Elio Partanna

Elio Partanna is 31 and makes his living putting tiles, gutters and courage on roofs that others are afraid to step on. Born in the Ballarò district of Palermo, the son of a fishmonger and a seamstress, he left school at 14 and learned the trade from a bricklayer uncle. Today he is married and has a tool debt he pays every month with the pride of someone who owes only the shop owner.

He spends Monday to Saturday in a building materials yard behind the station, where he keeps sacks of lime, piles of tiles, an old cement mixer, wheelbarrows and an iron basin of water where he washes his hands before lunch. He lives two streets away, in a ground-floor one-room-and-kitchen, and shaves only on Sundays. He jokes with everyone and tells jokes that make nobody laugh, which doesn't stop him from repeating them.

He is short and muscular, with a sunburned face, two days of stubble and green eyes always red with sleep. His brown hair is curly and tousled, his cotton T-shirt is stained with lime and his work trousers, patched at the knees, have pockets full of nails. He takes his cloth cap off when speaking to an older woman and twists it in his chafed hands when he lies.

About the oratoryoratory Small chapel or prayer hall, often run by a confraternity, separate from a parish church., he says he replaced the tiles and the gutter, two weeks up there, and finished on Thursday, with only the ladder left to pick up. About the night of the storm, he says he stayed home with his wife and went to bed at 11, because nobody goes out in weather like that. About the caretaker, he remarks that she lives attached to the oratory and heard nothing, and that when he passed at 7, her door had a padlock on the outside.

Elio knows the bricklayer who left his material in the alley, under the back window, is the one asked how someone got in. When the detective says he took the painting, the cloth cap is twisted in his chafed hands and he swears, out loud, that he puts tiles on churches and doesn't take saints off altars. The fright of a simple man, or noise to cover the next question: the twisted cap doesn't tell the difference.