The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (50 page)

In General Cadorna’s report to his superiors on the conquest of Rome, he described all this and discussed the ticklish question of what action to take against those who had kept the boy from his parents. “Although the pontifical laws left me in doubt about the possibility of applying a penalty against those who originally took Coen, I believed it right to order, on my own responsibility, the arrest of the Rector of the Institute of the Orphans and the person who was involved in hiding the boy, in order to satisfy the public conscience. Thus the judicial authorities are proceeding with the case.”
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Both the Rector and the employee who had hidden the boy were thrown in jail.

From the perspective of Rome’s Jews, as well as for Italy’s liberals, what might have been a triumphal ending to a sad story became, instead, something quite different. When Giuseppe’s mother, who had not spoken with her son since he went off to work at the cobbler’s shop half a dozen years earlier, finally got to see him again, she threw her arms around the now 16-year-old boy and covered him with kisses. Yet, wrote Cadorna, it was “all in vain. The voice of blood had been snuffed out, he didn’t give a rap for his mother, and the cynical rector of the institute said, ‘He should be considered to be no longer part of his family.’ ” Nonetheless, the Rector could not prevent the Coens from taking their son back with them, and on October 9 Giuseppe was consigned to his mother. But, as a local liberal correspondent described the
scene, “for his desperate, weeping mother he had only words of disdain and rage, saying he no longer had anything in common with her.”
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Despite the boy’s opposition, a court had ordered his return to his parents, on the ground that his father enjoyed legal rights over him. Hoping that, by removing their son from Rome, his old loyalties would reemerge, the Coens took him to Livorno.
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Yet Giuseppe never did change his mind, and as soon as he could, he returned to Rome and became a priest.

The Mortara family was also living in Tuscany, having moved from Turin to Florence in 1865, the year in which Italy’s capital made the same move. Like Michele and Fortunata Coen, Momolo Mortara trailed the Italian army into Rome hoping to reclaim his son. He may not, however, have been the first in his family to reach Rome, for, according to some accounts, his son Riccardo preceded him. It was the same Riccardo who, twelve years earlier, on that traumatic night in June, had run through the streets of Bologna searching for his uncles, tearfully telling them the news of the police who had appeared in his home in search of his younger brother. Perhaps as a result of that experience, Riccardo had chosen to join the Italian army and, at the time of the battle of Porta Pia, was a young infantry officer.

Although militarily the battle was a travesty of mismatched forces, patriots did what they could to puff it up. As the Italian troops poured through the gate, Riccardo, fighting behind General Cadorna, raced to San Pietro in Vincoli, where he knew that his brother was being held. When, however, Riccardo appeared in the doorway of Edgardo’s convent room, wearing the uniform of the Italian light infantry, he was in for a rude welcome. His 19-year-old brother, dressed in an initiate’s robes, placed one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sacrilegious sight and raised the other in front of him, signaling Riccardo to stop where he was. “Get back, Satan!” Edgardo shouted. But, the crestfallen Riccardo replied, “I am your brother.” To this Edgardo responded, “Before you get any closer to me, take off that assassin’s uniform.”
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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

W
HEN
M
OMOLO 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.
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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.