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

167 The Road to Hell
chance.’’ He had dark hair and wore glasses and looked a bit shy. Drummond
called him over to make the introductions. ‘‘So this was Omar!’’
Mary exclaimed. It was the first time Olga and Mary had met Dorothy’s
son, then in the U.S. Army of Occupation and on leave in Rapallo with his
mother.
Drummond suggested that Mary, as Pound’s minor child, should apply
to visit Ezra at the detention center. Permission was granted for thirty
minutes, once a month, but did not include her mother. Olga went anyway.
In 1945, army jeeps traveled along the ancient via Aurelia where oxen
had once been the principal beasts of burden, creating an almost continuous
cloud of dust. Near the village of Metato, just north of Pisa, the U.S.
Army had improvised the Detention Training Center for the Mediterranean
Theater of Operations. The camp was surrounded by a half mile of
barbed-wire fence held in place by concrete gibbets, with guard towers
spaced at intervals. In this grim setting, Olga and Mary found Ezra.
‘‘I’m very glad I followed your advice to the letter and asked only
permission for Mary, result being that I was allowed in, too—as a favor, I
have no right! Instead of the regulation half-hour, we had two-anda-half,’’
she wrote John Drummond.
She described their visit to James Laughlin: ‘‘Mary and I saw EP on
October 17th. He is being well-treated and is in better health than before.
He had got very thin on a war diet . . . now he has put on weight and is
very calm and cheerful . . . looks younger than his age.’’ Mary, more
realistically, described Babbo in his cell as ‘‘grizzled and red-eyed,’’ in a
U.S. Army–issue shirt and trousers, unlaced shoes without socks, but with
‘‘his old twinkle and a bear hug.’’
Olga had not been back to the calle Querini since the war’s end, and a
serendipitous o√er of transportation enabled her to go to Venice. ‘‘I
wouldn’t have undertaken such a trip . . . except suddenly a soldier friend
arrived with a jeep and a few days leave, which gave us a chance to lay
eyes again on the ‘divine mud puddle’ (as you call it),’’ she wrote Count
Chigi. ‘‘My little house [was] emptied of the most important part of its
contents . . . [but] things are beginning to go better for us now. I have
finally received some money my brother sent six months ago.’’
Though Olga appeared cheerful, there was a dark current running