The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 38
The only first-person account we have of Momolo’s search for his son in the wake of the fall of Rome is from Edgardo himself. The boy—now a young man—viewed events with mounting panic as he saw a vise closing in on him: “After the Piedmontese troops entered Rome, in those days of anarchy that preceded the formation of the new government, the police were unable to rein in the rabble-rousers. After they used their force to seize the neophyte Coen from the Collegio degli Scolopi, they turned toward San Pietro in Vincoli to try to kidnap me as well.”
Pius IX, Edgardo recalled, had many times, in those tumultuous days, sent word to Edgardo’s superiors to ask whether he had been taken away from Rome to safety. And it was the fatherly Pope, Edgardo said, who gave him “the strength and the courage not to give in to the pleas and the threats of the liberal authorities who wanted to make me, in violation of my religious vows, return to my family and expose myself not only to the danger of breaking my oaths but, indeed, of becoming an apostate.”
The Rome police prefect himself appeared at the convent, “urging and pleading with me to return to my family, in order to satisfy public opinion.” Meanwhile, Edgardo learned that his father had arrived in Rome and was waiting for him. Police stood guard outside the convent to ensure that the friars did not try to sneak Edgardo out of Rome. Loath to see his father, and afraid that, like Giuseppe Coen, he would soon be seized by the police and handed over to his parents, Edgardo, no doubt with the help of higher ecclesiastical authorities, arranged to meet with General La Marmora, the King’s representative in Rome. In Edgardo’s recollection, after he had explained the situation to the General, he was asked what he wanted.
“The police want to make me return to my family.”
“But how old are you?” asked the General.
“Nineteen, Excellency.”
“Well, then, you are free. Do what you want.”
“But, Excellency, I am being threatened with reprisals.”
“In that case,” replied the General, “come to see me, and I will protect you.”
Despite these assurances, if assurances they were, Edgardo’s superiors feared that he would be taken. Outrages against the Church were being committed every day, and Edgardo was a symbol of the Pope’s temporal power, whose downfall the rowdy masses were joyfully celebrating. Although Cardinal Antonelli had said that he did not think it necessary, a plan was made to send Edgardo abroad. In Edgardo’s words:
On October 22, 1870, at ten at night, accompanied by one of the friars, both of us dressed in street clothes, we made our way through the convent garden in order to elude the surveillance of the guards who were stationed there. We went to the central train station, where, my mentor told me, he spotted my father. Deeply frightened, I begged in my heart that I be spared the encounter, and in fact my prayer was answered and, without any incident, I got on the train for Bologna.
Edgardo and the friar got off the train briefly in Foligno, a small city in Umbria, to get something to eat at a restaurant.
In front of us sat several young men who, from the red sash they wore, seemed to me to be Garibaldini. They were talking about the recent escape of the young Mortara, attributing it, as usual, to the Jesuits. To tell the truth, I was shaking like a leaf, but my companion, without losing his composure, began to talk to them and, being clever, was able to change the subject of their conversation, so that they forgot about the fugitive.
Edgardo and his guide then reboarded the train. They reached the Austrian border without mishap and found refuge in a convent on the other side.
Back in Rome, Edgardo’s father was despondent. For twelve years, Momolo and Marianna had been waiting for this moment, had been consoling themselves with the thought that the days of papal power in Rome were numbered, that the gloom that had clung to their home all these years would finally be lifted. All his hopes, his appeals for help to everyone who would listen, seemed to have been in vain. And he also felt he had failed his own people, the Jews. For years they had been praying for his son’s return to his family and his religion, yet all the while they had harbored the fear that the boy would be won over by his captors and join the long line of former Jews who devoted their lives to denigrating the religion of their ancestors. Momolo returned to his family in Florence a beaten man.
