Sometimes I passed the time imagining the nights she cried alone at the edge of alcohol, with those effortless but dreadfully sad, unreconciled tears; those listless, ritual tears, which welled up almost baffled by themselves, by their own unfathomable, remote misery, which could only be explained with great difficulty; and I thought if someone were to ask me, “What is she like?” and I had to answer then and there, I wouldn’t be able to describe her, or remember her at the moment she did anything. If someone were waiting for my response, I’d only be able to describe the way she returned to her tears.
After a while—a few hours were enough—I would manage to conjure her in other gestures and careless habits. She seemed destined to be a memory, nothing more than a memory. The appeal, the happiness she might exude, began when her voice, the slow movement of her hands, were no longer too much of a hindrance or a distraction.
One night, she told me of how she would cry. The evening she cried in my presence, her brief and deliberate tears were easy to explain, since I assumed she was hoping that something, now lost, would come into the drawing room and settle down beside her, or beside one of the others. It might be a face, one face less, the same spider taking its usual path, the slit wrist of which they had spoken. I could also explain her way of crying alone because whole sentences she’d uttered followed me home, stretching after me uselessly; I couldn’t interpret them, or ask anyone to explain the many hidden corners of her fatigue and her selfishness.
“Some nights,” she said, “when my sisters have fallen asleep, I come back to the drawing room. I like to be in the drawing room. I can never remember anything when I’m lying in bed. So I sit in the armchair and smoke. I know I can sit there whenever I like, but I don’t want them to become accustomed, or to accustom myself, to the armchair seeming to be mine. I’ve never abandoned any habits willingly. And it’s too late to start now … If I’d thought of it before, perhaps I would always sit there so later they could say, ‘That was her chair.’ But it’s too late now, though ever since we’ve lived in this house I’ve noticed they seem to save it for me.”
I watched as she began her hurried tour through the scant list of memories she might have bequeathed them, had she thought of it before; hastily, distractedly, in the ruins of evenings that might still be left, in night-time fragments while her sisters slept: gathering white kid gloves, unmarked books, predictably slammed doors, the brand of her cigarettes, the day she braided her hair.
To help her, perhaps in the hope that she would leave more memories behind, I tried to counter her, “Memories are harmless. It’s lovely for you all to have your own routines. I like knowing that chair is yours, though I wish you would say so yourself. And if you did, perhaps the others might feel moved to choose their own. It would be such a small price to pay. I too would like to be able to say later, ‘That was her chair …’”
But she had already retreated towards her tears, and I could tell that she enjoyed them. That night, she asked me to come back after dinner, since it was her favorite time of day, and she would be alone for a while. I shouldn’t have accepted, since it meant seeing her another way, and I didn’t want to know her any more deeply, move any further into her private world, until the day came when I could listen to her with nothing to distract me.
That night she told me of how she cried. I remember how hard it was later, back in my house, to remember precisely how she broached what she wanted to say, and I even found myself writing down some of her words, because that must’ve been how she spoke to herself, to express her most intimate feelings, without anyone else knowing.
I knew she cried. I knew, too, that her tears were neither unexpected, nor startled by their own weight, but that she would wake up one morning, determined to cry that night. She needn’t be in a hurry, betray a different kind of sorrow, or even pity herself. It was enough to go through the day with her mind made up, knowing she wouldn’t fail, that nothing could make her delay it, as if, long before, she’d marked the date with a cross: “Tonight is my time to cry.” Calmly, as if awaiting something pleasant and familiar, she would sit with the others in the drawing room, go into the dining room, return to the drawing room after dinner, and then, when they said good night, she would undress and lie in bed, until the other two fell asleep. Then she would get up again, and, wrapping something around her shoulders, go silently into the drawing room, to pass the time with her tears.
Sitting in her armchair—so she told me, since I never saw her then—she would wait a little while, as if to settle comfortably. I don’t know what it was that she remembered, with which tearful word she endeavored to let herself go, since she never told me. Perhaps it was a “Farewell” tossed by the wind, which she couldn’t hear; someone murmuring, in a careless moment, “Blessed are the eyes that behold her”; perhaps a melancholy evening after a piano lesson. Since I knew so little, I couldn’t list all the likely scenarios: imagine a deceased father, her own predictable widowhood. I could only surround her with events reminiscent of the way she sat in the drawing room, and even then, it was so difficult that I had to write many things down, so as to try to understand them later, when I had the chance.
After a while, as she smoothed her nightgown over her knees—and perhaps that was the best, most solemn moment—a tear would come to her eye, though she would still wait a while before letting go. But not for long. Whatever was dwelling inside her would suddenly come to life, and—as if deliberately stirring belated farewells, blessed eyes, letters still unreturned, a piano in the afternoon with no desire to keep playing, two lifeless sisters, perhaps a wail beside the unworn gloves—with bitter sobs, motionless at first, then letting her tears fall onto her hands, onto her nightgown, she would cry for an hour, two hours, gazing ahead, not wiping her eyes, unblinking, as if posing for a weeping portrait, while her tears, like the first heavy drops of rainfall, bathed her nightgown, leaving small damp patches on her chest, on her skirt, that little by little turned cold.
When she’d finally cried so much that only rough fragments of sobs were left in her throat, she would get up slowly, return to her bedroom, not needing to turn on the light, climb into bed, and soon fall fast asleep. Sometimes she had to lie on her side so she couldn’t feel, against her skin, the final swollen drops of her deliberate tears.