The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (39 page)

Father Feletti had now said what he wanted to say. Carboni left. The warden turned the key to his cell as the magistrate left the friar to his prayers and his thoughts.

Having heard from the Inquisitor, Carboni was now eager to hear from the victims, from Momolo and Marianna. This turned out to be difficult, for the Mortaras were not easy to locate, as they no longer lived in Bologna. Carboni requested, and received, authorization to petition the authorities of the Kingdom of Sardinia to summon Momolo to testify, but he learned that Momolo happened to be in Florence on business. Carboni discovered that Marianna’s uncle Angelo Padovani, the banker, who was still living in Bologna, was in touch with him. On February 1, Padovani was called in to the prosecutor’s offices and given a written request to pass on to Momolo as soon as possible, asking him to report to the Bologna prosecutor. Five days later Momolo appeared in Bologna to testify.

Carboni invited Momolo to tell about his son’s kidnapping. Once he got started, it was hard to stop him. He told of the appearance at his home on the evening of June 23 of Marshal Lucidi and Agostini, his horror on learning of their mission, and the desperate attempts over the next twenty-four hours to keep them from taking Edgardo.

When Momolo’s torrent of pained recollections ceased, Carboni seized on the points that were of most interest to him.

“Did Marshal Lucidi ever show you any written order that the boy be taken?”

“No.”

“Do you know for a fact, as you have said, that the order in question came from Rome, and that the proof of the baptism was undertaken by that Tribunal?”

“I was never able to learn anything about it.”

“Do you have any complaints about the behavior of the police in the way that they carried out their order?”

“No, I can’t complain. The Marshal kissed me many times, and many of his men were clearly moved by our tears and our desolation.”

“Didn’t the Father Inquisitor attempt to persuade you to give up your son voluntarily, to avoid having to separate you by force?”

“I was so beside myself that I can’t recall if the Father Inquisitor tried to persuade me to give him up spontaneously. The fact is, though, that I gave him up only because of force. Without that, they would never have gotten my son.”

“And yet, the Father Inquisitor … has said that, having assured you that your child would be brought up and educated in those sciences for which he had most inclination, so that he would one day be able to support you, he was able to persuade you, so that you left quietly, and you
went home to persuade the boy’s mother to leave her son behind. Isn’t that true?”

“It’s false! Father Feletti may have used those arguments to try to convince me, but I wasn’t persuaded in the least, nor did I go home to persuade my wife.”

In fact, Momolo told the magistrate, at the time he went to see the Inquisitor, his wife had already gone to the Vitta home.

“And the boy, Edgardo, how did he feel about being taken from you and from your family?”

“The boy remained in bed until one o’clock in the afternoon, and though he may have realized to some extent that the police had come for him, we tried to hide it from him so as not to injure his health. Then it was all so sudden when they took him from my arms, and took him away, that I couldn’t tell you whether he shouted or what he said, especially since at that moment I was practically in a daze myself. I have heard people say, though, that on his trip he kept asking for his parents and for his Mezuzah, which is a kind of medallion of our religion.”

“And how did your son behave during the visits that you and your wife had with him in Rome?”

“Although he was frightened, and intimidated by the Rector’s presence, he openly declared his desire to return home with us.”

Perhaps Carboni felt that, for all its peculiarities, the Mortara case was not unlike many other criminal trials he had known. Accuser and accused had entirely different accounts of what had happened. The task of the Magistrate was to provoke his witnesses in such a way that the truth would come out:

“You should know,” Carboni told Momolo, “that Father Feletti has said that from the moment you and your wife were told … that … Edgardo, having been baptized, had to be turned over to the Church, the boy … remained unperturbed, and that while the other brothers and sisters all cried, he remained quiet and tranquil. That the next evening he let the police help him get dressed, showing the same lack of concern and happiness.” And then, on his way to Rome, Edgardo constantly asked to be taken to church. Carboni continued his paraphrase of Father Feletti’s testimony, leading Momolo to believe that he found it convincing.

