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Chapter
Nineteen.

A few days before Ezra Pound tried to give himself up or offer his services or whatever he was doing, Harry passed through Rapallo with a recon platoon from the 473rd Infantry Regiment. It was April 26, 1945.

He said they took some German prisoners in Santa Margherita and went on to Genoa, where about four thousand Germans surrendered the next day. Harry said he had been trained as a tank crewman at Camp Bowie, Texas, and went to Italy to join the Second Armored Group as a replacement. As soon as he got there the Group was disbanded and reformed as part of the 473rd. Harry was assigned to the Intelligence & Reconnaissance platoon as the lieutenant's driver. He was twenty years old.

"The war was almost over," Harry said, "so during the next couple months they had us rounding up deserters. There were some famous ones like the Lane Gang, a bunch of guys that stole all kinds of army supplies and sold them on the black market. Clothes, trucks, jeeps, everything. Others were soldiers who'd committed serious crimes and were wanted fugitives. Any deserters we caught we'd take to the Army Disciplinary Training Center, a military stockade they had not far from Pisa, between there and Viareggio. We were here in Rapallo looking for deserters working the black market when we picked up the guy from the 92nd, the one I shot, but didn't find out till later he was wanted for murder. He'd raped a woman and cut her throat. Temporarily we had him locked in a storeroom in the hotel we were using as headquarters, on the Piazza Garibaldi. This one time, because I happened to be standing there, in the lobby, the sergeant picks me to relieve the soldier guarding the storeroom, so he could go to chow. I'm going down the hall and who do I see coming toward me but the guy, the deserter, with the carbine he'd taken off the guy I was going to relieve. Coming fast, to club me with the gun rather than shoot me and let everybody know he'd escaped. Coming at me as I'm reaching for my sidearm, clearing it, a round already in the chamber. I know that 'cause it was the way I kept it. That guy in the parking lot last month.... No, it was in October, wasn't it? He stopped when I pulled the gun. This one didn't, the deserter, he kept coming, raising the carbine to club me with it when I shot him and it stopped him. I shot him again and that one knocked him down. He'd killed the guard, so we never found out how he got the carbine away from him.

"A couple of weeks later, on May twenty-ninth, we delivered a deserter to the Disciplinary Training Center and that was the day I saw Ezra Pound for the first time, scruffy looking, like a skid-row bum inside one of the maximum security cells, where they kept the violent prisoners and the ones condemned to death. They had reinforced the cell Ezra Pound was in with steel wire mesh. He called it a gorilla cage and it did look like one. It sat on a concrete slab about six by ten, had a slanted roof, and was open on four sides, so the rain could come in from any direction. Other prisoners had pup tents inside their cages. All Ezra had the first few weeks were a couple of blankets. They kept a spotlight on him at night and no one was supposed to talk to him. You see," Harry said, "hardly anyone there knew he was a world-famous poet. The camp officials were told he was a traitor and to keep a close watch so he didn't try to escape or commit suicide. There was also talk the Fascists might try to rescue him. Finally, after a while, they eased up and moved him to the medical compound. They let him use a desk so he could continue writing his poetry."

"His Cantos," Joyce said. "He spent forty years writing a poem that hardly anyone in the world can understand."

"'No man who has passed a month in the death cells,'" Harry said, "'believes in cages for beasts.' You don't understand that?"

Joyce said, "Once in a while he made sense."

"He was a genius," Harry said.

"He was a racist," Joyce said, "and viciously anti-Semitic. He thought Hitler was right about the Jews; he said they started the war. He called Roosevelt President Rosenfeld."

Harry shrugged. "He said later that was a big mistake, those views, talking like that."

"He said later the Cantos were a mess, too, stupid all the way through," Joyce said. "I read the books you gave me, Harry. Don't forget that."

"He was old then," Harry said, but without much conviction.

Raylan wondered how often they had this discussion, Harry defending his hero, Joyce tearing him down. There was a silence and Raylan said, "You spoke to him, that time in the prison camp?"