CHAPTER 25
A Death in Florence
WHEN MOMOLO RETURNED from Rome, he was 55 years old, and Marianna 52. Of their nine children, seven still lived with them. Other than Edgardo, only their eldest son, Riccardo, aged 27, lived elsewhere. A second lieutenant in the Italian army, he was based at the Advanced War Academy in Turin. The twin girls, Ernesta and Erminia, 24, helped their mother at home. Augusto, 23, had recently received his law degree and worked for the Ministry of Finance. Arnoldo, 21, had a good job working for a company that provided foodstuffs to the army. Ercole, at 18 just a year younger than Edgardo, had gone to high school and recently taken an exam to get into pharmacy school. The two youngest children, Imelda, 13, and Aristide, 11, born after Edgardo’s departure from home and given the same name as the child who had died in 1857, were both students.1
In addition to the nine members of the Mortara family in their fourth-floor apartment in via Pinti, they had, as always, a servant. When they had lived in Bologna, the same servant typically remained with them a number of years, Anna Morisi serving the longest, but by the time they moved to Florence they were finding it difficult to keep one for more than a few weeks. One after another quit. Shortly after Momolo returned from his fruitless trip to Rome, yet another of their servants left, and a 22-year-old replacement, Antonietta Vestri, was found. She left after four weeks.
After Antonietta, the Mortaras hired Rosa Tognazzi, a large, lively, redheaded young woman of 23. Rosa was one of seven sisters from a share-cropping family in the Chianti hills of Tuscany. She had moved to Florence a year before, following the example of her older sisters, who had already taken jobs in the city as servants. Since her arrival, Rosa had worked for a succession of families, moving in with the Mortaras in late February. She may have been put in touch with them by her sister Giuseppa, who lived with a Jewish family herself.
At 5 p.m. on April 3, five weeks after Rosa Tognazzi moved in, a servant in the apartment below thought she heard someone running in the Mortaras’ apartment. Her ceiling shook, and then, all of a sudden, she heard the sound of window shutters flung open, followed by two awful thuds from the tiny courtyard. She ran to the window and saw Rosa lying on her side on the pavement. Glancing up, she noticed that the Mortaras’ window was open. Looking down again, she could see that Rosa’s skirts were lifted up over her face, showing her private parts. The screams of the woman who lived on the ground floor fueled her terror. After looking up again and seeing no one at the Mortaras’ windows, she wondered if she should go down to help. She decided against it. “I didn’t have the courage,” she said.
Rosa was still alive and partially conscious as she lay in the courtyard, although she had a broken neck, a broken foot, broken legs, a broken hip, and many other injuries. She even murmured a few words to the neighbors who rushed to her aid. It took an hour and a half to get Rosa to the hospital, where, at 7:15 p.m., she died.
Police soon swarmed over the scene, ministering to the injured woman and talking to witnesses. The initial police report, prepared that evening, concluded that Rosa had killed herself. The policemen had already reconstructed the events that had led to her fateful fall. Around 3 p.m., she had gone, as she did every day, to meet Imelda as she got out of school. While she was walking the girl home, Rosa happened to run into her former employer, Luigi Bartolozzi, who was walking with another man. Bartolozzi accosted Rosa, accusing her of having stolen ten lire, as well as some of his wife’s clothes. He warned her that if she didn’t return it all immediately, he would report her to the police. With a frightened Imelda looking on, Rosa denied the accusations and hustled the girl away. The men followed the two down the street until they reached the building of the Mortaras’ friends the Bolaffis, where Rosa was supposed to deliver a message. The men entered the building after them but soon left. Signor Bolaffi then offered to escort the shaken Rosa and Imelda back to the Mortaras’ home, which he did. A few minutes after Rosa’s entry into the apartment, the police report concluded, “she threw herself, unobserved, out the window.”
The initial police report notwithstanding, within minutes of Rosa’s fall, neighbors began to spread the rumor that this was no suicide. The man of the household, a loud and violent type, they said, a Jew, had pushed Rosa to her death.
