Vesuvius by Night

Chapter 11

On a clear day the journey from Pompeii to Oplontis is not far. In his time, Larius had driven, ridden or walked this coastal road, enjoying a chance to absorb the natural beauty of the bay, while his thoughts went off into their own freewheeling. Sometimes he had to curse an obstructive carrot cart; but sometimes a bonny farm girl would offer distraction if he pretended interest in her olive oil. Even if she snubbed his chat, there would be a stall of fish pickle to tempt a purchase, fishing boats to watch, or his own hopes and dreams to polish up. He had always liked this road.

Once, on the same journey, his uncle, Falco, had given him a strange heart-to-heart, explaining contraception, such as it existed. Five, going on six children later, Larius was the first to admit the discussion had been wasted on him. Still, today he thought of his uncle, a man with a reputation for problem-solving. Well, get out of this one, Falco!

The sight of the volcano ahead kept Larius resolute. As long as he could, he rode the baker’s hinny. With its fairly willing cooperation, he had passed out of Pompeii through a necropolis, a street of noble tombs outside the Herculaneum Gate. Later, other fugitives would simply give up their flight right there, so near the town, overcome by fumes, heart attacks or pure exhaustion. But Larius had gone through early enough; had made it to open country, travelling out on this shore road that he knew so well, though today it was unrecognisable under the rising deposits of magma, viewed through a choking veil of smoke.

He managed the couple of miles to Oplontis. He was not sure how he did this; still, although Larius seemed a dreamer, he had always been stubborn. Maybe dreamers have to be. Besides, he felt desperate. He had a wife, four distant children, and this other child to save, let alone himself. He would not give up.

He was not ready to leave his existence. He had pictures to paint. He unexpectedly wanted a chance to make things happier between him and Ollia; he also wanted to watch their children blossom into fine young people. His girl might defy convention and be a famous woman painter. The others were promising characters too. He would be a better father, if only it was allowed. Hell, he might even be a better husband. He definitely wanted to be a better artist.

He knew he was good. He believed he still had more in him.

Oplontis was a hamlet. It was dominated by a huge imperial villa that once belonged to the family of Nero’s wife, though for years no one imperial had stayed there. The Flavian emperors preferred to holiday in their own Sabine hills. If they ever turned up in Neapolis, their chamberlains imposed upon some hapless senator. Larius had once been in to look, so he knew that even though the long swimming pool in Poppaea’s place was being used by locals as a fishpond, the statues in the gardens were extremely fine, while indoors it had gorgeous, innovative art on its walls.

A couple of families had smaller villas, the kind used for a mix of pleasure and rustic industries, but mainly Oplontis was a dead hole these days, all mullet nets and battered scallop creels.

Larius had guessed right: down on the beach, all the sensible fishermen had left, taking out their families before the sea became impassable; only the hopeless Vitalis had dallied. There must have been others who felt trapped by their own indecision, but they had taken to their heels now. This man had always lacked motivation. He must have sat here, hoping the volcano would simply shut down, or that the ghastly scenes around him were all a puzzling dream…

Larius arrived at crunch time. Finally, even Vitalis had accepted he should make a move. He had spent time plugging holes in his boat and hunting for his favourite oar. He had gathered up his free-range cousins and his vague-eyed mother, who was all of ninety. They had packed their fishing smack, which was not large, with a crazy collection of barrels and baskets, then all squashed aboard. The boat sat unnervingly low. Nevertheless, Vitalis was now posing on the end, plying the long oars with his chest out-thrust, as if he were still showing off his body to girls. All the sneering local girls had gone, hours earlier.

Larius hailed him. Vitalis backed the oars. Any excuse to stop moving. He had barely travelled any distance; they were still in the shallows. A couple of his relatives were batting at monstrous mats of floating pumice, trying to clear a path.

‘Who’s that?’ called Vitalis, although he knew.

‘Me, Larius, Ollia’s husband. I’ve got Marciana, can you take us with you?’

