The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (41 page)

Anna had gone to work for Pignatti in the fall of 1857, a couple of months after she left the Mortaras. It was said “that she left them because she was pregnant and went somewhere else to have her baby.”

I remember very well that seven or eight years ago, when I was with the De Angelises … a son of the Mortaras, whose name I don’t know,
became sick, and it was said that he was going to die. Around then, one morning, as I was taking some of the De Angelises’ little children to school in via Gambruti, I ran into Morisi. Among the other things we talked about, she—without mentioning that child’s illness—asked me, “I’ve heard that if you baptize a Jewish child who’s about to die he goes to heaven and gets indulgence; isn’t that right?” I don’t remember what I told her, but when the Mortara boy was kidnapped by order of the Dominican Father, I was sure that he must have been the one who was sick when I was working for the De Angelises, and baptized by Morisi.

Elena remembered having herself seen Edgardo once when he was sick that time. “I saw him in a crib that wasn’t in a bedroom, but in another room where his mother was watching him. He was little; he seemed to me to be about a year old.”

“Did you think,” asked the magistrate, “that the boy was in danger of dying?”

“Since his mother was crying, and despaired for his life, I thought he was dying, also because of his appearance: his eyes were closed, and he was hardly moving.”

Elena also had something to add about events during the three months in late 1857 when Anna had worked in her home. Anna had never said a word to her about having baptized one of the Mortara children, but “four or five times she went to the Convent of San Domenico, summoned by a man from that church.” Elena, her curiosity aroused, asked Anna what they wanted with her. She responded that “the Father Inquisitor had promised her a dowry.” Following the last of these visits, Elena added, “she led me to believe that she’d been made to swear, and promise, never to live with Jews again.”
⁸

Three days later, the magistrate called in Second Lieutenant Agostini. It was the first time Carboni met the man who had taken Edgardo to Rome. In the records of Agostini’s testimony with Police Chief Curletti, taken right before the Inquisitor’s arrest, little had been said about the behavior of the boy himself. Father Feletti, in giving his account of Edgardo’s placid departure from home and pious pilgrimage to Rome, had claimed that Agostini would confirm his story. Carboni was eager to hear what the policeman would say.

Agostini seemed ill at ease in the Bologna interrogation room. He had already testified about the matter in Cento, he said, and had told them all that he knew. But the magistrate asked him to tell how Edgardo had reacted to being taken from home on that June evening.

“He was pretty unhappy about it,” Agostini responded. “After Sorcinelli [a fellow policeman] put him in the carriage, a Jew, whose last name, I think, is Vitta, came up to the window and told him that he would be following in another carriage with his mother and father. On the other hand, the Father
Inquisitor had provided me with a good supply of sweets and toys so that I could calm the boy down during the trip when he asked for his parents.”

“The boy never cried?” asked Carboni.

“Never.”

Carboni had just taken testimony from Antonio Facchini, the passerby who had witnessed the scene of Edgardo’s removal from his home. It was Facchini who had ruefully wished that he could have led an expedition of his friends to intercept the departing police wagon and rescue the boy. He had clearly recalled that as Edgardo was being forced into the police carriage he had begun to scream, and that a policeman had put his hand over the boy’s mouth. The magistrate asked Agostini if this was not, in fact, true.

“I know that his father was shouting,” Agostini replied, “and I could hear him while I was in the carriage, since the door was open. But from the time I got the boy, right up through Rome, he never cried.”

Carboni was eager to check the Inquisitor’s account of the six-year-old’s penchant for visiting churches on the way. “During the trip and during the various rest stops you made,” he inquired, “did the boy ever ask to be taken anywhere in particular?”

In Fossombrone [recalled Agostini] we spent the night at the police barracks, and the next day was San Pietro’s Day. Seeing the policemen going off to mass, the boy expressed the desire to follow them, since I myself had to go to mass. I took him to the mass with me. From Fossombrone until Rome we had two rather devout women from Fossombrone in our carriage. Having learned the boy’s unusual story from me, they gave him a lot of attention, and taught him the Ave Maria on the way, and read to him from books of devotion.… So that during the various other stops on the way to Rome, he’d ask me to take him to church, and either I, or those women, did so.

