The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 41
Then I went back to the bedroom and fainted. When, after some time, Bolaffi still hadn’t come back, my husband wanted to try to get out of bed, and he fell down. My son Aristide began to shout for help from the window on via Pinti, and after that some carabinieri came, then other police. Let me repeat, none of my older sons were there, and no one was in the kitchen or the room with the two beds, because everybody was in my husband’s bedroom.
The Magistrate asked Marianna if Rosa had been wearing a kerchief when she had last seen her. No, Marianna responded, but she did recall something about a kerchief: “On Saturday, April 1,” she said, “Tognazzi asked one of my daughters for a handkerchief to blow her nose.” The Magistrate showed her the kerchief that had been covering Rosa’s wound when she was found in the courtyard. “Yes, that’s it,” said Marianna.
The case was about to take on a new wrinkle, for the Magistrate was sure that Marianna was not only guilty of perjury, trying to protect her guilty husband, but of something more. We have reason to believe, he told her, that Rosa Tognazzi was mortally wounded on the head in your home. “In order to make it look like suicide, she was thrown out the window into the courtyard with your own help.”
“I tell you as a woman of honor,” Marianna responded, “that no one in my house ever molested or mistreated Rosa. On the contrary, we were happy with her, and in the thirty-three days she was with us, we never even had occasion to shout at her.”
Her sons had told her that the Magistrate was asking about an old razor, and Marianna volunteered that she knew something that might be relevant. “One evening, Rosa said she couldn’t walk because of her corns. I told her to put her feet in hot water, and she did. Then she asked for a razor, and she was given one of my daughters’, a razor that has written on the outside the word ‘special.’ When we were recently packing up to move,” said Marianna, “we couldn’t find the razor anymore.”
Before dismissing her, the Magistrate showed her the razor found with Rosa’s body. She recognized it as the one that was missing from their home. When asked how long it had been stained with blood, she said she didn’t know.
In Marianna’s testimony there was one small detail that the Magistrate thought might solve one of the remaining mysteries in the case. The murder weapon had never been found. How was the mortal blow struck? What was that blunt but cutting implement that had smashed Rosa’s forehead?
Marabotti asked the two medical examiners who had done the autopsy to come with him to via Pinti. He led them up to the apartment in which the Mortaras had lived. After explaining his mission to the new tenants, the Magistrate and his medical colleagues made their way to the two narrow sets of stairs that led to the terrace and the servant’s quarters. He turned to the two doctors and asked: If Rosa had been pushed down the stairway, might she have sustained the injury which they had noted on her left frontal ridge? After careful examination of the steep pitch of the stairs and the old, jagged edges, they replied: “If Tognazzi was violently pushed in such a way as to go headfirst down either the first or, especially, the second staircase, she might well have sustained the wound on her forehead, along with a number of her other injuries.”
The Magistrate’s evident pleasure at this feat of scientific detective work soon began to fade, however, as he discussed the final preparations for trial with the Prosecutor. The stairs theory created more problems than it solved. What scenario were they to present to the judges? That the Mortaras, enraged at hearing from Bolaffi the news that Rosa was a thief, shouted angrily—as was their habit—up the stairs to the terrace to which Rosa had retreated? That, further enraged by the young woman’s refusal to respond, Momolo, cane in hand, made his way up the stairs? That, beside himself with fury, he struck or pushed the woman so that she went tumbling down the stairs? That, as Marianna, Bolaffi, and the others ran to see what had happened, they saw the woman lying at the bottom of the stairs, blood flowing from a horrifying gash in her head? That, after first trying to aid her, taking one of their handkerchiefs and, folding it lengthwise, tying it around the wound, it became all too clear that Rosa was mortally wounded? That the prospect of having police once again in their home, and their fear of what people would think of a suspicious death of a Catholic servant there, led them to panic? That, remembering Rosa’s unpleasant encounter earlier with her former employer, and her tearful state on returning home, someone had the idea of trying to make the death look like suicide? That, because Momolo could not lift the bulky, semiconscious woman, his friend Bolaffi helped Marianna and their just returned son Ercole drag Rosa to the courtyard window and hoist her up and out?
