The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (52 page)

Marianna then returned to the bedroom. A few minutes later, they heard a big noise, like a door slamming. Rosa didn’t answer their calls, and, being all too familiar with his servants’ habit of walking out on him, Momolo told his daughter Ernesta to go to Rosa’s room to see if she had taken her clothes with her, a sure sign that she would not be back. Meanwhile, his wife went to look for Rosa down the stairway. As Marianna was returning through the corridor, she heard shouts coming from the courtyard and went to look out the boys’
bedroom window. She saw Rosa lying in the courtyard below. “She returned to my bedroom all upset and said that Rosa had thrown herself out the window.” Bolaffi, hearing this, ran to see for himself. Returning to Momolo’s room, Bolaffi “said he would go to the police station and try to help Rosa. I tried two times, amidst all the confusion, to get out of bed, but I just couldn’t.” Momolo then sent his son Aristide to run down and try to find out what had happened.

At the time all this occurred, Momolo reported, the only people in his house were Bolaffi, Bolaffi’s little boy, Rosa, his own youngest son, Aristide, his wife, and his three daughters. His older sons were all out. His bedroom was far from the room from which Rosa fell, he said, and for the previous two weeks he had never gotten out of bed except to go to the lavatory.

Having completed his interrogation of Momolo, the Magistrate went into the main part of the Murate prison to interview Flaminio Bolaffi. Bolaffi said that he had forgotten to mention to the police that when he had accompanied Rosa and Imelda to the Mortaras’ home, he had taken along his 12-year-old son, Emilio. Asked whether Rosa had been wearing the white kerchief on her head when she had come to his house, Bolaffi responded no, she hadn’t.

“You should know,” said the Magistrate, “that on the basis of our investigations so far, we must conclude that Rosa Tognazzi was wounded on her head inside the Mortaras’ house before she fell from the window. Therefore, we believe that the wound was caused either by Mortara or by you and that, following this grave wound, she was thrown from the window.”

“That can’t be,” Bolaffi replied, “unless she injured herself. Mortara was in his room in bed, and I had no reason to lay a hand on the servant.”

The following day, the Magistrate, as required by law, prepared a request to the court for permission to hold the men in jail. The immediate reaction to the incident, that it was a case of suicide, he wrote, had been proven wrong by the wound they had found on the victim’s forehead and the kerchief that had been tied around it. Rosa had returned home that afternoon, according to witnesses, healthy and calm. The women in the ground-floor apartment had heard angry noises coming from the Mortara apartment, followed immediately by Rosa’s plunge. Asked, as she lay moaning on the pavement, whether she had been thrown out the window, she had responded yes.

All the evidence, the Magistrate wrote, led to the strong suspicion that Rosa had been gravely injured inside the Mortara apartment and, half alive and half dead, had been thrown from the window to give the appearance of suicide. Although careful examination of the apartment the following day had revealed no sign of any blood or murder weapon, this was not surprising given the delay.

The accumulated evidence, wrote the Magistrate, “dictated the arrest of
Mortara and the other Jew, Flaminio Bolaffi, the one who had been in the Mortara home when the event occurred.” What was the case against Bolaffi? He was the one, wrote the Magistrate, who brought word of what had happened to the police station without first doing anything to minister to the injured woman. He, too, had been trying to get everyone to believe that Rosa’s encounter with her former employer had led her to kill herself. And if Rosa had been so gruesomely attacked in the apartment and then thrown from the window, as the evidence indicated, Bolaffi must have known about it.

As for Momolo, he claimed that he was unable to get out of bed, but a neighbor had seen him go out that evening with his youngest son, walking without difficulty. And all the evidence suggested that Momolo was a man of poor character: the household was constantly filled with screaming and profanity, and no servant could stand it for long.

The judge found the Magistrate’s case convincing and ordered the two men to remain in jail.

In the aftermath of Momolo’s arrest, his family sent a telegram to Riccardo in Turin, telling him to return home immediately because of “a family emergency.” Meanwhile, Augusto, who had just finished law school, took on his father’s defense.

