The Other Profile by Irene Graziosi

Author:Irene Graziosi [Graziosi, Irene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

1 Translated by Adriana Baranello

PART THREE

After the trip to Paris, time passes more quickly. I’m sometimes caught out by how much I’ve changed, even since the previous week. I can’t say precisely what these changes are, but when I think back to something I did or said in the recent past, it’s as if I’m watching someone else in my place.

I confide in Gloria about this feeling: her eyes open wide and she says it’s the same for her. In fact, her appearance betrays much more of this change than mine does. She has regained a bit of weight and her jawbones no longer protrude so sharply, even if I sometimes catch her massaging them, as if checking she can still feel them through the skin. Unlike Gloria’s influencer friends, who display a suspicious concern about her eating habits, I say nothing when she eats and nothing when she doesn’t; I just take mental notes in a silent surveillance—sometimes in a spirit of care, sometimes of envy. For the most part, I am amazed when I see her eat and witness her body becoming less skeletal: it means I haven’t infected her. She is still untainted. Feeling this protective of someone else is new to me, and although it is entangled with other less noble sentiments, it makes me wonder whether, deep down, I’m a better person than I thought I was.

We work all the time. We go to publicity events where we smile like a pair of fools; we go to photo shoots where Gloria is told to get into awkward poses that make her uncomfortable. What we’re really doing is prostrating ourselves to the bizarre requests of the brands and the Instagram algorithm. The latter is continuously changing: sometimes it wants Gloria to post ten-second videos, sometimes it wants her to put up photos on her grid without sharing them to her stories. But they both demand the same thing: that Gloria be herself, without ever really being herself.

We haven’t talked about Lavinia since Paris. Or rather, I have tried several times to find out how that night affected Gloria, but whenever I ask, she shakes her head or gives me an evanescent smile. Then I try to intuit her mood in other ways. I find her crying in the toilets on photo shoots, or, when she invites me to her house, I find her lying on the bed in a onesie, eyes empty, staring at her phone, surrounded by a tide of half-opened packages on the floor. Each time she is called up to perform as her public avatar, another tiny piece is chipped off of whatever remains of her core after so many years of inhibition.

In April, Anna Ricordi had the first in a long series of little accidents. On a windy day her car, a small silver CityCar, crashed into a pole. It didn’t cause any damage, but the way the accident happened was cause for concern for herself and Valentina, and then also for Gloria.

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