One of the cousins shouted out that no they bloody couldn’t, they were bound to sink. True. If Larius climbed in, the weight of a strong twenty-three-year-old would make that craft capsize. It was the same one he first saw a decade ago, which Vitalis had barely maintained. Even if it stayed afloat, the ramshackle old thing was too laden to be rowed far. Only Vitalis had oars anyway, the cousins were half-heartedly wielding poles and brooms to push aside the welded pumice and other flotsam that cluttered the sea.

The waves looked rough. They had shipped water. One of them bailed morosely. As a water boatman’s son, Larius assessed the situation with grim, professional eyes. His father would say, don’t touch it.

The old woman, who had always been kind to Ollia, squawked that they could squeeze in the little one. Ruled by his mother, Vitalis even fixed his oars and trod dangerously forward, teetering among his relatives who grabbed at him dangerously. Though terminally hopeless, Vitalis had always been good-natured. He held out his arms to take Marciana, as Larius picked her up and began to paddle out with her.

She clung to her father. Struggling wildly, Marciana refused to go. She had never been a screamer, but she screamed now. It was too heart-rending. Larius gave in and returned to the beach where pumice scrunched beneath his feet as he floundered and nearly lost his balance. Had he failed Marciana? He kept her, kept hold of her; wept with frustration, yet accepted his own unwillingness to send her off alone on a risky vessel, with people he regarded as feckless and a man he had never liked.

So he and his child remained together at Oplontis. They watched the fisherboat slowly leaving for as long as they could see it, though it was soon lost from view in the darkness. Vitalis rowed, not with the strong, seated pulls of trireme oarsmen, but with the standing method used all over the Mediterranean, a kind of leisurely sculling that appeared inadequate, yet which took the boat out steadily until only a short time later it was far from shore.

Night seemed to fall. Maybe it was still daytime, but this seemed like night. Was there a moon? If so, it was completely blotted out.

Larius was too exhausted to continue. He sat down against an old hut that had half collapsed under fallen ash. More ash rained down.

He would rest. He would give his daughter a night’s respite. Tomorrow they would try to travel on to Herculaneum, foolish thought. For now, they would stop here.

Deep inside the volcano something must have changed. The ceaseless fall of white lapilli altered. Larger, blacker tephra descended in hot chunks three times bigger than before, now inches across, among a new shower of terrifying heavy rocks. These fell with stunning speed. Nobody was safe outside. So, leaving the hinny on the beach, Larius abruptly picked up his daughter; carrying her tight in his arms, he put his head down and ran for his life.

When he crashed into one of the lesser villas, the first place he came to, he was amazed to find its once-gracious rooms were full of people.

A dirty tide of humanity had fled, some like himself from Pompeii though others were local. Sometimes during earthquakes people took to the fields to avoid the risk of being crushed under falling masonry. Now, after the all-day punishing descent of volcanic matter, these wanted a good roof above them. As night came, fugitives were reconciled to staying here.

If the villa’s owner was present, Larius never saw him. Maybe the place was not in the possession of people of substance, or maybe they no longer used it for the high-life. Still, there were oil lamps and someone had lit a few.

Rustic equipment was everywhere. One room contained an enormous pomegranate crop, the ripe fruit spread evenly on mats. Not having eaten or drunk for hours, Larius and Marciana helped themselves.

‘Tuck in. Don’t expect snack-vendors coming round with hot sausage trays… We can leave a payment in a dish.’

‘I don’t think so, Father!’ Smeared with juice and enjoying this snatch of banter, Marciana perked up. ‘Shall I look for their cutlery canteen with the antsy-fancy pomegranate seed-picks?’

‘Daft beggar. Use your fingers.’

He licked one of his and tried to rub smuts off her white little face. It merely spread the dirt. Larius stared at his pigtailed tot, still swathed in the cloak he had wrapped around her at the widow’s house, feeling his love well up. Something caught in his throat. Aware, but ignoring paternal sentiment, Marciana went on eating pomegranates.

