Ilaria

Ilaria is twenty-four, she is invented by us for this section, and what she does in Milan is call shows. Four days in September, four in February, and for twenty minutes at a time she owns everything that happens before anyone sees anything.

Minute twenty. A courtyard space off via Savona, doors still shut, four hundred chairs and nobody in them. Thirty-four exits. Tape on the floor with a name on each strip in marker, and a running order on a board she has not looked at since Tuesday because it is already in her head.

Minute fourteen. A change comes down from the atelier: two looks swapped, which moves a pair of shoes, a jewellery handover and one girl’s entire window to get out of a dress. Ilaria renumbers the tape and runs the new order past the line twice, at the volume of someone ordering coffee. Backstage at that hour has the acoustics of a car park. People at the far end hear her anyway.

Minute six. Dressers everywhere, the sound desk testing, and a small quiet zone around her that everybody is working around without having agreed to.

Minute one. A flat hand between someone’s shoulder blades, a count, and go.

That is the whole of her gift and it is not a small one. She is unhurried in the precise minutes when nobody else can be, which in this city is worth more than taste and is paid accordingly.

Away from the job she is cold to people who have done nothing to deserve it. There is no strategy in it. She has finished forming her view of an evening by ten past and sees no reason to keep her face busy while the rest of the table gets there. A bar off corso Buenos Aires at one in the morning does the thing rooms do when she comes in, which is go quieter near the door for a second and then louder than before.

Men read the flat expression as a scoreboard and set about putting something on it. That is the funniest recurring event in her life and she has never once corrected anyone.

Milan is in the City Index with the other real cities this invented cast stands in. The rest of them are in Profiles, and she has time for perhaps one.