Harry nodded. "Once. I asked him how he was doing. He said he was watching a wasp build a house with four rooms. I saw him again a month later, after he'd been transferred to the medical compound. He was sitting at a desk typing. I'd heard that he wrote letters for prisoners who were illiterate. They liked him, called him Uncle Ez. Anyway, he was typing something, I asked him how he was doing. This twenty-year-old kid talking to Ezra Pound. He looked at me and, while he was still typing, said, 'The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity...' I said, 'What?' But now he was staring at what he'd typed. 'The ant's a centaur...' I remembered the line and found it three years later in a book of his poetry, The Pisan Cantos, in number Eighty-one."

Joyce said, "Does it make sense to you?"

Still after him.

Raylan thinking, It doesn't have to make sense. Not to Harry.

As Harry said again, "The man was a genius."

"You're taking someone else's word for that."

"Sure, why not?"

"A genius, and more than a little nuts."

"That too," Harry said. "But it got him off, didn't it? His friends said he had to be crazy to have made so big a fool of himself."

Joyce looked at Raylan. "You know what happened to him?"

Raylan shook his head. He knew the name, Ezra Pound, and that was about it. Following the trip to Atlanta he'd tried reading some of the man's poetry and had given up, telling himself he was too dumb. He was glad to hear hardly anyone else understood it either.

"He was declared insane," Joyce said. "Instead of doing time for treason he was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. C."

"Twelve years in St. Liz's bughouse," Harry said. "No way to treat the old darling of the U. S. expatriate intelligentsia. I think it was Time magazine called him that." He said to Ray-Ian, "You know that hat you wear? There's a picture of Ezra wearing one just like it in one of my books. I'll show it to you, taken in Rome in 1960." He looked at Joyce and said, "In the library by the big chair, the only good one in the house. You'll see two biographies there and a book of poetry, Selected Cantos."

"Dinklage, where art thou,with, or without, your von? You said the teeth of the black troopsreminded you of the boar-hunt, I think yr/first boar hunt, butThe black prisoners had such a nice way with children, Also what's his name who spent the night in the air caught in the mooring ropes. Lone rock for sea-gull ho can, in any case, rest on water! Do not Hindooslust after vacuity?"

Joyce closed the book with her finger marking the place. "You want me to go on?"

"You mean," Harry said, with his deadpan expression, "you don't understand that? A very nice reading, Joyce, we should have some wine and cheese with it."

She said, "It almost makes sense and then loses you. First I had to find a passage that's in English." She said to Raylan, "Some of it's in Italian, Greek, and he'll throw in Chinese characters every once in a while."

"He had a Chinese dictionary with him," Harry said, "and a book of Confucius, when they threw him in the cage. Show Raylan the photographs in the biographies. The gorilla cage, pictures of his wife Dorothy and Olga Rudge. The bigger book has the picture of Ezra Pound wearing the hat like Raylan's, taken in Rome in 1960. I remember that because after they let him out of St. Elizabeths he couldn't wait to come back here. Listen to this, with Dorothy and another girlfriend forty years younger than he was, Marcella, he thought he was in love with and ought to marry once he divorced Dorothy. What happened, Dorothy teamed up with Olga, who was still in Italy, and they sent Marcella packing. Then, it wasn't long after that he became depressed about his work, wouldn't eat or talk much. Dorothy gave up trying to take care of him and he came here to live with Olga, where I saw him again," Harry said, "in sixty-seven. Three days in a row, in fact, I saw them at the same cafe, Ezra Pound and his mistress, always with a group having lunch. Anytime I saw him there were people with him, friends, or writers getting interviews. Poets flocked around him. There always seemed to be a party at lunch, everybody laughing and talking. One time when I was at the next table, he had some kind of fish and complained about the bones the whole time he was eating it. That same day, I followed him to the men's room, got ahead of him, and held the door open. As he reached me I said, The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.' He looked at me and walked right past into the can, didn't say a word. So, that was okay. He had people bothering the shit out of him all the time. They'd come and ring the bell, tourists, and Olga Rudge would tell them, 'If you can recite one line of his poetry you can see him.' She'd turn a hose on them if they wouldn't leave." He said to Joyce, "We should be having lunch. Isn't it time?"

She said, "We have cheese and sausage. Some kind of cold pasta Robert put together."

