The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (20 page)

Ippolita added, “Let me tell you, I’ve had eight children of my own, and I’ve seen and taken care of many more, and I remember very well that Edgardo Mortara never had any of those signs that you see in little children that show they’re really sick and might die.”

Following Ippolita’s testimony, her 27-year-old daughter, Marianna, stepped into the notary’s office to back up her mother’s account. In 1852,
when her mother worked as a servant for the Ravennas, Marianna also worked for them, as a maid. She recalled the time when her mother had filled in for Anna Morisi at the Mortaras for a few days, and her mother’s comment at the time that one of their children had some mild childhood illness. Lastly, Giuseppina Borghi, a 41-year-old seamstress who had lived in the apartment below the Mortaras in 1852, was brought in. She recounted what was, by now, a familiar story, of a boy with a brief and slight illness, and a servant who was at the time much sicker herself and confined to bed.

Having done what they could to show that there was no time when Anna Morisi could have performed a Church-approved baptism, since Edgardo had never been at death’s door, and having further cast doubt on whether Anna was even well enough to have gone out to the grocer at the critical time and done what she said she did, the Mortaras were now ready to speak to the young woman’s credibility in the present. They first called on their 30-year-old business agent, Enrico Mattioli, who told of Anna’s disturbing familiarity with Austrian soldiers who lived nearby, and of the young woman’s tawdry reputation. She was viewed, he said, as “an unwholesome young woman, indeed of immoral and dishonest behavior.”

But the lone male witness was but the warm-up for the steamy accounts to follow. First to testify was Elena Pignatti, a 22-year-old woman who, with her husband, Alessandro Santandrea, ran a grocery store not far from the Mortaras. They had hired Anna Morisi as their servant shortly after she left the Mortaras, in the early fall of 1857. Pignatti’s testimony was short but disturbing:

“I knew Anna or Nina Morisi very well from the time last autumn when she came to work for me … and lived with me around three months. I couldn’t keep her any longer because of her reprehensible behavior.” Signora Pignatti gave some examples: “One of these occasions involved an evening when, having some suspicions, I crept up the stairs of my house in via San Mamolo … which is just above my store. When I got up there, I found the same Nina pushing an Austrian captain out of the house. When I scolded her for her scandalous behavior, she asked me to forgive her, admitting that she had invited him in there.”

Signora Pignatti continued: “Around the same time she plotted with a stock boy in my store. The two were in cahoots: he stole the foodstuffs and she hid them. When I discovered what they were doing, I fired her right away. To have kept her on any longer would have only brought me further disgrace; her wicked nature was by then all too clear.”

A similar tale was told by Anna Facchini, the young woman who had succeeded Anna Morisi as the Mortaras’ servant, the one who had first answered Marshal Lucidi’s knock at the door four months earlier.

Anna Facchini had begun work for the Mortaras while Anna Morisi was still living there. At the time, she came in only during the days. When Morisi left, her sister-in-law, Assunta Buongiovanni, came to replace her for two months, and it was by a coincidence linked to Assunta’s arrival that Marianna Mortara came to know that Nina was a thief.

Facchini herself had observed Morisi in action on previous occasions. “More than once,” she testified, “she asked me to help her steal wine from the Mortaras’ cellar.” But one day shortly after Nina had left, while Assunta was doing the wash, she was surprised to find a pair of socks just like one of hers. She mentioned this to Signora Mortara, and then went to get her pair to show her. These turned out to be socks that had been stolen from the Mortaras. When Assunta was asked where she had gotten them, she replied that before coming to the Mortaras she had lived briefly with Nina Morisi; in packing to leave for her new job, Assunta had mistaken a pair of her sister-in-law’s socks for her own and had brought them with her. Signora Mortara told her servants that she was missing not only the pair of socks but assorted pieces of underwear as well. It then dawned on her that they had all been stolen by Nina.

Facchini went on to tell of something else that Nina was well known for: her couplings with Austrian officers. Here Morisi had profited from the fact that some Austrian officers boarded in the apartment adjacent to the Mortaras. Her penchant for sneaking soldiers into her home, the suspicion of which had led her subsequent employer to tiptoe up the stairs from her store to catch her red-handed, was well established when she worked for the Mortaras. Facchini told of seeing Nina lead Austrian officers into the Mortara home on several occasions, both when the Mortaras were in another part of the apartment and when they were out. “I warned her various times to show more modesty, to use better judgment and act less brazenly so as not to disgrace herself and not to disgust the Mortaras.”