Although the prosecutor agreed with the gist of this scenario, he was afraid that tying the prosecution to the tumble down the stairs would leave too large an opening for the defense. First of all, even if Momolo were not nearly as incapacitated as he pretended to be, the idea of his jumping from his bed and rushing up the steep stairway seemed shaky. And, just how would he then have been in a position to push her headfirst down the stairs? The Prosecutor thought it best not to rely too heavily on the stair theory. And so, although the prosecution’s charge to the court on June 7 mentioned the possibility that Rosa might have been pushed down the stairs, it also advanced the alternative that the enraged Momolo had struck her with a heavy stick, perhaps the handle of one of his walking sticks.
It was mid-June, and the case was ready to go to Florence’s Royal Court of Appeal. Both Momolo Mortara and Flaminio Bolaffi had been in jail for two and a half months. There were now four defendants, for both Ercole and his mother, Marianna, were charged, along with Bolaffi, as accessories to murder, accused of having helped Momolo throw Rosa from the window. Momolo was charged with unpremeditated murder. There were two defense lawyers, and each submitted a lengthy brief to the court, one for Bolaffi, the other for the Mortaras.
Just before the final defense arguments were to be made, the District Attorney, reviewing the prosecution’s case, requested that the court drop the charges against Bolaffi, Marianna, and Ercole for lack of evidence. The court, however, was not bound by this recommendation.
It was outrageous, began Bolaffi’s lawyer, that a perfectly peaceful, decent family man could be thrown in jail and left there for months without any evidence against him. All Bolaffi had ever done was show kindness to the Mortaras’ servant, escorting her back home on that fateful day. Why would such a man “become, all of a sudden, so perverse as to assist in a crime of such incredible atrocity?” What motives could he possibly have had to lead him to help throw the still-breathing Tognazzi out the window? And, assuming someone did help Momolo throw her out, what evidence was there to think that it was Bolaffi? There were several other members of the Mortara family present, including Momolo’s wife and, perhaps, his son, Ercole, all of whom, as family members, would have had a much stronger motive for such a cover-up.
And what about the various witnesses whose testimony was being used against Bolaffi? Why did the prosecution regard Bolaffi’s question to the old woman on reaching the ground floor as so suspicious? If he had asked her what had happened, it was not to feign ignorance of the fact that the injured woman was the Mortaras’ servant or that she had just plummeted four stories into the courtyard. He asked because he wanted to know if she were still alive.
And if Bolaffi, in reporting the fall at the police station, said that he didn’t know what happened, there was no cover-up here. He simply meant that he had not been in the room from which Rosa fell and so could not tell the police how it happened. “As for his refusal to return to the Mortara house,” argued the lawyer, “it can be explained by his natural desire to return home.” Bolaffi had already done his duty by rushing to the police to report the matter. “The spectacle that the Inspector invited him to see was not pleasant, and anyone would have wanted to flee from it.”
In short, the lawyer concluded, there was no evidence of Bolaffi’s guilt, just a sinew of speculation. “We are confident that you will absolve Signor Flaminio Bolaffi of this accusation and free him from prison.” With this, Bolaffi’s defense rested.
Bolaffi’s attorney had good reason to think that his client’s ordeal was nearing its end, since the District Attorney himself had recommended against prosecution. Momolo’s lawyer had no such confidence. Momolo’s defender, whose eloquent closing argument preceded the judges’ verdict, was not his 23-year-old son Augusto, but a more experienced lawyer named Mancini who had come to the family’s aid.
For the defense, a clear thread tied the police persecution of the ailing Momolo to another police operation that had, nineteen years earlier, in Bologna, deprived his family of one of its members. Momolo was a Jew, viewed by many of his Catholic neighbors with ill-disguised hostility.
“If there was ever a trial which brings to mind the sad examples of ill-fated legal proceedings, it is this one,” Mancini began. You start with some ill-conceived assumptions, add a hearty dose of religious fanaticism, and this is what you get. “What stands out to the eyes of the dispassionate observer,” he said, “is the veil of prejudice under which, in this proceeding, they began to suspect that a crime had been committed by the Jew Mortara. It’s remarkable,” the lawyer exclaimed, “that the witnesses do not simply refer to him by his name. Indeed, the prosecutor’s office itself does not call him, in the normal manner, the defendant Mortara. He is, for everyone, simply Mortara the Jew!”