Marabotti called in twenty witnesses to testify over the next two weeks as the investigation gathered momentum, bringing more disturbing facts to light. But the first few witnesses did nothing to help the prosecution’s case. Giovanni Balduzzi, the young carabiniere officer who was the first policeman called to the scene, flagged down by a neighbor, told how, after seeing Rosa lying in the courtyard minutes after her fall, he had rushed up to the Mortaras’ apartment. Quickly moving through the rooms, he found that only one of the windows that looked out on the courtyard was open, in a room with two beds. Although he looked quickly for signs of blood or other such evidence around the window, he found none. “I then went,” he testified, “into the room where the whole family of the Jew Mortara was gathered, and where Mortara himself lay in bed.”

At the request of Augusto Mortara, in his capacity as his father’s lawyer, the Magistrate interviewed a number of character witnesses for Momolo. The Mortaras’ 26-year-old seamstress reported that she had, for many months, come regularly to the Mortara home to do sewing for them. Although she had heard Momolo raise his voice at times, she said, “I can’t say anything bad about the Mortaras.” And, she concluded, “I don’t think he is capable of having thrown the woman out the window.” Momolo’s barber was called in, and he testified that in recent weeks he had had to come to the Mortara home to shave Momolo, who was too incapacitated to get out of bed.

But Momolo’s neighbors, eyewitnesses to the tragedy, continued to doubt
his innocence. Among the most hostile was Enrichetta Mattei, a 38-year-old woman who lived on the third floor of Momolo’s building. “I knew the Jew Mortara,” she said, “only to say hello to.” And though she had been out of the building on the afternoon of the third, something had happened on the previous day, she told the Magistrate, that he should know about.

It was a Sunday, she recalled, and she had overheard Momolo “cursing the servant Rosa, who had just returned from mass, saying: ‘This mass takes you an awfully long time, oh, damn you and your mass!’ and other words in the same angry tone, so I went to the window and said, ‘Damn you and your Rabbi!’ And then he closed his window himself, and I could hear that he was in the kitchen and not in bed. After I said those words to the Jew,” she added, “Rosa came to the window, shook her head unhappily, and I saw that she was crying.”

She concluded her testimony by telling the Magistrate: “People in the neighborhood all say that Rosa was thrown from the window, and I believe it.” But, she observed, “Mortara could not have done it alone, because she was a heavy woman.” Enrichetta, illiterate, signed the transcript of her testimony with a cross.

Interspersed with the neighbors, other witnesses were called in an attempt to shed more light on the victim herself. Had she ever reported any fears about Mortara to anyone? Was there, on the other hand, any evidence to suggest that she was suicidal? What kind of a person was she?

Angiolo Farzini, in whose home Rosa had lived as a servant for three or four months before she went to work for Luigi Bartolozzi, testified that Rosa had been an excellent employee. “She was always cheerful,” he recalled, “and never showed any ideas of wanting to throw herself out a window.” There had, though, once been a problem: “She had a sister sick in the hospital, and she often took her things, with our approval. One time, though, my wife surprised her while she was taking a bit of oil and vinegar in a little bottle, and she reprimanded her. Rosa took it badly and left our house without ever returning, even though it was only a matter of a few pennies. For the rest,” he concluded, “I always found her to be a good woman, and if she hadn’t left, I would have been happy to keep her.”

Rosa’s sister Maria testified that she had last seen Rosa three weeks before her death. Rosa told Maria that she was happy in the Mortaras’ house. “She never in her life seemed gloomy, nor ever had any reason to be.” When she first heard of Rosa’s death, Maria had assumed that it was the result of natural causes, but then she heard rumors that Rosa “had been thrown out of a window for having burned her employers’ lunch.” That story was, in fact, gaining wide currency. Police were already trying to locate two women in the neighborhood who, the day after the murder, had informed a third that Rosa had been murdered because she had burned the Mortaras’ soup.

The police tracked down the two servants employed by the Mortaras before Rosa. Erminia Poggi, an 18-year-old woman, had gone to work for them three months earlier, just after Momolo had returned empty-handed, and empty-hearted, from Rome. She left after a month, she recalled, “because there were too many people in the house, and the employer was a furious man, as were his children.” Momolo Mortara “continuously mistreated me and did nothing but complain all day long.”

