A

A is the narrator’s married foreign lover and the center of the passion she describes: a man whose calls, visits, and absences reorder her attention, while his own feelings remain difficult to know. Their relationship is shaped by secrecy and unequal dependence on his timetable. When he eventually returns after leaving France, the encounter does not restore the man she had carried in memory; instead, it makes the affair’s intensity and its lack of lasting meaning newly visible.

Identity and the Affair

A is a foreigner, and the narrator’s knowledge of his life and culture is limited. Their conversations take place in French, which he speaks fairly well, while she cannot express herself in his language. His imperfect, sometimes uncertain use of French makes their exchanges approximate rather than fully transparent. The narrator comes to regard this linguistic distance not simply as an obstacle but as a protection against imagining that they share a perfect relationship or form a single whole. The man she loves remains, in the end, a stranger to her.

He is married, and the affair’s practical terms reflect that condition. The narrator cannot phone or write to him freely, give him presents that would be hard for him to explain, or set the terms of their meetings. She gives him letters as he leaves, suspecting that he may tear them up during his drive. She avoids leaving traces on his clothes or body and avoids places where his wife is present. Her caution is motivated both by concern that the wife might discover the liaison and by fear that A, if faced with conflict or resentment, might stop seeing her.

What the Narrator Can Know

At first, the narrator reads A’s behavior as evidence that he feels the same passion she does. She recalls his radiant expression and silence when looking at her, his account of driving recklessly to reach her, and his stories about his childhood. As he becomes more distant and less forthcoming, that confidence falters. A mention of his father or of picking raspberries in the woods at twelve can revive her belief in their intimacy, while the end of his gifts makes her think of attentions she no longer receives. She repeatedly interprets small signs, then revises those interpretations.

Her uncertainty also changes what counts as proof. She initially suspects that a question about whether she will be away at Christmas might conceal jealousy or curiosity about another man; she later recognizes that it may have been only a practical question about arranging a meeting. She wonders what their afternoons together mean to him and concludes that she cannot confidently assign them a larger significance. In her account, the one certainty available to her is whether he desires her or does not. His interior life, by contrast, remains largely inaccessible.

A’s married status produces an especially painful division between the private bond the narrator feels and the ordinary life he shares elsewhere. She fears seeing him with his wife, partly because she imagines them together and partly because she worries that an intimate gesture—touching his neck or adjusting his clothes—might expose her attachment. The constraints do not extinguish her desire. Instead, they help sustain waiting: when a call from a telephone box fails, she learns to treat the silence as a possible prelude to a second call, when A can speak and ask to meet.

Departure and Return

A leaves France and returns to his own country. Six months later, the narrator describes the likelihood that she will never see him again, and the separation brings intense grief. In the period after his departure, she struggles to occupy herself and to maintain ordinary routines; even dressing and applying make-up take effort. Familiar media images of women waiting for men become difficult to look at because they reflect, and seem to repeat, her situation.

During the first Sunday of the war, A calls unexpectedly and says he wants to see her at once. The narrator has half an hour before his arrival and uses it to dress and make up; she waits in the hallway wearing a shawl he has never seen. He enters without knocking, as he used to. He appears to have been drinking and is unsteady. His arrival briefly revives the old pattern of a visit, but the circumstances are different: this is a return after a long absence, not a continuation of their former routine.

After their meeting, A wants coffee. The narrator learns that his life in the East resembles his life in France: he has the same kind of job, and still has no child, although his wife would like one. At thirty-eight, he retains a youthful appearance but looks more tired. She notices that his hands are less smooth and his nails less tidy, changes she tentatively associates with the colder climate of his country. When she reproaches him for not keeping in touch, he responds that he could have called merely to exchange greetings, without knowing what else to say. He has not received the postcard she sent to his former workplace in Paris.

They dress, gather their clothes from the floor, and she drives him to his hotel near the Étoile. They kiss and touch at traffic lights between Nanterre and Pont-de-Neuilly. On her way home through the La Défense tunnel, the narrator wonders where her story has gone and recognizes that she can hope for nothing more. A leaves three days later without another meeting. His promise to call remains unresolved: she does not know whether he means from his country or from Paris on a future visit, and she does not ask.

The Man Remembered and the Man Who Returns

The narrator later doubts that A’s final visit belongs to the same story as the affair she had lived and written about. She calls it almost nonexistent, as though it were only a date, 20 January. The man who returns is not the man she carried within herself during the year he was in France or the man who inhabited her writing. She believes she will never see that remembered man again. The distinction does not make the visit irrelevant: its very strangeness gives the passion a meaning that is not a lesson or a promise, but its lack of meaning beyond the intense reality it was for two years.

A’s remembered presence persists through particular details: a single photograph, his childhood memories and voice, and a glass from which he drank that the narrator keeps unwashed. She had decided to learn his language. These objects and intentions register how much importance she gave to him, but they do not establish how he understood the relationship. The glass preserves a trace of his visit; the photograph presents only a visible image, while the narrative’s more consuming A is made from memories, gestures, and desire.

A as the Subject of Writing

The narrator distinguishes writing about A from writing a book about him. He had told her that she would not write such a book, but she says she has instead translated into words the effect his existence had on her life. The writing is not addressed to him and, she believes, he will probably never read it; she describes it as an offering left to others. A is therefore central to the book without being fully represented as an independently knowable subject. Its subject is the alteration his presence brings about in the narrator.

That transformation is also a transformation in time and attention. The narrator dates the start of her writing to approximately two months after A’s departure, though she cannot remember the exact day. She can recall events from their relationship with striking specificity, including public events and an ordinary purchase made just before a planned meeting, but cannot connect the writing of a particular page with the rain or world events of the months when she wrote. Living through passion and writing about it, she observes, produce fundamentally different experiences of time.

She continues writing even after the immediate need to write has been satisfied, partly because stopping would bring the pages closer to being read and judged. The prospect of publication brings her nearer to society’s conventional values and questions about whether the work is autobiography. Writing thus preserves the experience without restoring the affair: A becomes the occasion for a record of how another person’s existence can redirect a life, while the returned man and the written pages alike expose the distance between experience and its surviving trace.