The Inquisitor’s story, replied Momolo, was but a litany of lies.

When the police arrived, and for several hours afterward, Edgardo slept soundly. When he finally woke up and saw the police, he was seized by convulsive trembling, which lasted until full sunrise. And when we
offered him some food to give him strength, he refused to eat before having said our morning prayer, for it is prohibited to eat before reciting it. In fact, he then recited the prayer with the prayer book open, as the police can attest, but even so he could eat very little the whole day because his system was upset. He got up late, and he got dressed without anyone’s help, other than the usual assistance from his mother, who had him put on his usual clothes, along with a cap, something that doesn’t bother him at all, because all his other brothers wear one when they go out of the house.

No Jewish boy should leave his head uncovered.

At the meetings with Edgardo in Rome, no rabbi had ever been present—as the Inquisitor had claimed—but, rather, once or twice Signor Scazzocchio, the secretary of the Jewish community, had accompanied him. And the Inquisitor’s claim that it was the Pope who had invited Momolo and Marianna to Rome, much less paid their way, was “
falsissima.”
As for the boy’s alleged fright at being accosted by his mother in the church at Alatri, Marianna had never come anywhere near the church, remaining at the Rector’s home while Momolo went in search of their son.

The Magistrate then turned his attention to the question of the baptism itself, for if there had been no valid baptism, the Inquisitor would have had no legal right to order Edgardo taken from his parents. Anna Morisi took center stage.

“How long was Morisi working for you?”

“About six years, with some interruptions of a few months here and there, and she left for good five or six months before our son was taken from us. She quit after having some words with my wife. She had worked for us for so long, she seemed to think that she should be the boss and do things her own way.”

Had she gone away angry? asked Carboni. Was there reason to fear a vendetta?

“For some time there was less than perfect harmony between her and us, though we bore it with more good nature and patience than we should have. But there weren’t any bad feelings of a sort that would reasonably lead to any fear of a vendetta.”

“Who took care of little Edgardo at the time he was sick and was said to have been baptized by Morisi? Did she ever have him in her care by herself?”

“She never cared for him alone, not even at the time of that illness.…
At night we kept him in a cradle beside our bed and during the day in a bedroom where his mother watched over him.”

Carboni concluded the interrogation by asking about Anna Morisi’s religious observance.

“We sent her to do her duties, but whether she did them or not I couldn’t say. One thing is certain: she was no religious fanatic.”
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CHAPTER 20
The Inquisitor’s Trial

A
NNA
M
ORISI WAS NOT
eager to be found by the Bologna authorities. She did not know what they might do to her. After all, were it not for her, Edgardo would never have been taken from his parents. Although she knew little about the new government beyond the fact that it was a foe of the old, she had heard her priest in Persiceto say that the new rulers were anti-Catholic, godless enemies of the Pope. If they thought nothing about barging into a convent in the middle of the night and hustling off the redoubtable Dominican friar, what chance had she in the face of their displeasure?

For Magistrate Carboni, back in Bologna, the time had come to see what he could learn from the Mortaras’ former servant. On February 9, he and his assistant set off in a carriage bound for Persiceto. On their arrival, they were escorted by the chief local magistrate to a sunlit corner room on the second floor of the town hall, which he had readied for them. A policeman went to get Anna Morisi, and she soon appeared.

The Bologna magistrate led the young woman through the preliminaries: “I’m Anna Morisi, daughter of Giovanni, who’s no longer living. I’m 23 years old. I was born in Persiceto and I live here, near the church of San Lorenzo. I work as a cotton spinner, and I’m married to Giuseppe Buongiovanni. I’ve got just one son, and I’m Catholic.”

