TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

in Rimini, Pound finds the building closed. The town librarian was at home ill with the
flu. Returning a week later to the same impediment Pound finds a peculiar ally, Averardo
Marcheti, his hotel keeper and co-founder of the ―Fascio Riminese.‖ It was the Fascio
Riminese who caused the collapse of Rimini‘s socialist administration through brutality
and intimidation. Marcheti, happened and prevailed upon by Pound, complains to the
town boss, Dr. Luigi Marcialis, the Fascist ―Gran Cordone Mauriziano.‖ In the middle of
his illness the Gambalunga librarian is shamed and intimidated by Marcialis into opening
the library. Pound sends a triumphant and maudlin letter home to Dorothy about the
librarian, Aldo Francesco Massera, ―who may die of the shock.‖ Rainey writes, ―Here,
for Pound, was swift action replacing bureaucratic delay. He would never forget it, and
almost immediately he sought to commemorate the event‖ (130).
In fact when we understand this sorry story of Pound‘s relationship to these
elements in the fascist machinery and his unconscionable wish to be given access to any
and all Malatesta documents, as if they belonged to him personally, the conclusion to
―Canto X‖ and its use of the Broglio manuscripts seems a perverse parody of the real
fights taking place in Italy between black-shirts and moderates. Pound‘s commemoration
of Malatesta‘s martial success uncomfortably inflates his own ―triumph‖ over Massera:
And they came at us with their ecclesiastical legates
Until the eagle lit on his tent pole.
And he said: The Romans would have called that an augury
E gradment li antichi cavaler romanj
Davano fed a quisti annuttii,
All I want you to do is to follow the orders,
They‘ve got a bigger army,
But there are more men in this camp. (47)
The lines from the Broglio manuscript, as translated by Rainey:
129