through the ethereal cascade of mosquito netting.

Then we go into the sunlight, across a short gangplank, into a little square building.

“Our little crazy house,” says Miss Mamie affectionately. “You haven’t seen Antoñica, have you? Well, she isn’t crazy any more. I’m going to take her back inside as soon as the doctor comes around again at the end of the week, but I have to keep her here awhile. She’s only been here three weeks.”

Sitting close to the window in an old-fashioned high-back rocking chair is a tiny creature in a long ragged flannel nightgown with a ruffle around the neck. The sun falls directly on her face; the hot wind blows in on her straight from the embers of the huge red Poinciana tree outside the window.

“She can’t hear nothing and she can’t see nothing,” says Miss Mamie, “she’s just like a little baby. I do everything for her just like a little baby.”

She unclasps a hand from the arm of the rocking chair and holds it. It holds hers tightly, and Antoñica raises her face to Miss Mamie’s and begins in Spanish in a loud harsh voice. I try to make out what she is saying, but Miss Mamie says it doesn’t make any sense.

“She’s terrible fond of me,” she says. The old woman’s hair has been cut so that it is about an inch long. Miss Mamie keeps rubbing her hand over the small skull, rather roughly, I think. But yes, it is true — Antoñica does appear to be fond of her. She snatches Miss Mamie’s hand to her cheek, and jabbers louder than ever.

“She outlived all her folks, she ain’t got anyone left, she’s way over ninety,” says Miss Mamie in a sort of coarse singsong, rubbing the old woman’s white head and rocking her back and forth. “Terrible fond of me. I feed her just like a baby, just like a baby.”

Antoñica’s wool-white hair glistens in the sun. The ruff, the unnatural motion, her feet curled up off the floor, and her clutching hands make her look like a rare and delicate specimen of Chinese monkey. But her eyes, which are bright milky blue, like the flames of a gas burner when they have just been turned off and are about to sink back into the black pipes, give her an apocryphal appearance.

Perhaps she is an angel, speaking with “tongues.”

Miss Mamie and I go back to the parlor and stand and talk some more. I know that some people consider her a saint. Probably they are right. She is capable of arousing the same feelings that the saints do: profoundest admiration and suspicion. Thirty dollars a month wages, thirty years of unselfish labor, “managing” on one hundred and thirty dollars a month for “everything” are all incredible feats — unless one does believe she is a saint.

There are other proofs of Miss Mamie’s unusual character. There is her indifference to personal cleanliness (although she keeps her patients very clean). There is her solitariness: she rarely, if ever, leaves the hospital. There is her appearance: her face, her hands, and those long ascetic feet are all in her favor. Above all, there is her inquisitiveness and talkativeness and that childlike expression in her eyes when she takes hold of my shoulders and peers into my face and asks question after question — just as St. Anthony might have rushed out of his cell, and seized a traveler by the elbow and naïvely but determinedly asked him for news of the world. In fact, all the saints must have been insistent buttonholers, like Miss Mamie.

I suddenly remember José Chacón. Seeing Miss Mamie now, as sitting patiently at the mouth of her cavern on the edge of an endless desert, I wonder if the old man had been the wild “lion of the desert,” coming to her roaring, with thorns in his paws? I ask about him.

“Oh, José. He was here lots of times, seven or eight times.”