There’s a premise at the heart of Domenico Starnone’s novella Trust, that never really seemed plausible. Starnone wants us to believe that secrets shared by a young couple — things they are two ashamed to confess to anyone else — haunt them for decades.
The couple in question are Pietro, a literature teacher, and Teresa, one of his students with whom he has a passionate and turbulent relationship. After one of their repeated arguments Teresa comes up with an idea she thinks will create such a strong bond between them that they will never break up again.
Let’s say I tell you a secret, something so awful that I’ve never even told it to myself, but then you have to confide something just as horrible to me, something that would destroy your life if anyone came to know it. She smiled, as if she were inviting me to play a game, but deep down she looked quite tense. Her anxiety was contagious, I was stunned, I was concerned that, at only twenty-three years of age, she could already have a secret so very unmentionable. I, at thirty, had one, and it had to do with an affair so embarrassing that I blushed just thinking about it.
Any relationship counsellor would most likely be rolling their eyes in despair overt this strategy. And they’d be right. Within days of this pledge, Pietro and Teresa break up and this time there is no going back.
They move on in life separately. She leaves Italy for the USA where she becomes a successful and famous scientist. He marries a mathematician and fellow teacher, becomes a father and gains notoriety for his radical thoughts on the education system.
Yet Pietro cannot shake off his fear that one day Teresa will turn up and blow up his carefully crafted public persona. Even 40 years or so later he still frets about the possibility.
What are these terrible secrets they shared when they were young? Since we never get to discover this, most of Trust just felt like a big tease. Of course, people can and do worry about things they let slip and later wish they’d kept silent about but are we honestly expected to believe they fret about the possibility of discovery for 40 years?? Maybe if you’re a high profile figure who has built a reputation of being squeaky- clean but Pietro isn’t anywhere in that league.
Actually Terese does in fact prick the bubble that Pietro has created around their secret: “… today, I barely remember what I told him I’d done, and I’m surprised that I recall little of what he’d confided in me,” she reflects late on in the novel.
It might have been easier to ignore the difficulties about the secret that not much of a secret , if the characters had been more interesting.But it was hard to connect with any of them.
The majority of Trust is narrated by Pietro and though he tries hard to convince us that he’s a very reasonable man, I found him an obnoxious figure.
According to his version of events, he becomes a thought-leader on education, a man who gains a large following of admirers but actually he writes one essay which gets stretched into two books. He has more than a touch of the fantasist about him I felt,
He also has a very dismissive attitude towards women, seen most particularly in the way he treats his wife. Her academic career is of minor significance compared to his own he believes. Instead of supporting her desire to gain recognition and funding for her research, he just expects her to fit this in while looking after the children. In the meantime he goes swanning off to various conferences and dinners with his attractive agent.
Why is she so dissatisfied, I’m her husband, the father of her children, she should be happy about the impression I make: the better things go for me, the better off her life, and Emma’s, and Sergio’s, and that of the baby who’s about to arrive.
On another occasion Pietro congratulates himself that she’s regained her looks after childbirth. As the last phrase indicates, once again everything revolves around him:
… now in my house and in my bed there was a stable woman who considered herself an excellent math teacher, a mother who saw after the needs of three children and a wife who, after a long period of decline, had gone back to looking after herself so as not to look bad next to a husband who’d gained some discreet success.
The book abounds with his misogynistic attitudes, making it impossible for me to feel anything but distaste for this man.
I had looked forward to reading Trust having enjoyed Trick, an earlier novella by Dominic Starnone but this latest one isn’t in the same league.
My thanks go to the publisher Europa Edition and Netgalley for my copy of this book,
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