[1] Pietro Di Leo, security officer of a department store in Milan, where the girl he is dating also works as a make-up artist, is separated from his wife and with a son that he only sees on weekends.

He is a very dissatisfied man, whose psychosomatic suffering (loss of nose bleeds, outbursts of anger, visions) reveals a situation of profound discomfort.

Having failed to work as a seamstress, Pabe is hired as a waitress in a hotel when she has already cut her hair, put on ordinary clothes, removed her earrings, and passes herself off as an Italian raised with a Greek accent.

Pietro is totally immersed in his new life, he no longer has psychosomatic attacks, he takes off his bourgeois suit and has his mustache lengthened; Pabe, who was a virgin and perhaps now is also pregnant, is in love and happy with him, but from the outside she continually suffers moral violence (the sight of a Roma expelled from the bar where she is instead sitting because she is believed to be Italian; the encounter with another Roma in poverty who stops her by asking her for money first and then, recognizing her as a gypsy, tries to talk to her) and physical violence (a hotel customer tries to rape her).

The final blow comes when the hotel manager asks her if the rumors circulating about her real ethnic identity are true, because in this case, the first person to be suspected of any theft would be her.