Anna was actually 26 years old, but she had never been too clear on how old she was. Her exact age would ordinarily have made little difference, but the unexpected attention paid to her otherwise obscure life had turned her age into a topic of discussion from Rome to London, Munich to San Francisco. She herself had said that she was just 14 years old when she baptized Edgardo,
and her youth was picked up by the Mortara-friendly press as further evidence of why the reported baptism should not be taken seriously. In fact, at the time that, by her account, she baptized Edgardo, she was nearing her nineteenth birthday.
¹

Asked if she knew why they had called her in, she replied: “I guess it’s because of the boy of my old employers, the Mortaras, Jews who live in Bologna, who I baptized, and who because of that was taken from his family by order of the Inquisitor, Father Feletti. I assume that’s the reason because I heard that this monk was recently put in jail.”

Anna was then asked to tell her story. Although she had hoped to avoid this encounter with the magistrate, now that she had the chance to give her own version of what had happened, she did so eagerly. Anna told of Edgardo’s sickness, which, as she recalled, took place in the winter of 1851 or 1852, when he was about 4 months old. (As Doctor Saragoni’s records would later reveal, Edgardo had taken ill at the end of August 1852, when he was just over a year old.) She told of the Mortaras’ apparent fear for his life. “One morning,” she recalled, “I saw them sitting, sad and crying, at a little table next to Edgardo’s crib, reading from a book in Hebrew that the Jews read when one of them is about to die.”

This scene made a big impression on her, she said, and so, a little later, when she was sent to buy some oil from Cesare Lepori’s grocery nearby, she couldn’t help telling him about the boy’s illness. Hearing the story, Anna recollected, “Lepori suggested that I baptize him, so that when he died he would go to heaven. But I told him I didn’t know how to baptize someone. I was only 14 or 15 years old, and didn’t have much education about Christianity, since I was raised so roughly.” The grocer, she said, assured her it was easy. All you had to do was say “ ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,’ take some water from a well, and sprinkle a few drops on the boy’s head.”

When I got back to the house, I saw that the parents were watching over their sick son, so I had to wait for about an hour. They finally left the room, which was the living room, and went to their bedroom; I don’t know why. I quickly drew a little water from the well, went over to the boy’s crib, and repeated the words that I’d been taught, with the fixed idea of sending a soul to heaven. I put the fingers of my right hand in the glass of water, sprinkled a few drops on the boy’s head, and in a moment it was all done, without anyone noticing.

To Anna’s surprise, shortly after the furtive ceremony Edgardo got better, and, she said, she gave no more thought to what she had done. But years later, just three months in fact before she left the Mortara home for good, another
Mortara baby, Aristide, who was a little over a year old, also got sick. Two days before he died, Anna, on her way to the storage room upstairs, ran into another servant she knew, whose name was Regina—Anna could not recall her last name—a woman who worked for their neighbors, the Pancaldis. Regina asked her what the problem was with the Mortaras’ baby, for she had heard him screaming all night long. Anna told her what she heard the doctors say: the boy had something they called the “sacred flame” and would surely die.

“Regina then asked me,” said Anna, “ ‘Why don’t you baptize him?’ I said: ‘Not me. I already baptized another one of them, and I wouldn’t want him to live, like the other one did, and I told her the exact details about the baptism I gave Edgardo.”

About two months after she left the Mortaras and began to work for the Santandrea family—above five months in all after her conversation with Regina—a man appeared, delivering a printed summons for Anna to appear before the Father Inquisitor at San Domenico. Signora Santandrea read it to her.

“I obeyed the call and was brought into that convent, into a room where Father Feletti and another Dominican father were. Father Feletti had a book open and made me touch it on a page where I could see a little cross printed, and he told me that it was the Gospel, and he said that it was a kind of oath, which bound me not to say anything about what he’d question me about.” Father Feletti had then begun his investigation of the baptism:

“I innocently told him everything that I later told to those men [the Mortara brothers-in-law], and that other monk … wrote down everything I said, but they didn’t read it back to me, and I didn’t sign my cross to it, at least I don’t remember it. When he finally dismissed me, he told me again not to say anything about it.”