Thinking, no doubt, of Momolo’s portrait of a boy crying for his parents while begging the officer for his mezuzah, Carboni asked, “And didn’t the boy ever refer in any way to the religion he was born in?”

“Never,” Agostini replied.

“He never asked for any object from his religion?”

“No.”

“Yet it is said that throughout the trip he asked continually for his parents, and for his ‘mezuzah,’ a kind of Jewish medallion. Isn’t that right?”

“No, that’s not true at all.”

How, the magistrate asked, could Agostini account for the boy’s desire to keep going to church?

“I’d say it was a matter of simple curiosity and also the effect, maybe, of those two women’s influence.”
⁹

That same day, Magistrate Carboni received news that he had been eagerly awaiting. Although he had been able to interview Momolo Mortara, he had not yet heard from the other injured party, Marianna Mortara. Momolo, in his testimony, had said that his wife, bedridden for the past three months as a result of the continued trauma she had suffered from her son’s abduction, could not come to Bologna. The only way to get her to testify was to have the Turin police question her. Although Bologna was still a few weeks away from joining the kingdom of Sardinia, relations between the courts of Bologna and Turin were good and cooperation was to be expected.

Yet it seemed doubtful at first that the authorities would ever get her testimony. In response to the Turin court’s request that she appear, her doctor sent a letter painting a disturbing picture:

The serious illness that afflicts Signora Marianna Mortara of Bologna … has had extremely dangerous phases that have at various points put her life in danger. And these phases occur just at the times when particular circumstances recall to her mind the disaster that struck her family (the cruel abduction of her son). As a result, as her doctor, and having had occasion to get to know the anguish that torments her, and the great sensitivity and weakness that this leaves her in, I recommend [you to …] touch as little as possible on all that regards that which lies at the origin of her past misfortunes, and to do so only with the greatest care, if you do not want to exacerbate a fatal disease.
¹⁰

Thus warned, two magistrates of the Turin court set off the next day to find Edgardo’s stricken mother, hoping she would be able to testify from her sickbed. They had been briefed by Carboni, who sent them a detailed account of the testimony he had received to date, and the points on which Marianna’s testimony would be most valuable.

Arriving at the Mortara home around 3 p.m. on February 18, 1860, the Turin magistrates found that, although Marianna was momentarily out of bed, she was in poor shape. “When we told her why we had come, on recalling the event in question, she almost fainted and, after a long time, recovering a bit, said that she was not at the moment able to bear any examination, having just today gotten out of bed for the first time, following four months of being ill following childbirth.” Marianna asked them to give her another day, and the men left.

They returned the next day. Although in bed, Marianna said that she was now prepared to answer their questions.

Marianna recalled for them that night in June, and then how, at noon the next day, “at which point I had practically fainted away, I was put into the carriage of our friend Giuseppe Vitta and taken to his house.” There, she said, “I was overcome by my pain, and as a consequence I wasn’t able to see just how the police tore my son away from my husband.”

It was late, and the magistrate thought that Marianna had had about all she could take for the day. They told her that they would return the next afternoon.

The following day, the magistrates, once again at Marianna’s bedside, asked whether she knew anything about Edgardo’s behavior during his trip to Rome. She replied: “He did nothing but cry. He wanted to go back to his parents. He kept asking what he had done wrong to be taken away. He kept asking for his mezuzah. He rejected the other medallions that they wanted to give him, and he didn’t eat. The boy himself,” she said, “told me all this in Rome, with the Rector of the Catechumens right there. In fact … the Rector told me that the boy must have a lot of guts to have survived such suffering.”

The magistrates then turned to the question of the presumed baptism itself, asking Marianna about Edgardo’s illness. She denied that it had been anything serious and insisted that she would never have left Anna alone with the baby. Indeed, on the days that Edgardo had been sickest, she said, Anna herself had been very ill and confined to bed. Marianna remembered it well, because the Sabbath was approaching and, since as Jews they could not kindle a fire or a light on Friday evening or Saturday, they arranged to have a friend’s servant spend those days with them to help out.

