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

5
A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
50
1924–1926
‘‘The past is forgotten, the future is ominous’’
Ezra was slow to acknowledge Olga’s importance in his life. He invited
her to Rapallo the middle of February 1924 on the pretense of further
collaboration on the Villon opera. He tried first to book a room at the
Hotel Splendide but, finding no vacancy there, settled her in the Mignon,
where he and Dorothy were temporarily lodged. Angry at Pound’s indiscretion,
Olga left the scene and climbed to Monte Allegro, a village above
Rapallo, where she took a room at the Albergo Fernigotti. When Ezra
tried to reach her by telephone, he was told that the signorina was out, or
the lines were guaste (out of order). When he finally got through, Ezra—
blind to the nuances of human behavior—questioned why she sounded so
cold, ‘‘so frozen on the phone?’’ Before the construction of a funicular,
Monte Allegro was accessible only by a narrow, di≈cult path up the
mountainside. Still convalescent from appendicitis, Ezra protested he was
too weak to climb: ‘‘Have had the miseries for three days, e ti voglio [I
want you]. . . . If you can come down one day, wd. feed you tea and toast.’’
While he was vacillating, Olga received a message forwarded from
her primo amore in Cairo. When she responded quickly and spontaneously
by telegram, Egerton suggested that he might ‘‘come to Europe for the