But the most graphic accounts of Nina’s sexual escapades were offered by two middle-aged women.

Rosalba Pancaldi, a 44-year-old woman who ran a café next to the local parish church, was known by her friends as Rosina. She testified that she had known Nina Morisi for several years, for she had, until a few months earlier, lived in the apartment above the Mortaras with her husband and three children. She explained that next door to the Mortaras lived the Foschini family, whose boarders, Austrian officers, had the room immediately adjacent to the Mortaras. She had often seen Anna acting flirtatiously with the Austrian soldiers and had, indeed, heard it said that she did much more.

“One morning,” the woman recalled, “the officer called Paja or Paolino brought Morisi into his room, from which, a little later, she came out
shouting in that way she had, ‘Oh! what a fuck I had, Signora Rosina, oh, what a fuck I had!’ putting her hands over her face.”

Rosina continued: “I remember, though it’s a bit vague to me now, that one of the servants that I had back then, called Elena, told me she had seen these two in that same room, but I can’t recall if she saw them through the keyhole or some other way.” In any case, she went on, “after this encounter with Morisi, time and time again when she would see me she would repeat the words ‘Oh! what a fuck I had!’ while she laughed and winked.”

Nor was this all. Pancaldi recounted that another of her servants, Maria, had told her of looking down from the terrace one night and seeing Nina “let some German officers into the Mortara apartment … by stepping across from their terrace to her window. I can’t recall if they used a plank to walk across or just jumped.” Signora Pancaldi concluded her testimony by aiming one final blow at what little remained of Anna Morisi’s good name: “I know that this Morisi generally had a poor reputation due to her behavior with the German officers, and she even let them stroke her breasts while they stood at the window of the terrace I mentioned.”

Lest this testimony be taken as the product of one woman’s licentious imagination, the Mortaras arranged to have a final witness corroborate it. Geltrude Foschini, the 50-year-old woman who lived next door to the Mortaras with her husband and their Austrian boarders, told much the same story as her former neighbor, including Nina’s use of the terrace to admit the soldiers into the Mortaras’ apartment at night, and her furtive visits to the soldiers’ rooms.

In fact, Foschini added a detail that Pancaldi had neglected to mention—namely, just who it was who was in the habit of spying on Nina’s amorous adventures through the keyhole. One day, she recounted, Pancaldi had excitedly told her of having seen Nina, in broad daylight, go into the room of the Austrian officers, where Paja awaited her. “Moved by curiosity,” Foschini continued, Signora Pancaldi “put her eye to the keyhole and saw the two in bed engaged in an obscene act. Just at that moment, she saw Signor Mortara coming up the stairs, so Pancaldi said in a loud voice, ‘Nina, here comes Mortara.’ And seconds later Morisi came out and said to Pancaldi, ‘What a fuck I had!’—an expression that she would repeat from then on whenever she saw Pancaldi. In fact, I myself heard her repeat these words on many occasions, and I once asked Signora Pancaldi to explain it to me.”

What the Pope made of all this when the notarized testimony arrived at the Vatican in early October, is hard to tell.

CHAPTER 11
Drama at Alatri

W
HILE
M
OMOLO
was rounding up witnesses in Bologna, he and Marianna debated whether to stay in Bologna or go to Rome to see Edgardo and work there for his release. Arguing for staying in Bologna was the real danger that the family business would go bankrupt in Momolo’s absence, leaving them with seven children to feed and no means to support them short of Jewish charity. Nor were the children, who had been shaken by their brother’s capture, eager to see their parents leave, even though there was no lack of relatives to look after them. And a final doubt was raised by Marianna’s health.

Just what her state of health was in the aftermath of Edgardo’s departure is not easy to know. The problem is not any lack of sources, for month after month, newspapers published medical updates. Nor are these reports contradictory. For the most part, they all say the same thing. Yet they so closely resemble the tales told over the centuries by Jews about similar tragedies that we have some reason to wonder about them. We have seen this Jewish mother before.