As a result of this attitude, Mancini argued, instead of first asking whether any crime had been committed, “they assumed that it was a crime, prompted by the twisted suspicions of an old bigot and by the [Catholic] paper Armonia, to the detriment of Mortara the Jew, and both logic and common sense were bent in search of proof.”
Immediately after Rosa’s fall, the lawyer recalled, the first police report had attributed her death to suicide. The first doctor on the scene had said that the head wound could very well have been caused by Rosa’s fall, and what they knew of her upsetting encounter immediately beforehand with her former employer showed that she had been in an agitated state of mind.
But then the servant from the ground floor, Teresa Gonnelli, “who knew that Tognazzi worked for ‘the Jew,’ hearing the poor woman’s moans, says she asked her the following question: ‘Oh! What happened, poor girl? Did they throw you down?’ and claimed that twice she responded ‘yes.’ And then Anna Ragazzini,” the lawyer continued, “who knew the ‘Jew’ and knew that the dying woman was the servant of the Jew, says that Gonnelli, trembling with fright, repeated that terrible response to her.” Out of this hysteria came the idea that a crime had been committed, and amidst a welter of conflicting ideas, of medical reports and then requests for reconsideration of the medical evidence, came “this monstrous trial.”
“Momolo Mortara,” the lawyer told the judges, “is the most loving, yet most unhappy, father of the boy Edgardo, abducted from his family as a result of religious intolerance, a fact that produced such a scandal not only in all of Italy but in the entire civilized world. And this intolerance, unfortunately, appears again in the souls of these bigots and fanatics.” Having thus set the stage, the attorney began his review of the testimony, and as he did he offered a dramatically new view of what had happened on that April afternoon.
It is curious, said Mancini, that when, right after Gonnelli asked the gravely injured Rosa if she had been thrown out the window, witness Andrea Casalegno asked her “if she had fallen, or if they had thrown her from the window, or if she had fallen down the stairs,” Rosa had only reacted to the last of these questions, murmuring, “Yes, down the stairs.” Yet the police had only paid attention to what the “two bigoted women” had said, and ignored this. The fact is, the lawyer told the court, Rosa was in no position to respond lucidly to anyone. She had just fallen down four stories, her head was smashed in, her brain cavity filled with blood, and her neck broken. To base Momolo’s arrest on the murmured responses to the leading questions of a bigot, under such circumstances, was disgraceful.
First, look at Rosa’s state of mind that afternoon. She had run into the employer from whom she had stolen, a man she hoped never to see again. In a public street and in front of her employer’s child, he had accused her of being a thief and a liar and had threatened to denounce her to the police. She was humiliated and fearful not only of the police but of being summarily fired when the Mortaras found out what had happened. What would she do? She had nowhere to go if she were fired but into the street. When, crying and upset, she returned to the Mortara home, she saw Bolaffi go in to talk with the Mortaras. Indeed, she may even have overheard Bolaffi advise them to throw her out and report her to the police.
“To say that she had never before shown suicidal tendencies,” said the lawyer, “as if to say that she did not have sufficient reason for such a desperate decision, is meaningless.… These are ideas that are spoken of when they will not be acted on, and are most likely to be carried out when they are least discussed.”
Yet, admittedly, it wasn’t easy for Rosa to put her sudden suicidal resolve into practice. Looking four stories down into the tiny courtyard robbed her of her courage, so she got the fateful idea: she would cover her eyes so that she would not have to see the vertiginous sight. She even had something in her pocket that she could use, the handkerchief that the Mortaras had recently given her. But when she began to fold it in order to make the blindfold, Imelda happened by and, embarrassed and afraid that the girl might guess its purpose, the nervous Rosa tried to conceal what she was doing.