Asked about Anna’s behavior during her years of service with them, Marianna painted a less than flattering picture: “Her behavior was like all servants. She had her defects, which I bore but was unable to change: I saw that she was a liar, an oath breaker, and a thief. But it seemed to me that she was fond of all my children, and so I put up with her. I came to realize, though, that because Edgardo was so lively, she often hit him.”

It was the end of Marianna’s interrogation. Momolo stood by her side as she signed the transcript.
¹¹

Back in Bologna, Carboni heard from other witnesses. Dr. Saragoni, the Mortara family physician, vigorously denied that Edgardo’s illness had ever been life-threatening, saying that he had made as many house calls as he had only to calm the boy’s parents, who were nervous types. He had also examined Anna Morisi when she was pregnant in the mid-1850
S
, but Anna’s baby was delivered not by him but by the midwife in whose house she was staying, at the Mortaras’ expense. Meanwhile, the Bologna magistrate discovered that he would not be able to interview either Marshal Lucidi or Officer Sorcinelli, the
man who had placed Edgardo in the police carriage outside the house, for both had retreated, along with Colonel De Dominicis, with the forces remaining in the papal police.

Carboni decided that he needed to talk to Anna Morisi again, this time ordering her to appear before him in Bologna. He had more questions to ask. As far as he could tell, Father Feletti had never looked into Anna’s background, nor had he summoned any witnesses to check her story. If the Inquisitor were to be judged according to the law in effect at the time that he had ordered Edgardo taken, his failure to conduct an adequate investigation into Anna’s claim might allow the magistrate to find grounds for his conviction.

On February 29, Carboni received a certificate from the town doctor of San Giovanni in Persiceto. It stated that, “having a nursing baby, and having no one to leave him with, nor means to procure transportation,” Anna “cannot now go to Bologna.” To this another town official added a certificate attesting to Morisi’s “
stato di miserabilità.”
She was destitute and had no way of buying a ticket on the coach to the city.
¹²

Carboni had no desire to make another trip to Persiceto, yet needed to talk to her, so he arranged for a seat on the coach to be provided for the young mother and ordered her to appear. On March 6, she showed up at his office, the last witness—other than the defendant himself—to come before him.

The Magistrate’s first question got right to the point: “Is it really true that, as you said in your earlier examination, you baptized the boy Edgardo Mortara when, around the time he was eight months old, you believed he was in danger of dying?”

“It’s the Gospel truth.”

Carboni informed Anna of the doctor’s testimony that he had never told her or anyone else that Edgardo’s illness was serious, and of the Mortaras’ testimony that they had never spent the whole night awake by Edgardo’s side and had never read prayers from a Hebrew book while standing over him, as she had claimed. And anyway, the magistrate added, “what would you know about a book like that? You are illiterate!”

Dr. Saragoni had, Anna insisted, told her that Edgardo was very sick, and the Mortaras had spent two or three nights by Edgardo’s side. One morning, she said she saw Momolo

“reading the book of the dying. I learned from my sister Monica, who worked as a servant for the Mortaras for four years before me, that when a Jew was about to die, they stood over him and read a book in Hebrew.”

“We have also determined [the Magistrate cut back in] that Edgardo was born on August 27, 1851, and that he had the illness of which you
speak at the end of August 1852, when he was in his thirteenth month, which we confirmed … by inspecting Dr. Saragoni’s records.”

“But I began to serve at the Mortaras when the boy was four months old,” Anna responded, “while the snow was still on the ground. And he became sick soon after that, and I remember anyway that it was the cold season, because they still kept the fire burning in the room where the boy was.”

Carboni proceeded to reconstruct the dates of Edgardo’s illness, Anna’s own illness—during which, she had herself testified, she didn’t notice anything because she was so sick that “I felt like I was going to die”—and the arrival of the substitute servant. The timing, Carboni told her, proved that the baptism could not have taken place the way she claimed it had. He then got her to admit that the Mortaras had never given her any responsibility for caring for the sick child, over whom they kept a constant vigil. “It is for this very reason,” proclaimed the magistrate, “that the parents deduce that it was impossible for you to have baptized him.”