The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 30
Carboni concluded the interrogation by asking about Anna Morisi’s religious observance.
“We sent her to do her duties, but whether she did them or not I couldn’t say. One thing is certain: she was no religious fanatic.”3
CHAPTER 20
The Inquisitor’s Trial
ANNA MORISI WAS NOT eager to be found by the Bologna authorities. She did not know what they might do to her. After all, were it not for her, Edgardo would never have been taken from his parents. Although she knew little about the new government beyond the fact that it was a foe of the old, she had heard her priest in Persiceto say that the new rulers were anti-Catholic, godless enemies of the Pope. If they thought nothing about barging into a convent in the middle of the night and hustling off the redoubtable Dominican friar, what chance had she in the face of their displeasure?
For Magistrate Carboni, back in Bologna, the time had come to see what he could learn from the Mortaras’ former servant. On February 9, he and his assistant set off in a carriage bound for Persiceto. On their arrival, they were escorted by the chief local magistrate to a sunlit corner room on the second floor of the town hall, which he had readied for them. A policeman went to get Anna Morisi, and she soon appeared.
The Bologna magistrate led the young woman through the preliminaries: “I’m Anna Morisi, daughter of Giovanni, who’s no longer living. I’m 23 years old. I was born in Persiceto and I live here, near the church of San Lorenzo. I work as a cotton spinner, and I’m married to Giuseppe Buongiovanni. I’ve got just one son, and I’m Catholic.”
Anna was actually 26 years old, but she had never been too clear on how old she was. Her exact age would ordinarily have made little difference, but the unexpected attention paid to her otherwise obscure life had turned her age into a topic of discussion from Rome to London, Munich to San Francisco. She herself had said that she was just 14 years old when she baptized Edgardo, and her youth was picked up by the Mortara-friendly press as further evidence of why the reported baptism should not be taken seriously. In fact, at the time that, by her account, she baptized Edgardo, she was nearing her nineteenth birthday.1
Asked if she knew why they had called her in, she replied: “I guess it’s because of the boy of my old employers, the Mortaras, Jews who live in Bologna, who I baptized, and who because of that was taken from his family by order of the Inquisitor, Father Feletti. I assume that’s the reason because I heard that this monk was recently put in jail.”
Anna was then asked to tell her story. Although she had hoped to avoid this encounter with the magistrate, now that she had the chance to give her own version of what had happened, she did so eagerly. Anna told of Edgardo’s sickness, which, as she recalled, took place in the winter of 1851 or 1852, when he was about 4 months old. (As Doctor Saragoni’s records would later reveal, Edgardo had taken ill at the end of August 1852, when he was just over a year old.) She told of the Mortaras’ apparent fear for his life. “One morning,” she recalled, “I saw them sitting, sad and crying, at a little table next to Edgardo’s crib, reading from a book in Hebrew that the Jews read when one of them is about to die.”
This scene made a big impression on her, she said, and so, a little later, when she was sent to buy some oil from Cesare Lepori’s grocery nearby, she couldn’t help telling him about the boy’s illness. Hearing the story, Anna recollected, “Lepori suggested that I baptize him, so that when he died he would go to heaven. But I told him I didn’t know how to baptize someone. I was only 14 or 15 years old, and didn’t have much education about Christianity, since I was raised so roughly.” The grocer, she said, assured her it was easy. All you had to do was say “ ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,’ take some water from a well, and sprinkle a few drops on the boy’s head.”
When I got back to the house, I saw that the parents were watching over their sick son, so I had to wait for about an hour. They finally left the room, which was the living room, and went to their bedroom; I don’t know why. I quickly drew a little water from the well, went over to the boy’s crib, and repeated the words that I’d been taught, with the fixed idea of sending a soul to heaven. I put the fingers of my right hand in the glass of water, sprinkled a few drops on the boy’s head, and in a moment it was all done, without anyone noticing.