The Magistrate asked the young woman if Momolo had ever threatened her. “He never threatened to hit me, though a number of times he swore he would throw things in my face. He was violent with his children as well and, out of anger, would throw plates or other things at them.” Nor was his wife spared his wrath: “One time, when his wife broke a lampshade, he went into a fury; he took her by the neck, saying he wanted to kill her. He brought her like this into the bedroom.” What happened there she didn’t know, she said, but afterward, she saw the signora in a faint on the bed, being attended to by her daughters, who were giving her smelling salts. Nor, completing Erminia’s unflattering portrait, was the signora herself much better; she was always in a bad mood.

If Erminia had lasted for thirty-three days, her successor, 22-year-old Antonietta Vestri, lasted only twenty-seven. She, too, described the household as plagued by constant quarreling. Her boss was “of furious character, even shouting at his children.” And Marianna “was never satisfied with my service.”

More direct testimony on how Rosa was faring at the Mortaras came from her friend Augusta Carnicelli, a 19-year-old servant. Augusta had spoken to Rosa when, she recalled, Rosa “had already been working for the Jew Mortara for over a month.… In talking to me about her employers, she told me she couldn’t stand it anymore, because they were never satisfied with her. They made her take stuff back to the market, and even though she obeyed, when the shopkeepers refused to take it back, they beat her with fists and slaps and were always insulting her.” Augusta told Rosa she should quit, but Rosa did not want to leave before she found another job, afraid that “she would find herself in the middle of the street.” Just five days before Rosa’s death, Augusta had run into her again. The young woman who had always been so cheerful was in tears, Augusta claimed, bemoaning her life at the Mortara home.

The Magistrate heard testimony of another kind from the policeman who had been on duty when Flaminio Bolaffi rushed in with the news of Rosa’s fall. Officer Pilade Masini painted a suspicious picture of Bolaffi. Asked to tell what had happened, Bolaffi had said he didn’t know anything, and then, when the policeman asked him to accompany him back to the scene, he didn’t want to come. When Masini arrived at the courtyard and examined the moribund woman, he was struck by the terrible wound on her forehead and noted the
bloody kerchief and the fact that there was so little blood beneath her head. “Right then I got suspicious that she had been thrown out.”

Learning that Rosa lived on the top floor, the officer rushed up the stairs and knocked repeatedly on the door, as loudly as he could, but got no response. He went back down, thinking that no one was home, but quickly ran up again when the neighbors told him there were people up there. This time he kicked at the Mortaras’ door until finally it was opened by a 12-year-old boy who, Masini said, seemed confused. The officer brought the youngster downstairs with him, but since the boy seemed to know nothing, Masini took him back upstairs. The boy did not knock on the door but whistled, and a girl came to open it. Masini went in and found Momolo in bed. The invalid, reported the policeman, said that he didn’t know what had happened. Masini went to investigate the windows that looked onto the courtyard but found them all closed. “I looked on the ground briefly but didn’t find any traces of blood.”

The matter of blood was on the Magistrate’s mind that day as he asked the two medical examiners to do more detailed studies of the forensic evidence, focusing, in particular, on the wound to Rosa’s forehead. Could it have been made by the blade that was found in her pocket? And could they shed any more light on whether the wound came as a result of the fall or had been inflicted first? On April 19, they submitted their report.

On the razor the doctors had no doubt: “Such a wound could not have been made by the blade of the razor found in Tognazzi’s pocket.” The gash was not caused by anything as sharp or as light as a blade. The mysterious razor seemed to have nothing to do with the young woman’s death.

The doctors were also able to reconstruct the position in which Rosa had landed. Given the nature of the fractures to her right foot and leg, as well as to her hip, they were confident that, “if not in a perfectly upright position, she was in a vertical position not far from fully upright” when she hit the ground, right foot first.

As for the kerchief, if the wound that it covered had been produced by the fall, “it would have had to be lacerated.” It was not.

The Magistrate had also asked whether the limited amount of blood on the kerchief and the lack of much blood below Rosa’s head on the courtyard didn’t show that the wound must have been inflicted elsewhere. In this, the doctors had to disappoint him. The amount of blood in the handkerchief, they reported, was consistent with the nature of the wound.