Harry was going through one of the biographies. He said to Raylan, "Here, this is what he looked like when I last saw him. He was eighty-two then. Look at the hat. You ever see a brim like that? The coat and the walking stick; the coat's like a cape. The guy had style right up to the end, eighty-seven when he died in Venice the night of his birthday. Olga was there with him. Here's a picture of her. Good-looking woman, uh? They were together fifty years. Here, this is the one. At his wake, Olga touching him I guess for the last time. Born in Hailey, Idaho, died in Venice." He said to Joyce, "We going to have lunch or not?" He handed the book to Raylan and watched him turn to the photographs of the gorilla cages and the military stockade. "I went back there on one of my trips," Harry said. "You know what's there now? A nursery where they grow roses. Another time in Rapallo, you know who I saw? Groucho Marx."

They left Raylan to go out to the kitchen and fix lunch.

It was right after that, alone by the window, he saw a dark-colored Mercedes sedan drive past. Black or dark blue, he wasn't sure. The car slowed to a crawl, Raylan watching it until it was out of sight. He waited awhile before looking at the gorilla cages again.

Joyce came back with sandwiches. Harry had two glasses of wine on top of the Galliano and was taking a nap.

She said, "You'd think if he was going to recite poetry it would be someone more like... I was going to say Edgar Guest and it reminded me of that Dorothy Parker line, 'I'd rather fail my Wasserman test than read a poem by...' Do you know what I'm talking about?"

Raylan nodded, eating the sausage-and-cheese sandwich. "So far."

"Harry picks a guy who wrote the most obscure poetry I've ever read. Nothing that makes sense, but Harry won't admit it."

"I don't think whether he understands it or not," Raylan said, "matters to him."

"I know, but he pretends he does. Now," Joyce said, "he even makes it sound as though he recognized the guy in the cage as Ezra Pound and was the only person in the camp that knew who he was. Harry might've known the name, but it was after the war he looked Ezra Pound up and found out, my God, this guy's famous. And started reading his work, if you can imagine, the Miami Beach bookie feeling some kind of rapport with the world-renowned poet who might be a little nuts. The next thing you know Harry returns to Rapallo. Comes back again, and again, and finally twenty years after seeing Ezra Pound in a cage, there he is again, an old dude now but still with that flair, the black hat and walking stick, a man who'd been dining with his mistress at sidewalk cafes all his life and Harry wanted to do it, too, see what it was like."

Raylan said, "And the bad guys came and ruined it for him."

"Even if they hadn't," Joyce said, "Harry would have changed his mind about sidewalk cafes. It's one thing to sip Galliano with an espresso on a nice day and watch the girls go by. But it can get cold and damp and the girls put on coats, the ones still around. On top of that he has trouble communicating and shouldn't drink, not even coffee. What Harry found out was, he's too late for sidewalk cafes. I don't think he'd last more than a few weeks, even with the sun out. Harry might be a romantic at heart, but he's a practical kind of guy, too, set in his ways. When he called and asked me to come? He tells me how much he misses me, he can't wait. And then he says, 'Oh, yeah, and bring me a couple bottles of after-shave. Caswell-Massey Number Six.'"

Raylan said, "That's after-shave?"

"His favorite."

"It sounds more like an East Kentucky coal mine."

He was alone again in the sitting room, looking around, wondering if he could live in a place like this, a museum with ceilings higher than he'd ever seen inside a house, and not a chair or table you dared put your feet on. Harry was right about the chairs, Harry dying to be left alone so he could get smashed. Put him in the car and go. Fly out of some other city besides Milan or Rome. Joyce had left to take the lunch dishes to the kitchen and check on Harry. She was easy to talk to. He'd asked if she and Harry were planning on getting married and she said, "Are you crazy?" Told him a couple of weeks in the same villa with Harry would be about all she could manage. She had been married to a real estate salesman less than a year when he divorced her. Raylan had said, "Well, we have something in common," and told about his wife, Winona, divorcing him for a real estate salesman. Joyce said maybe, like her marriage, it wouldn't last and he and Winona would get back together. He told her it would never happen; he missed his boys but not his ex, not for a minute. And was glad he'd made that clear. If it happened he and Joyce ever started keeping company, he didn't want complications in the way.