To Anna’s surprise, shortly after the furtive ceremony Edgardo got better, and, she said, she gave no more thought to what she had done. But years later, just three months in fact before she left the Mortara home for good, another Mortara baby, Aristide, who was a little over a year old, also got sick. Two days before he died, Anna, on her way to the storage room upstairs, ran into another servant she knew, whose name was Regina—Anna could not recall her last name—a woman who worked for their neighbors, the Pancaldis. Regina asked her what the problem was with the Mortaras’ baby, for she had heard him screaming all night long. Anna told her what she heard the doctors say: the boy had something they called the “sacred flame” and would surely die.
“Regina then asked me,” said Anna, “ ‘Why don’t you baptize him?’ I said: ‘Not me. I already baptized another one of them, and I wouldn’t want him to live, like the other one did, and I told her the exact details about the baptism I gave Edgardo.”
About two months after she left the Mortaras and began to work for the Santandrea family—above five months in all after her conversation with Regina—a man appeared, delivering a printed summons for Anna to appear before the Father Inquisitor at San Domenico. Signora Santandrea read it to her.
“I obeyed the call and was brought into that convent, into a room where Father Feletti and another Dominican father were. Father Feletti had a book open and made me touch it on a page where I could see a little cross printed, and he told me that it was the Gospel, and he said that it was a kind of oath, which bound me not to say anything about what he’d question me about.” Father Feletti had then begun his investigation of the baptism:
“I innocently told him everything that I later told to those men [the Mortara brothers-in-law], and that other monk … wrote down everything I said, but they didn’t read it back to me, and I didn’t sign my cross to it, at least I don’t remember it. When he finally dismissed me, he told me again not to say anything about it.”
Her interrogation had taken place on a Saturday, around Christmastime, she said. Just a month later she returned to her hometown, San Giovanni in Persiceto, for she was soon to marry, and her groom was a local man. A few months later she heard rumors that the police, by order of the Holy Office, had taken Edgardo away, news “that surprised me and made me unhappy.” She then told of the visit by the two Mortara brothers-in-law, her initial conversation with them, and then the decision not to talk to them anymore: “In fact, our parish priest made me keep quiet and wouldn’t let me see the Jews again.”
Carboni asked whether she had told anyone other than Regina about the baptism. “At first,” she replied, “I didn’t say anything about it to anyone else, not even to the Confessor. But after I got to Persiceto, I told my sisters about it.”
After Anna repeated that it was Lepori who had told her to baptize Edgardo so he could go to heaven, Carboni asked:
“And when you later saw him get better, didn’t the idea of seeing him grow up ignorant of the Catholic religion and being educated in that of the Jews make you want to get advice from your Confessor about what you had done?”
“No. It never occurred to me.”
“How could it be that you never thought of it?”
“Well, sometimes I did think about it, because … when the boy walked with me in front of one of our churches he would tip his cap, seeing that I bowed my head. But I never said anything, not even to my Confessor, named Luigi, who was one of the Fathers of the Madonna on via Galliera, because I was afraid of how angry my employers would be. They had forbidden me to take the children into our churches.”
“But you really believed that you had made Edgardo a Christian after what you had done?”
“Yes, I believed it.”
“But the Jews Angelo Padovani and Cesare De Angelis, who have been questioned about this matter, claim that you said that, once the boy got better, you didn’t give any more thought to what you had done, that you said you didn’t think it was significant because you did it without really knowing what you were doing. Is that right?”
“I can’t remember what I said to the Jews because I was crying and I was all confused.”
The magistrate moved on to the grocer’s role in the baptism. If Cesare Lepori had, in fact, given her detailed instructions for baptizing Edgardo, as she said, it seemed obvious that when the grocer next saw her, he would have asked her whether she had gone through with it. Hadn’t she said something to him about it after the baptism?
“I didn’t tell him anything, and he never asked me anything about it.”
“Can you prove that he advised and instructed you to baptize Edgardo?”
