The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (54 page)

Marianna then recounted the events of April 3: Bolaffi’s unexpected return with Imelda and Rosa, his appearance at the bedroom where she sat with her bedridden husband, and the story that Bolaffi told of Rosa’s stormy encounter with her former employer. But in the details that followed, there were some elements that were new to the Magistrate.

While we were talking, Rosa had gone up to her room. Meanwhile, Bolaffi was saying that we should give some careful thought to the
matter, and he advised us to fire the servant and report her to the police. Since he was talking so loudly, I asked him to speak more softly so that Rosa wouldn’t overhear him. I then called Rosa from my husband’s bedroom, and since she didn’t answer or come down, I got up to go look for her. Going upstairs, I found that she’d locked herself in on the terrace with the key that is always left in the lock. Her face was all red, and it seemed to me that she’d been crying. I asked her to come down and prepare dinner, but she didn’t say anything. She walked ahead of me down the stairs, and I accompanied her to the kitchen, where I told her that she shouldn’t get all upset, and that if she was innocent, she had nothing to fear.

Marianna then returned to the bedroom. About five minutes later, she heard a big, sudden noise. Their dog started barking. Momolo thought that Rosa must have slammed the door and left, and Aristide ran to call after her down the stairway.

Bolaffi and I went to the front window to see if she was leaving the building, but since we didn’t see her, we started to go back. As we passed the room with the two beds, where the dog kept barking, I saw that the window was open. I approached it with Bolaffi and saw Rosa lying in the courtyard, groaning. Desperate, I went back to the bedroom, no, first I threw myself in Bolaffi’s arms. Since none of my older sons were home, I told him that he would have to do what had to be done. He said that he would go down to help Rosa and to report it to the police, and without even going back to my husband’s bedroom, he left.…

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.