Vesuvius by Night

Chapter 2

The painter witnessed what happened. He had left the room where he was about to start once the plaster was ready, and walked outside. The tremors of the past few days had unsettled him. Though he pretended to ignore his tension, the recent subterranean activity had been growing worse.

‘Come and see!’ his daughter had called from the street doorway, sounding more curious than alarmed, yet excited. ‘Father, look at this!’

He had been standing back from the main wall of the big room, taking the measure of its central panel where he was ready to paint a mythological scene. The new top coat of plaster was just reaching its critical stage. Even so, he went to find out what she wanted, after first encouraging his junior, Pyris, who was putting a black wash on a panel. It was well within the boy’s competence, so the painter could leave him to it.

Hylus, the other man in their team, was crouched down by the dado touching up a merry scene of cupids racing in chariots drawn by little goats. ‘Fresco cupids have a bloody hard life. I hope this bunch are grateful I’m letting them be boy racers. They’re constantly at it, working their wings off, making perfumes, weaving at looms, being goldsmiths. I bet their pay stinks too,’ joked Hylus, who often wittered on while he was working.

‘One’s got a boil on his bum,’ commented a plasterer. He was up on the scaffold, annoyingly. That ought to have been done by now, way back when the coffered ceiling and coves were put up and painted. They were supposed to finish first so the decorators could move top-down. Anyone other than a crack-brained plasterer would see that was the sensible way to programme a job.

‘Shit, it’s a drip; thanks, Three Coats. Fetch me a rag, will you, Pyris?’ Hylus was clearly thinking only a plasterer would make such a big deal of pointing it out. Three Coats, named for his endless lessons on how to build a fine surface, smirked. A sound wall in fact had six coats, three in the rough and three smooth with marble dust, but the painters, who were competent plasterers themselves, never let him finish telling them.

That smirk from Three Coats had irritated the painter more than usual, so it had been a good idea to move away. Popping out to see what his daughter wanted avoided snapping at the other man. As team leader, he liked to keep the peace.

He could not afford to disappear for long. Frescos must be painted at the right moment. Now that Three Coats had filled in his panel and its design was roughly marked out, he had to work fast, before the wet plaster went off. In fresco, colours were not simply laid on the surface but were sucked into the glossy final layer of the finish while it remained moist. This made the paint survive household knocks better, and it could be washed down without losing colour. They always assured their customers it would last forever.

Sometimes they completed details dry, but that was for a reason, or so they claimed. Actually they might not have finished in time and had no wet cloths to keep the plaster workable. They pretended to be using a ‘specialist technique’. Painters knew how to preserve their mystique.

The recent shudders from deep within the earth had disturbed and annoyed the team leader. He possessed a sense of danger, though he could live with risk. He just worried about their work. The current site had suffered before; next door, where they had also been working this month, the bakery oven had sustained major cracks in the big earthquake and was now being repaired yet again. Most of the flour mills were completely out of action. This morning, when he and his team turned up here, they had anxiously inspected all the walls; having to check every day for overnight disturbance made him depressed, even though everyone who worked in Pompeii routinely endured their work being damaged. At least the townsfolk tenaciously rebuilt; shockwaves meant a surge in property renovation, which was excellent, although you never knew if what you finished for your customer would survive the next upheaval.

An artist who cared could end up having a breakdown. At this point in the job, any flying dust was a nightmare. And what was the point of putting your soul into your work, if your efforts might be cracked apart or even brought down? If people liked your style they would call you back for repairs, but creating a scene for a second time was unsatisfactory. You could get tired of constantly redoing jobs. Artists dream that what they produce will last for generations – small hope in the Campanian earthquake zone.

Anyway, when customers had something done twice, even if the fault was unavoidable, there was always a niggle about the extra payment. He hated the stress.

So these past four days of tectonic agitation had left him restless. The uncertainty had made him surly and unable to paint well. He needed to settle before he started the new panel. As team leader, he did not need to ask anyone’s permission. He had moved away from his paints, as if to take a pee or find a bite to eat from his knapsack.

In reply to his young daughter’s call he stepped right outside the building. For a moment he stood quietly and looked up and down the side-street. It was being dug up in several places: there was already a long trench for what seemed like endless work to the water supply, god knows what engineer had thought that up. And now, next to the house, a cess-pit had been excavated, its ghastly contents piled up everywhere. That made the third in the sidestreet.

