Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

160 The Road to Hell
ham sandwiches. And if anyone says beer cans cannot be opened with a
bayonet, they lie.’’
At four o’clock a car was requisitioned to take Olga and Ezra to Chiavari.
The driver could not find U.S. Army headquarters, so he dropped
them o√ at the partisan prison. The o≈cer in charge recognized Ezra as il
poeta, amico d’Italia, and refused to take him in without a written order.
Pound still believed that as soon as the American authorities heard his side
of the story, charges against him would be dropped. He asked to be taken
to the U.S. Command to state his case, and Olga stuck with him. From
Chiavari, they went by army jeep to Lavagna, where the occupying G.I.s
were lounging about, fraternizing with Italian civilians who appeared
happy to see them. The walls were covered with blood; in Olga’s words,
‘‘They [the partisans] had been paying o√ old scores.’’
At U.S. Army headquarters, they found someone who had heard of
Ezra Pound, the poet—the o≈cer in charge, Colonel Webber—but the
colonel didn’t know what to do with him. He asked if they were hungry,
and the K-ration box lunches tasted ‘‘very good indeed’’ after wartime
shortages. Then he ordered them taken to the Counter Intelligence Center
(CIC), a modern o≈ce building in the center of Genoa.
Earlier, in Zoagli, Olga had overheard two partisans discussing Casa
60, and she guessed they might have broken into her house. She asked
Colonel Webber if he would send orders to the sindaco to protect her
property. Olga was surprised at the new political pecking order: when the
colonel gave the order to his Italian subordinate, the boy responded with a
Communist salute.
It was getting dark at about seven o’clock when they arrived in Genoa.
A young o≈cer escorted them into a large hall with two carabinieri guarding
the door and ordered them to sit down and wait. The straight-backed
o≈ce chairs grew harder as the hours went by, Olga remembered. ‘‘In the
distance, in another room, I could hear people crying, God knows what
they were doing to them. It got to be nine, ten, eleven o’clock. We were
left there all night, just sitting on those hard o≈ce chairs.’’
The next day, they remained in the same hall without food or drink and
without speaking to anyone until, at 4:30 in the afternoon, two soldiers
escorted Ezra into another o≈ce for questioning. He didn’t return until