“There were only the two of us, so I couldn’t give you any proof.”
“And what did the Inquisitor say about what you had done? Did he praise you or blame you?”
“He told me that if I understood correctly that he was in bad shape, I acted excellently in baptizing the boy, because that way, if he died, he’d go to heaven.”
“Were you given any payment, any gift for your deposition?”
“No, sir.”
At the end of her testimony, Anna put her cross to the document. Although she had forgotten it, it was a cross that she had also scrawled at the bottom of the testimony she had given a little over two years earlier at the Dominican convent in Bologna. As in that earlier interrogation, Anna received a warning before leaving. The authorities reserved the right to initiate proceedings against her should they decide that they had the grounds to do so. If she was lying, she was in trouble. Magistrate Carboni, meanwhile, prepared to return to Bologna, where, the next day, he would send a summons for a key witness. He was eager to interview the man who, according to Anna Morisi, was responsible for Edgardo being a Christian.2
On February 11, Cesare Lepori sat before Carboni in the Bologna interrogation room. He said that he knew Momolo Mortara, who had occasionally dropped off a list of groceries at his store, but that he had never met Marianna Mortara. He was familiar with their children because they had sometimes accompanied the family servant, who had shopped at his store. And, he added, he had heard rumors in 1858 about a police raid on their home, aimed at taking away one of their children who had been baptized.
Lepori was aware that the Inquisitor was in jail and that Anna Morisi had blamed him for the whole affair. When asked what he knew about the baptism, he was ready:
“I don’t know anything about it. In fact, a little after they took his son away, Signor Momolo Mortara came to find me at my store, along with someone I didn’t know. He asked me if it wasn’t true that a few years earlier I’d advised one of his servants, named Anna, to baptize the son in question. But I had to tell him, just as I’m telling you now, what’s the whole truth: that it just never happened.” When told by Momolo that Anna had said it was he who had told her what to do, Lepori recalled, “I was surprised and angry. I told him that if it was true that I’d gotten her to baptize the boy, given that she continued to come to my store to shop for various years after that, she would’ve told me that she’d given the Sacrament. But I only found out that the boy had become a Christian when he was taken from his parents.”
“Do you recall Anna, the person Mortara spoke to you about?”
“No, I can’t remember her, but if I saw her again I might be able to recognize her.”
“You don’t even remember that a woman named Annina came in the past to shop in your store as the servant of the Mortara household?”
“No. I just remember that various women came to shop in my store for the Mortaras.”
Did he not recall that in 1852 the Mortaras had a child who was sick? “No,” he answered.
“Nor that they had a nursing child named Edgardo?”
“I don’t remember.”
But, the magistrate insisted, Anna Morisi’s testimony was clear. One morning that year, when she came to buy some oil at his store, she had told him about Edgardo’s illness, and he had suggested baptizing the boy and given her detailed instructions on how to do it. “Isn’t that all true?”
“It’s not true at all, and I don’t know anything about those things that this woman has accused me of.”
“Tell the truth, because Morisi, after having already told this to many different people, who found her story to be entirely believable, has repeated it for this court. How can you explain why she would want to accuse you, both in court and outside it, of something that she just dreamed up?”
“Having baptized the boy, she probably wanted to make excuses for herself by blaming me for having told her to do it. But I tell you, and I’m ready to say it to her face, she lied, both in court and out of it.”
Carboni had his doubts about the grocer. Lepori, like Morisi, was warned on his way out that the magistrate reserved the right to charge him should he find the grounds to do so.3
Other than the Inquisitor himself, Anna Morisi had cited only two people who could serve as useful witnesses to verify her story. One was Cesare Lepori, who had called her a liar. The other was Regina, the woman who had worked for the Mortaras’ neighbors, the Pancaldis. According to Morisi, Regina was the only one she had told of Edgardo’s baptism before getting the Inquisitor’s summons. Carboni was eager to track her down.