They poked around, searching for somewhere to rest. Everyone else seemed to have gone to the basement, as if it might be safer. Among their fellow fugitives, dimly viewed in near darkness, they discovered a subtle hierarchy. The rich, clutching jewel caskets and cash boxes, shunned those who might turn on them and rob them. They clustered in one room. In another, the rest eyed everyone darkly. Neither group wanted anyone else to join them.

He and Marciana came back up to the reception area. Plebeian to his soul and still a city boy at heart, Larius cursed the country bastards hogging the space where he wanted to settle his daughter for the night. The child was utterly done in. Hell, he was. If humanly possible, he would not have them spend this night huddled by a spiky bankbox in the godforsaken atrium with volcanic hoggin and rocks dropping through the roof and the risk that Campanian clod-hoppers would trample them in the dark. Nobody would give him an oil lamp, or he would have gone in search of an empty bedroom.

They wandered hand in hand to the huge double-height courtyard. The centre space was deep in volcanic debris, which had even buried a mass of upended amphorae that had been waiting to be filled. The intended grape or olive harvest must be lost in the fields, choked or burned.

Tentatively feeling for stair treads, they climbed to the upper storey where they cleared the deep ash by shoving it off the balcony. Marciana was by now so tired and drained, she dropped asleep immediately against a remaining drift of debris. After making sure she would not sink in and suffocate, Larius went for a short mooch, wading along the dark upper verandah. Fathers have to check the house. Fathers prowl the perimeter, on guard. When a long day ends, fathers wander off by themselves, looking up at the stars while perhaps they fart quietly to show that they don’t give a damn, while they think about their responsibilities.

There were no stars. But if you could ignore the constant volcanic commotion, there was time to think. Indeed, there was nothing else to do. This was when Larius Lollius the painter took stock, having an enforced pause in his desperate journey. Sheltered with his daughter at least temporarily, he assessed their plight.

Now, Larius faced the likelihood that he would not survive this. Standing alone in a peristyle of somebody else’s villa as it slowly filled with still-hot magma, he wondered whether they would be forced to simply stop right here. It felt too unsafe. What choice was there? As far as he had seen downstairs by wavering lamplight, this place once possessed fine decoration of the kind he had spent his adult life creating. It had been turned over to industry and barely lived in, or at least not used for the leisured life its first owners must have planned. But it was being swallowed up in filth, filth he could taste, filth that had made his daughter cough her lungs out, and which was stifling him too. He felt the grit in his teeth, dust sticky on his skin and clothes, debris clustered in his hair. Oplontis was slowly being buried. Anyone who stopped moving would be buried too.

Now, looking out and up, Larius could see Vesuvius. The coast below the mountain was shrouded in impenetrable dark, while huge flames of different colours rent the high slopes and the sky above the volcano. Sometimes there were single streaks of light, sometimes a snaking trail, sometimes whole showers of pyrotechnics shaken out through the billowing blackness. All around grumbled the noise of whatever was happening far underground. Innumerable farms must have been destroyed. Crops and vineyards were buried, hundreds of animals were dead. People too. Even those who had managed to stay alive until now were facing cataclysmic danger.

This was when Larius cursed his fate, and he cursed from his soul, using the worst words he knew. Here he was, an eyewitness. He wanted to paint this. Generations of painters would strike awe in viewers with their Vesuvius by Night. For them would be movement and torment, fire and darkness, horror and suggested noise. They could position tiny figures, stricken by fear, contrasted against the enormity of ungovernable natural forces. Many would achieve this from imagination alone, for you cannot force a volcano to erupt when you need a model. He could have done it from life. But Larius knew, recreating this dramatic scene would never be for him.

He could only stare, as he thought of his own short life and his family – then in his wry way accepted the aching pain of so much wasted opportunity. He was a fatalist. He knew, tonight, this was the end of everything for him.

He went back to his daughter and squatted beside her, elbows on knees, face buried in his hands. All over the area people took that pose. It was a position in which they could rest – but also the posture of despair.