News of Marianna’s parlous health was broadcast throughout Europe within days of Edgardo’s capture. Recall that James Rothschild, in his letter from Paris to Cardinal Antonelli, written July 17, spoke of the fact that, as a result of the kidnapping, Marianna had become sick, in fact,
“presque folle”
—she had practically gone crazy. Lionel Rothschild’s letter to Cardinal Antonelli from London the following month contained a similar description.

As stories denouncing what the Church had done began to appear in the Jewish and liberal press throughout Europe, Marianna’s failing health was a common theme. All could sympathize with a poor mother who had been
driven out of her mind by despair at having her son torn from her. Indeed, reports suggested that her very life was in jeopardy. One of the first of these, published in
L’univers Israélite
in Paris, citing friends of the Mortara family in Bologna, described Marianna as “overwhelmed by sorrow.” She had abandoned her numerous other young children and her home and fled to Modena. There she was being cared for by her relatives but had fallen “gravely ill from grief, and now there are strong fears for her life.”
¹

The theme was a powerful one and apt to appear whenever the Jews appealed for support. When, after receiving the August letter from the Jews who had met in Piedmont, the Central Consistory of French Jews sent their plea to Napoleon III for his intercession, they wrote that Edgardo’s mother had been “driven mad by the excess of pain.” Their petition added that Momolo’s untiring efforts to bring his wife back to her senses had been to no avail.
²
Around the same time, the letter sent by forty Prussian rabbis to the Vatican—written in French—likewise referred to the “poor mother” as having “almost gone insane.”
³

The tale of the distraught mother was pulling at the heartstrings of Europe and being wielded as a potent weapon in pressuring the Holy See to release the child. Only by letting Edgardo go could the Vatican remove the sorry sight of a mother—wanting only to hold her beloved child in her arms again—driven to madness while the Church kept him locked up under clerical guard.

The story was used to influence Edgardo as well. Given the fear that the boy’s sympathies for his family were fast eroding in the face of the enticements of the Church, Momolo was urged to impress on him just how miserable his mother had become because he had been taken away from her. Indeed, Edgardo was told, if he did not return soon, she might die from the pain.

While Momolo was in Rome in August, Marianna sent a letter to her son via the Università Israelitica. After examining it, Scazzocchio and his colleagues persuaded Momolo not to deliver the letter to Edgardo. The problem, it seems, was that Marianna was too reassuring and sounded too much like herself. Scazzocchio explained their decision in a letter he drafted on August 25, addressed to the Mortara support group in Bologna: “Signora Marianna’s letter will not be delivered because it does not correspond to what [Momolo] Mortara has already told the boy … We want him to think of her as a mother who is grievously suffering from moral and physical ills produced by the long and painful absence of her son.” Edgardo must be convinced that his return home was “the only cure for her maternal bereavement.”
⁴

So alarming were the reports of the impact that the seizure of Edgardo had had on his mother that the Jewish press found itself having to reassure its readers that she was, in fact, still of sound mind and body. Two items in the
Archives Israélites
of Paris in January 1859 are revealing. The first reported some good news. A letter had just arrived informing them “that the child’s sainted mother has not become insane following the blow that she suffered. Her pain is great and mute; it is touching, it is immense, but she will bear up.” Far from being beaten down, readers were told, the mother would, together with her husband, fight on for their child. “Edgardo Mortara’s father and mother have assured one of our special correspondents that, whatever happens, they will not stop for even a minute of their lives to pursue the dearest object of their desires, the conquest of their son … nothing will stop them.”
⁵

Later in the same issue, the
Archives Israélites
printed a letter it had received from a friend of the Mortaras in Rome. He recalled that the family had been well respected in Bologna, known for their integrity and enjoying a flourishing business. Edgardo’s abduction, however, had sadly altered their position. What was most alarming, the correspondent reported, was the emotional state to which the parents had been reduced, and it was the mother whose situation was most worrisome: “The father shows a great deal of courage, but the mother is having a hard time carrying on. Although she no longer cries when I see her, you can see the recent tracks of tears on her cheeks, and the self-control that she strains to keep up simply shows her pain and her affliction all the more. If the Holy Father had seen this woman as I saw her, he would not have the courage to keep her son another moment.” Yet, the correspondent hastened to add, “the widespread rumor that she has gone mad is not true. She still has all of her wits.”
⁶