Then, said the lawyer, there is the issue that the prosecutors have made so much of: the evidence that Rosa’s lethal head injury could not have occurred on the courtyard pavement, that it had to have been inflicted before she hit the ground. I fully admit that in this the scientific evidence is clear. Yet, he asked, must this be taken to mean that the wound had been inflicted in the Mortaras’ apartment, as the prosecution, moved by its preconceptions, so stubbornly contends? The answer is no.
The courtyard itself measures just three meters by two meters. In fact, from the window from which Rosa fell to the opposite wall measures exactly 2.09 meters, barely more than six feet. And on each floor down, the wall juts out around the base of the windows. Yet with all the investigations undertaken by the single-minded investigators, did any of them take the trouble to examine these protuberances? Unfortunately, Mancini said, they did not.
And then there is another bit of evidence ignored by the prosecution: the account of the servant Margherita Rosati, who was sitting in the second-floor apartment near the courtyard window. She reported hearing two big thuds, one after the other. Why two?
The explanation is simple, and the investigators would have come to it quickly if not for their assumption that Rosa must have been killed in the Mortaras’ apartment. In jumping, blindfolded, from the fourth-floor window, Rosa had inevitably gone forward as she plunged, and her body smashed off one of the ledges on the opposite wall as she picked up speed.
A whole set of her injuries made sense when understood in this way. Most important, it explained the deep, irregular gash on her forehead, caused by something blunt, and crushing the bone beneath, but also the other injuries on her left side: her smashed left knee and hand, and the peculiarities of her snapped lower cervical vertebra, produced when her head bounced back from the terrible impact of the blow to her forehead as she hurtled downward.
And then there is the final mystery. How was it that Rosa, on being discovered on the courtyard floor, had a white kerchief covering her wounded forehead? The prosecution theory, argued Momolo’s lawyer, was absurd. They would have it that in the less than fifteen minutes between Rosa’s arrival home and her fall, the bedridden Momolo was first told the whole story of Rosa’s encounter with her former employer, then he either called her in or went to find her, then inflicted the lethal wound, then someone found a handkerchief and prepared a bandage, and tied it around her forehead with a double knot, then Momolo came up with the idea that it would be better to throw her out the window, then he convinced everyone else to go along, then they dragged the heavy, semiconscious woman to the boys’ bedroom, and finally they hoisted her up and out.
There is something more, though, said Mancini. The prosecution is missing another important implication of the physical evidence they have presented. The medical examiners had concluded, based on her injuries, that Rosa must have hit the ground in a largely upright posture, feet first. Indeed, although the prosecution had not mentioned it, the fact that Rosa’s skirt and petticoats had been up to her face when she landed could be explained in no other way.
Now let us return, said the lawyer, to the prosecution’s scenario. As the frantic Momolo and his confederates were desperately hoisting the weighty servant up to the windowsill, were they lifting her feetfirst or by her trunk? The answer is clear. They would have done what was natural and hoisted her up by her trunk, followed by her legs. She would have plunged headfirst into the courtyard.
Rosa’s bare private parts, when the two women first found her, helped to explain the mystery of the kerchief-covered wound. The force of the air had put upward pressure on her kerchief, just as it had on her skirt. When Rosa’s head snapped back from the blow to her forehead as she fell, the position of her head allowed a burst of air to get under her hastily prepared blindfold, lifting the front of it up a few inches. By the time she landed, it had reached her forehead, the knot still firmly in place at the base of her skull.
What of all the evidence that Momolo was lying about his incapacity, or that the Mortaras were trying to cover something up? asked Mancini. Perhaps Momolo was seen in the kitchen. He said himself he got up to go to the lavatory, and so passed right next to the kitchen. The one witness to claim that Momolo was really ambulatory was the neighbor who swore that he saw him spryly leave the building that evening with his son. But he was looking out his third-floor window on a night in which there was no moonlight and only the dimmest of gaslight. What he saw was a product of his fantasy. The man he really saw leave that evening, after hearing the footsteps coming down from the fourth floor, was Flaminio Bolaffi, and the boy he heard and saw was not Aristide Mortara but Bolaffi’s son, Emilio. In fact, Bolaffi testified that he had returned to the Mortara home earlier that evening with his son to find out what had gone on in the hours since his visit to the police station. Apparently, to the neighbor, one Jew looked much like another.