Householders would be glad if their indoor toilets stopped smelling, but they were not pleased about the haphazard dungheaps. This was even worse than normal. Pompeii’s streets could be foul. Sometimes a frustrated householder put up a sign on his exterior wall, saying Do not shit here, stranger, move on! It only gave passers-by ideas, and if it didn’t work for individuals, it was hardly going to deter the dead-eyed, cack-handed, bloody-minded workmen who carried out civic contracts, not when they had mounds of stupendously ponging sludge to store somewhere while they dug a big hole.

He stepped around the piles carefully and went in search of his daughter. She wasn’t to be seen on the main road, so he turned and cautiously retraced his path. He had to go right to the other end of the side street before he found her, standing stock still at a corner, balanced on a stepping stone. Unlike the more sedate town of Herculaneum where his wife lived, Pompeii had no proper drainage; the town sloped steeply down to the sea so when it rained, surface water just dashed along its streets towards the port, carrying every kind of rubbish. The stepping stones were handy, though a magnet to children. One more worry…

‘What have you seen, chuck?’

‘There’s a fire behind the mountain.’

His daughter Marciana, eight years old, was the original reason the painter had rented a room of his own. She stayed with him sometimes. It gave him an excuse to limit how much he fraternised with his colleagues, being something of a loner. Even before he decided to sublet, his daughter had camped out downstairs at the lodgings. Now, no way was he having her come into contact with Nonius. Nonius, with his various unpleasant habits, had no idea Marciana even existed.

When he found her outside, the curly-haired little girl was rapt, staring towards the dramatic view of Mount Vesuvius; the tall local mountain, beloved of Bacchus and one-time refuge of Spartacus the rebel slave, dominated sightlines, elegantly framed by the distant city gates. Lush to its familiar high, craggy summit, packed with prosperous farms and vineyards, Vesuvius was one of many peaks in the area, yet it stood slightly isolated from the rest, with special charm. That must be why it had its own name. Five miles from the sea, it was always touched by threads of incoming cloud, dreaming in sunlight as it had done for generations.

‘Come out of the road!’

Many a child in the Empire was killed by an accident with a cart; drivers were madmen, utterly thoughtless, often drunk or dozing too. Anxious to retrieve his moppet, the painter was nevertheless distracted by what had so fixed her attention.

Behind the mountain as they saw it from Pompeii, clouds of grey smoke were filling the sky. If it was a forest fire, this was a strange one. The painter remembered hearing a sharp bang, but it had been distant and at the time he’d been concentrating on mixing a paint colour.

Nobody had ever suggested Vesuvius was volcanic, as far as he knew. If that had ever been true, it was long extinct. Most hills in the Italian landmass looked similar in form, from the long barricade of the Apennines to this circle of ancient peaks around the Bay of Neapolis. The Apennines were unstable, with regular landslides, rockfalls, mudflows and sinkholes. But the painter believed Italy had only one active volcano, the legendary Etna in Sicily. He dreamed of going south to see it, so he could paint Etna spewing fire, with the philosopher Empedocles throwing himself into the crater in order to prove he was immortal – while the mountain contemptuously hurled one of his sandals back to show he was not. The possibilities for contrast between dark and fiery light, the chance to show violent activity, were seriously alluring. Well, one day…

Not here though. Not here, despite recent warning signs. When, this very week after the Rustic Vine God Festival, growers had returned to town after inspecting their Vesuvian grapes before harvest, they claimed to have seen the ground bulging and even seen fumaroles like those that boiled and steamed in the Phlegraean Fields. They reckoned their vines were being scorched, ruined by unusual ash deposits.

Many chose to disbelieve them, which was the convenient response. A straggle of nervous folk did take fright. Everyone else said they were only looking for an excuse to visit relatives or to escape nagging spouses. Many of their neighbours were trapped in inertia, because if they left, where could they go? People had to live.

As the painter looked at the smoke, now almost draping Vesuvius in a grey fog, his mouth went dry. He felt his heart lurch. He reached for his daughter, intending to bring her back onto the pavement, when a new event happened. They heard it and felt it: a terrific rolling bang, the movement of air hurting their ear-drums, panic striking the soul. It was so strong the painter staggered, almost thrown off balance. Clutching at him, the child cried out.

‘Hades,’ he said to himself. He often talked out loud to nobody. He recovered. He grasped his daughter by the hand, feeling her cower against his leg, hearing her whimper.

What he and the child saw next was utterly unexpected. Rooted to the spot, he could not believe what he was watching. It was momentous. The top of the mountain had blown right off.

He was a fatalist. He knew straightaway that he would not paint the waiting wall panel.