She was not easily found. Regina Bussolari no longer lived with the Pancaldis. A 60-year-old childless widow, she was now living at her nephew’s home in the center of the city, a ten-minute walk from where the Mortaras had lived. On February 18, she came to testify.
Yes, she said, she knew the Mortaras. She had gotten to know them in the summer of 1857, because she had spent three months working for Signora Rosina Pancaldi, who lived next door.
“Do you know [asked Carboni] that, some time after the period you mentioned, the Mortaras suffered a serious misfortune because of one of their children?”
“Some time after I’d left the Pancaldi home, rumors spread through Bologna that one of the Mortara children, whose name I don’t know, though I do recall it was a boy, was ordered separated from his family by the Holy Office because he’d been baptized. I never heard any of the details of the case, and even today I’m totally in the dark about it.”
“But didn’t you know before the abduction that he was baptized?”
“I didn’t know anything, because no one told me a word about it.”
On Carboni’s prompting, Regina admitted that she did know a girl who had worked as a servant for the Mortaras, a girl from San Giovanni in Persiceto, but she didn’t recall her name.
Hadn’t you ever talked with her, Carboni asked, about the baptism she performed on the boy who was later taken away by the police?
“I think I only spoke with that servant once or twice, when she was going up to the storage room to get something, because to get to the stairs that led up to it, you had to pass by the front door of Signora Pancaldi’s house. But she never said anything to me about that boy, much less that he’d been baptized.” Nor, she said, responding to another question, had she ever talked to Anna Morisi about Aristide, the Mortara child who had died.
Yet, Carboni responded, Anna had said that she had run into Regina as she was climbing up to the storage room and that, after talking about Aristide, the Mortaras’ dying child, she had told Regina of Edgardo’s baptism. “You admit that in the same circumstances you had a talk with Morisi. Isn’t it also true that the subject you discussed was what Morisi says it was?”
“I say Morisi’s a liar. I didn’t even know that the boy, that Aristide who you’ve been talking about, was sick. I only found out about it when I saw the casket, and someone told me—I don’t remember who—that one of the Mortaras’ children had died.”
Asked if she had ever spoken with the Inquisitor, Father Feletti, Regina responded no, she had not.4
As she penned her cross to the transcript of her testimony, Regina, like Cesare Lepori and Anna Morisi herself, was warned that the court reserved the right to proceed against her. Either Anna Morisi was a talented spinner of yarns, thought Carboni, or both Lepori and Bussolari were liars.
The magistrate prepared a request to the head of the Bologna police, sent on February 20, for a police investigation to be launched into the records of Morisi, Lepori, and Bussolari. That same day, he called in Bussolari’s old employer to help him determine whether Regina could be believed. Signora Pancaldi verified that the notarized testimony she had given, at Momolo Mortara’s request, back in the fall of 1858 was accurate, complete with Anna Morisi’s giggling boast about her sexual encounter with her Austrian neighbor. In contrast to her steamy portrait of the seductress Morisi, she characterized Regina Bussolari as “a good woman, and very religious.” Regina “went to Church often, even too often.”5
As the magistrate was aware, this evidence of Bussolari’s religiosity cut two ways. As testimony to her upright and moral character—particularly in contrast to the growing evidence about Anna Morisi’s penchant not only for illicit sex but for petty larceny as well—it weighed heavily in favor of crediting her account over that of the Mortaras’ former servant. On the other hand, Bussolari’s reputation for spending a lot of time with the priests gave rise to the suspicion that, having heard from Anna Morisi about Edgardo’s baptism, she might have passed it on to one of her clerical confidants, with the report ultimately making its way to the Inquisitor.
But a week later a very different picture began to emerge when the first reports, based on a check of the police records, arrived on the magistrate’s desk. No police records involving Morisi or Lepori had been found, but something disturbing had turned up on Regina Bussolari, a native, like Anna Morisi, of San Giovanni in Persiceto.
