Desire as capital and investment

Desire as capital and investment is the narrator’s recurring way of understanding her passion for A: waiting, spending, bodily effort, and even time apart become forms of expenditure that seem to deepen the relationship. The metaphor is deliberately unstable. Intimacy appears to accumulate, but the more intense it becomes, the more sharply its limited duration is felt.

The Arithmetic of Intimacy

After each meeting, the narrator counts how many times they have made love. She feels that every encounter adds something new to their relationship, while fearing that the very accumulation of touch and pleasure will eventually draw them apart. In her formulation, physical intensity is not a secure store of value: what the couple gains in intensity, they lose in time.

The briefness of their meetings gives this accounting its urgency. The narrator removes her watch before A arrives, while he continues to wear his; she watches the clock and measures the remaining hours. Their time together is therefore experienced both as an accumulation of shared intimacy and as a resource visibly running out.

Expenditure as Commitment

The investment extends beyond the meetings themselves. The narrator gives money to people sitting in Metro corridors while wishing A would call, and promises to send two hundred francs to UNICEF if he visits before a chosen date. She breaks with her ordinary habits and becomes willing to spend freely, interpreting waste as part of the overall investment required by her passion. That investment also includes waiting, daydreaming, and the effort she devotes to her body.

Even practical arrangements take on this meaning. When she cannot bring herself to give up her summer holiday without making the depth of her passion unmistakable to A, she instead books a train ticket and hotel room in Florence for a date two months away. The trip lets her separate from him without ending the relationship; its eight days become an investment in longing and imagination rather than a release from desire.

Distance Converted into Imagination

Alone in Florence, the narrator walks through the city, visits museums and churches, and continually imagines A alongside her. She makes three wishes in the churches, all related to him, and reads the city through the lens of her own love rather than through a guidebook’s dates and histories. On the train back, she understands the eight days as a story she has lived through in her imagination: an ordeal undertaken for the betterment of love, and a further investment in craving through absence.

Popular culture also helps her recognize and authorize passion. Sentimental songs, which she had previously ignored, now seem to speak plainly about its universal force. She begins with the horoscope in women’s magazines and seeks out films she expects to encapsulate her own story, feeling disappointed when a film she wants to see is no longer showing. At home, she imagines that A may be watching the same program or a film whose lovers resemble them; if he has seen it, she is inclined to read his choice as a sign that their affair has greater intensity or legitimacy. These cultural references do not change the circumstances of the relationship, but they give her ways to interpret and sustain its emotional value.

The Investment After Departure

When A leaves France and returns to his own country, the system of investment becomes a means of enduring absence. The narrator describes waking in the night in despair and struggling to fill the day; even advertisements and lingerie shop windows recall a woman waiting for a man. She wants to remember A’s body in detail and recognizes how narrowly memory can approach hallucination. Desire’s investment now consists less in shared encounters than in preserving his presence through recollection.

The narrator’s statement that she measured time differently, with her whole body, gathers the concept into a physical and temporal register. In retrospect, she says A brought her closer to the world by revealing what people are capable of, including desires and beliefs she had once considered absurd. The investment does not promise a return in the form of a lasting relationship: it records how passion altered her experience, and how she translated that alteration into words for others.