I’D ALWAYS HAD A PROPENSITY FOR WANDERING, AND A perplexing fascination for the local drifters I stopped to chat with at the slightest opportunity. That afternoon I roamed the neighborhood in a daze for hours, looking for some kindred spirit, a human being to talk to. Beneath a bridge I sat down alongside a down-and-out and dissolved into tears. The old man barely raised an eyebrow and mumbled some words in a language I didn’t recognize. We sat for a while in silence, watching the barges as they floated by. Then I stood up and went on my way, not heading in any particular direction.

Almost mechanically, I eventually found myself in front of an elegant apartment building where one of G’s friends lived—Emil Cioran, a Romanian-born philosopher whom he had introduced to me at the beginning of our relationship as his mentor.

I was filthy, my hair was a mess, my face smudged with dirt from the hours I’d spent sitting on the ground in the neighborhood whose every bookshop, every crack in the sidewalk, every tree reminded me of G. I pushed open the heavy door of the building. Trembling, dirt beneath my fingernails, sweating, I must have looked like a vagabond who’d just given birth behind a bush. Tiptoeing, my heart thumping, I made my way up the carpeted staircase and rang the bell, my face burning as I held back tears. A diminutive middle-aged woman opened the door. She looked at me with a guarded expression. I said I was sorry to disturb, but I’d like to see her husband if he was home; all of a sudden Emil’s wife’s expression turned to horror as she took in my disheveled appearance. “Emil, it’s V., G.’s friend!” she shouted toward the other end of the apartment, then bustled down a corridor that led to the kitchen, and from the metallic sounds I guessed she was putting on the kettle to make a cup of tea.

Cioran came into the room, one eyebrow raised, a discreet but eloquent indication of his surprise, and invited me to sit down. That was all it took for me to burst into tears. I wept like a baby howling for its mother, pathetically using my sleeve to try to wipe the snot from my nose. Cioran handed me an embroidered handkerchief.

The blind confidence that had led me to him was predicated on a single thing: his resemblance to my grandfather, who was also born in Eastern Europe. He had the same white hair with a receding hairline, combed toward the back of the head, the same piercing blue eyes, the same hooked nose and accent that could be cut with a knife (“Tzitrón? Tchocoláte?” as he poured the tea).

I’d never managed to finish any of his books, even though they’re extremely short, composed as they are only of aphorisms. He was known as a “nihilist.” And, it turned out, in this regard he did not disappoint.

“Emil, I can’t bear it any longer,” I said, hiccupping between sobs. “He tells me I’m crazy, and I shall end up going crazy if he carries on like this. His lies, the way he just disappears, all the girls who keep turning up at the hotel. I feel like a prisoner. I’ve got no one else to talk to. He’s alienated me from my friends, my family . . .”

“V.,” he interrupted me, in a very serious tone of voice. “G. is an artist, a great writer, and one day the world will recognize him as such. Or perhaps not, who knows? If you love him, you must accept who he is. G. will never change. It is an immense honor to have been chosen by him. Your role is to accompany him on the path of creation, and to bow to his impulses. I know he adores you. But too often women do not understand an artist’s needs. Did you know that Tolstoy’s wife spent her days typing out the manuscripts that her husband wrote in longhand, tirelessly correcting every single mistake? She was utterly self-sacrificing and self-effacing, which is precisely the kind of devotion that every artist’s wife owes the man she loves.”

“But, Emil, he never stops lying to me.”

“But literature is all about lying, my dear young friend! Didn’t you realize?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was this really him, the great philosopher, the wise man, uttering these words? Was he, the supreme intellectual authority, really asking a fifteen-year-old girl to put her life on hold for the sake of an old pervert? Telling her to zip it, once and for all? I couldn’t take my eyes off Cioran’s wife’s chubby little fingers gripping the handle of the teapot. I managed to restrain myself from releasing the flood of invective burning my lips. All dolled up, her blue-tinted hair matching her blouse, silently nodding at her husband’s every word. Once upon a time she’d been a successful actress. At some point she stopped making films. No need to ask when that was. The only practical observation that Emil deigned to offer me—more enlightening than I realized at the time—was that G. would never change.