The morning after Rosa’s death, a 36-year-old hatmaker named Luigi Pierleoni, who had been one of the first on the scene, was called in to police headquarters to testify. He recalled that he had been walking down via Pinti when an old woman came out of a building yelling for help. She rushed him through a door and into a small internal courtyard, where he saw a woman lying on her left side, moaning. Her skirt and petticoats were raised up over her chin, so that he could see her thighs. Her left hand was curled back around her head. Around her forehead a blood-soaked white kerchief was tied, knotted in back. The old woman told him that she had already pulled the woman’s skirts down a bit, because she had found her in a shameful state, with “nature” showing.
Attracted by the growing crowd outside the building, another neighbor, Andrea Casalegno, entered the courtyard as well. He told police that “everyone who was there was saying that they had thrown her out of the window of the top floor.” He had lifted Rosa’s head off the pavement and asked her if she had fallen, or if she had been thrown out of the window, or if she had tumbled down the stairs. She responded to this last question only, whispering “down the stairs,” although there were no stairs near where she lay.
Casalegno then lifted the bloody kerchief from her forehead and discovered that it had concealed a nasty wound over her left eyebrow, a wound so deep that her mangled bone stuck out. A civilian employee of the carabinieri, Casalegno prided himself on his powers of detection. “That wound could not have been made by falling on the pavement, because there were no stones or anything else there that could have produced it,” he explained. On questioning, both Pierleoni and Casalegno recalled that it was the old woman who had first told them that Rosa had been thrown out of the window of the top-floor flat, the apartment, she had informed them, where the Jews lived.
The old woman was Anna Ragazzini, a 67-year-old widow who lived in her ground-floor apartment with her 18-year-old servant, Teresa Gonnelli. Teresa recalled hearing a big crash, as if someone had slammed a window shut, and right afterward, a big thud in the courtyard. The dog immediately began to howl, and the two women ran to see what had happened. There lay Rosa, her skirts up over her head. “Ragazzini pulled her clothes down to cover her shame,” Teresa remembered, “and we could then see that her head was bound with a white kerchief tied by two knots in back.” Rosa murmured, “ ‘Help me, I feel like I’m dying,’ and then Ragazzini went to the door to get help. I stayed there, alone, and said to her: ‘Poor girl, what happened? Did they throw you down?’ and twice she answered, ‘Yes.’ ”
Signora Ragazzini’s young servant went on to testify that in the two weeks that she had been living there, “day and night, I always heard loud noises, arguments, and quarreling in the Jew’s house.”
The Mortara Apartment in Via Pinti, Florence April 1871
“I know the Jew Momolo Mortara by sight,” Signora Ragazzini testified that same day. Although the Mortaras had lived in the building for two and a half years, she had never spoken to them, nor, for that matter, had she ever met their new servant. The widow had, however, seen Rosa return to the building the previous afternoon with the Mortaras’ little girl. Within fifteen minutes of their return, she heard the alarming sounds from the courtyard.
When Rosa, lying bleeding on the pavement, appealed to Signora Ragazzini for help, the woman had frantically raced to the street to find someone. Once outside the building, she looked up at the Mortaras’ apartment: “I saw two people—I couldn’t make out whether men or women—and I said, ‘Come down! Can’t you see that it’s your servant!’ but no one came.”
Actually, someone did come, although it was not one of the Mortaras but Signor Bolaffi, the family friend who had accompanied Rosa and Imelda home. He came down with a boy, reported Signora Ragazzini, “and asked what had happened. I told him, ‘You know better than I do, because the servant is from up there.’ He replied that he was going to the police station. That surprised me,” said the suspicious widow, “because it seemed to me that he should have shown more interest in the situation.”
Signora Ragazzini did not hesitate to tell the police just what she thought. “There’s a constant uproar in the Mortara home, and arguing and swearing day and night. I believe,” she told the inspector, “that the servant was wounded on the head before she fell into the courtyard, because she certainly didn’t put that kerchief on down there, and she didn’t do it on her way down either!”
