Trust Issues

The Delicate Bargain of Trust

The foolishness of trusting what you love because you love it

Alexander Chee
Human Parts
Published in
15 min readJun 28, 2018

OnOn my first day in Florence, Italy, three years ago, I went into a tiny gelato shop near the apartment I was renting for the month, and after I ordered gelato, reached into my pocket to pay, and realized I didn’t have enough. I struggled to explain this in my limited Italian to the shopkeeper, a friendly young man who listened perhaps for a second before he breezily said, “Pay me later,” in excellent English.

I admit I was stunned. I’d never met him before. But what was interesting to me was that as he said this, I thought, I will. And I did. For the rest of the month, I went back and bought gelato whenever I had the impulse. I’ve been invited back to teach at the program that brought me there for several years now, and I go back all the time to this little shop for gelato, also wine, which he also sells. I make a point of going even when I am put up in neighborhoods that are not near him. He remembers me with a smile, a look of recognition that I don’t get from most other places I shop, perhaps because I came back to really pay him that first time. I remember him because he trusted me. He remembers me because he trusted me and I came through.

Last month I was there again as his country and mine turned down dark roads to ethnic cleansing, and the purging immigrants, and I went in several times to buy gelato as a hedge against the despair I felt, and to think about why this was happening. I thought again about how easy it was for me and him to trust each other, and how it began with his extended hand.

A thought came. How to balance that delicate bargain against these larger betrayals? I know it’s not a simple question, and yet, I am still asking it of myself.

TThere’s a story my aunt likes to tell about me. I was visiting her at her home in Maine, and in the middle of the night, realized the doors to the house were unlocked. She lives next to what counts as a busy road for that part of the state. I was staying in her barn loft for ten days, working on a novel, and as I tried to go to sleep, found that I could not. When I asked myself why I understood that it was because I knew she left her doors unlocked. And so I locked all…

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Alexander Chee
Human Parts

Author of the novels THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT and EDINBURGH, and the essay collection HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL.