A year ago the death of Queen Elizabeth

No one can touch the queen, you can’t even shake her hand: in the presence of Elizabeth II you can only bow. Yet, her subjects love her physicality, her stainless figure despite the passage of time, a guarantee of strength and stability. And they are not yet ready for a successor to the throne.
October 2021. Queuing at Sainsbury’s supermarket. The cashier, a middle-aged Indian woman, wearily drags the products onto the reader and comments on the queen’s hospitalization with the customer in front of me, an elderly English woman. “When she leaves, having another ruler will be a shock. Look around, everyone in this shop has seen only you on the throne. We will physically miss you.” The old lady, I’d say in her seventies, nods. “Since I was a child, she’s the only queen I’ve ever had.”
Luckily the hospitalization lasted only one day, but long enough to make me think that I had never considered her from this point of view. The physical absence of the queen, the physical absence of a body that no one can touch (one does not shake hands with the queen), but in front of which, by protocol, one can only bow. Because Elizabeth II, with her almost 96 years, of which 70 years on the throne are now celebrated, is more than an icon and an institution for all the people who were born and raised under her reignpractically everyone who is shopping with me, and the vast majority of English citizens, who were born after she ascended the throne of St. George.
The cashier at Sainsbury’s is right. It is the queen’s body that will one day be missed, even for those who – as surely as the cashier herself and the old lady at the checkout – have never met her in person, but she has felt her presence throughout her life.
She’s always been there. Precisely physically, and not only through its own image, reproduced in millions of copies – from banknotes to postage stamps, from merchandising trinkets for tourists to mugs on the stalls of the Portobello market – so powerful because it managed despite everything not to be inflated.

The queen’s body, as a charismatic figure, has always remained the same. During these 70 years of her reign, Elizabeth has aged, her back has bent, her figure has become smaller and shakier, but basically she has never changed. She was already old when she was young, and she was young when she was old. She recently turned down the magazine’s Personality of the Year award The Oldie, motivating that one is as old as one feels. And she clearly didn’t feel old and perhaps she never even felt young, when she found herself treading the stage in the first person, she who was supposed to be a minor royal figure and who was not destined to become queen.
A queen unbeknownst to her and probably even against her will (you know, we’ll never know) who has always appeared as an immortal, an ageless highlander, with a body that was there to preside over the Crown, her role and his charisma. Her presence was enough to send a message. I am thinking of two examples: during the first lockdown, when fear was rampant and coffins, lacking space for burials, piled up in a shed built by the military right next to Buckingham Palace, and the virus seemed to never end, in the English newspapers – and of the whole world then – a photo of the queen on horseback appeared in Windsor park, where she had retired at the beginning of the pandemic. cthe rumor that Prince Philip was dead and that she too was ill circulated insistently, that photo expertly circulated by the spin doctors of the royal house had a clear message: if the queen rides a horse, the country is also on horseback. All this will end, my body proves it, which is here for you, for my people, my subjects. And the body of a queen riding a horse, in her country trench coat and with her customary scarf wrapped around her head, means there’s nothing to worry about. She’s been through it all and seen it all, this body, and this terrible thing too shall pass. Just seeing it was a panacea for the morale of the populace fascinated by monarchical mythology, but also for the more sophisticated citizens, those who call themselves republicans but who cannot ignore the queen’s body.

Source: Vanity Fair

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