Finally, the inspector called in Flaminio Bolaffi. Rosa had been dead less than a day. Bolaffi, a Jewish friend of the Mortaras, was also a businessman, at 53 about the same age as Momolo.2 He testified that when he had returned home the previous day, a little after 4 p.m., he had found Rosa and a very frightened Imelda there. His wife told him Rosa’s story of her encounter with her former employer and the man’s attempts to follow her into the house. Indeed, Bolaffi’s wife had herself spoken to the men when they came to the door. Imelda did not want to return home with Rosa alone, because she was frightened of the two men, nor did Rosa want to go either. “However,” Bolaffi recalled, “I persuaded her and accompanied both of them back to the Mortara house.”
When they arrived, Bolaffi found Momolo in bed. He had been bedridden for some time because of a painful tumor on his knee. In his large bedroom, his wife and two older daughters also sat, sewing. None of the other children was at home. Bolaffi explained why he had accompanied Rosa and Imelda home, and Momolo asked his wife to go fetch Rosa so they could hear what had happened directly from her. Marianna found Rosa, crying, upstairs on the terrace and told her to come down, saying, according to Bolaffi, “that if she was innocent, she had nothing to fear.” But Marianna returned to the bedroom alone.
A few moments later, Bolaffi reported, they heard a loud noise, and the Mortaras’ dog started barking. He thought the noise must have been made by Rosa, slamming the front door on her way out, but when he went to the stairs to look, no one was there. He noticed, however, that the window of the room that the older boys slept in, which looked out over the courtyard, was open, and, peering out, he saw Rosa lying below. “I immediately ran down the stairs to notify the police, and once I got downstairs, I saw two women at Rosa’s side. I urged them to assist her while I went for the police. And I can assure you,” he added, “that no argument occurred between Rosa and any member of the Mortara family while I was there.”
It was now time for the investigating magistrate, Clodoveo Marabotti, to go to the morgue to hear directly from the two surgeons responsible for examining Rosa’s wounds. It was a gruesome scene; Rosa’s body lay atop a marble slab, her long reddish hair spread out around her bloodstained head. A tall and robust woman, she was dressed in the clothes in which she had fallen: a slip, two petticoats, and a gray-and-white plaid dress. The examiners had removed the bloody white kerchief from her forehead. When they inspected her dress, they made a puzzling discovery: in a pocket, they found a razor, stained with blood.
Marabotti was especially interested in what the doctors could tell him about the wound to Rosa’s forehead. It was an irregular, rough, serpentine gash, they reported, five centimeters long, with contusions around the edges, so deep that the frontal bone beneath showed through.
Having done all they could with the body in the state in which they had found it, the doctors began the autopsy. They first opened up Rosa’s head and discovered that whatever had caused the gash over her eyebrow had also produced an extensive fracturing of the skull beneath. Her brain cavity was filled with blood. As for the cause of death, the doctors concluded that she could have been killed by the traumas caused by a fall from high up, but, they added, the wound to her forehead might have been lethal by itself.
The Magistrate then told the medical examiners of the testimony he had received about the violent behavior of Rosa’s employer, and asked them if they could say anything about what kind of implement might have caused the head wound, whether the gash was caused by the fall, or whether it predated the fall. Marabotti particularly urged them to consider the fact that, despite the vicious nature of the wound, the kerchief that covered it, though bloody, was itself not torn in any way.
The doctors hedged a bit, but clearly they saw Marabotti’s point. The wound to her forehead “could have been produced by the fall,” the doctors reported. Yet, “given that the woman, just before her fall, had folded a kerchief and tied it around her frontal region, in the manner found on the one that has been submitted to us, stained by blood … it is more believable and more consonant with the laws of mechanics that the wound … came before the fall and was produced a short time before the other injuries, by a lacerating and blunt implement.”
