Under the Earth They Began to Sing

TARQUINIA! THE CITY OF the painted tombs. The place that had shimmered on the edge of Clare’s imagination all her life, and doubly so since she’d begun imagining what might lie under her own meadow’s hilly mounds. Tarquinia, where the little tombs had brilliant frescoed walls showing scenes of banquets, music, dance and sport, of love and death and the afterlife, scenes portraying the Etruscans — the wealthy ones at least — as they had lived through their predestined generations, in opulence and splendour, under the shadow of the knowledge of their numbered days.

Luke had thought he could persuade her not to go along with him?

When they both cooled down, he tried to convince her that of course he’d been going to tell her of his plan. The reason he didn’t want her along was that the world of Etruscology was such a small one. Everyone would know she was Kane’s niece. The eyes of the clandestini were everywhere.

“Think about what happened with old Lerici,” he said.

“Who?”

Carlo Lerici, he said. “A retired industrialist back in the 1950s, who invented a way to discover which humps and hillocks actually contained unrifled tombs. Before long, everywhere Lerici’s little scientific entourage went the hills were alive with wandering shepherds, and bingo — a rash of looted tombs.”

“I don’t think I’d exactly attract that much attention.”

“Don’t kid yourself that you’re indistinct.”

The purpose of his subterfuge, he insisted, was to provide her, as owner of the land, an opportunity to assess whether her property did harbour anything worth exploring, without at present disturbing either the land or the authorities. Because she should understand that when it came to digging ruins, everything belonged to the State. Naturally, if anything significant came to light, he would make sure they called in the proper authorities right away — and the police too, he said, to provide protection. But it was smart to get a look at how the land lay, “before we get buggered up in the great Italian bureaucratic mire!”

He talked, as he gathered up his clothes, still imagining he’d be going on his own.

She went into the kitchen and cut eyeholes out of a plastic shopping bag, pulled it over her head, tied it round her neck with a string. He was bending over a map when she came back.

“Time for me to get moving,” he said, without looking up.

“Great. I’m ready. If I’m travelling incognito, I figure this should work.”

DRIVING TOO FAST AND in silence, Luke threaded the tiny lanes at the bottom of the hill, took the road towards Ossaia, turned on the radio. The song she’d heard that night with Gianni began to play. She reached over and turned it off. They branched across the plain towards Montepulciano, took a long diagonal under that city’s walls, then around many further curves; past woods and upland meadows dotted with fluffy sheep; past Pienza, designed by a Renaissance pope; past San Quirico, careening through countryside that offered such heart-lifting vistas that finally Clare couldn’t keep up her side of the huff any longer.

“What exactly is this equipment we’re going after?” she asked. “How does it work?”

In that superior tone of his, he said that his contact was rounding up instruments that “utilized several different modalities.”

“Like what?”

Magnetic survey, he said. Perhaps some old-fashioned resistivity. Maybe a spot of GPR. It was technical.

“I’m pretty technical, too.”

“Hmmm.” The big hand lifting from the wheel. The snake ring glinting. The hand hesitating, then settling hopefully on her thigh. “I noticed.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know what I like.”

The sky was blue. Another castled town popped up on the horizon. They were going to the sea.

They raced through a landscape that kept changing every few miles, scenes now tidy and ordered, now wild. They crested a ridge. Lake Bolsena lay below, a lapis oval set in a ring of hills and woods and golden cliffs. Luke said he knew a small hotel there where they would spend the night. She pictured a room with a balcony, bougainvillea, dinner under the stars. Finally they swung off onto a much quieter road, a straight white country road where ripening wheat glittered under rows of olive trees, the land sloping down to the distant sea, hazy, purple-blue. Tarquinia appeared ahead on a rise: massed buildings, a spire. In a field on the outskirts were many narrow tile-roofed huts, like rows of garden sheds. This was the famous necropolis, Luke said; those were the tombs. The huts were to protect the stairways leading down.

“Ah, and there’s Cerotti. Bang on time.”

“You don’t mean Vittorio Cerotti! Luisa di Varinieri’s husband?”

“Who else?”

So the august inspector of archaeology himself was Luke’s mysterious contact — now waiting to put Luke in touch with some unnamed person who was supplying the exploration equipment?

Cerotti did not look in the least perturbed to have Clare turn up. Perhaps the need for secrecy was all in Luke’s mind, the prying eyes of the clandestini too.

VITTORIO OFFERED TO SHOW her around the necropolis until it was time to go along and meet the anonymous supplier.

“First I will introduce you to a tomba that reflects a period late in the history,” he said, leading them down steep stone steps. “This will illustrate the sense of fatalism and despair that was felt at the time of imminent collapse of the culture.”

The air became clammy, warmer. He paused, turned back.

“But you will imagine the surprise that greeted the rediscovery of these paintings. Our Etruscans for centuries so silent, their cities vanished, their cemeteries the haunt of wandering shepherds. Yet suddenly, these long-dead people from underneath the earth began to sing!” He flung out his arms, as if about to conduct a choir.

At the bottom of the steps, they were brought up short by a heavy pane of glass; it was necessary protection, for just the breath of observers could cause damage to the painted walls. Vittorio pressed a switch. He pointed out a figure with a bearded profile not unlike his own.

“Here we see Charun with his large hammer persuading the dead man to go through the door to the underworld, helped by his friend the blue demon with the snakes. The snakes also have beards.”

He added that he had recently, in Studii Etruschi, published an article about those bearded snakes.

On the frescoed walls much of the paint had peeled away, yet the effect was eerily brilliant, the rotting green of the hook-nosed Charun, the virulent blue of the demon in a toga that was the rusty red of clotting blood, the spotted serpents coiled around his arms. Easy to imagine the awe this would have caused by torchlight as a procession entered to lay out another family member on one of the stone beds already holding the remains of others, those uncanny brilliant figures flickering in the torchlight. Clare peered in fascination, but Luke glanced at his watch, worried about the appointment with the still-mysterious supplier. Vittorio was happy to answer Clare’s questions though, and to expound at length about the pigments the painters would have used: the dark tones derived from oxides, by-products of mining activities in the Tolfa hills, and blues in part from copper (a recipe lost since Roman times), the greens from malachite. The paints, he emphasized, would have been very expensive, very rare.

When they emerged, he turned on Clare fiercely. “When you write of our Etruscan use of colour,” he said, “you must understand it was linked with prestige and status in the eyes of the people. It is important to state how the colours themselves have been used politically, as symbols to express power.”

“What was that all about?” Clare whispered, as Vittorio strode ahead along the gravel path. Luke said that Vittorio was an old Marxist, still stuck in the school determined to politicize archaeology, which made his position in the Soprintendenza difficult, perhaps even shaky these days, given a change of wind.

“Which makes things good for us,” he said.

Next, Cerotti led them down into the Tomb of the Bulls, where he expounded on the political implications of the scenes of buggery in the pediment. Clare couldn’t help egging him on as she took notes, though Luke tugged at his hair in impatience. When they emerged, he pulled her aside. “I don’t suppose you’d care to stay here in the necropolis like a good little researcher, rather than coming along any further and for sure fucking the whole thing up?”

“How much time will we have to come back here, after?”

“None.”

In truth, Clare was glad to stay back alone. She peered into as many tombs as were accessible to the public, fascinated. They had been cut out of solid rock, yet mimicked real houses of the living, stone ceilings cut and painted to resemble wooden beams — even one sprigged with tiny flowers like a wallpapered bedroom ceiling — another that gave the impression of a tented pavilion, showing trees beyond the tent openings, and a chorus of revellers dancing through, women in see-through floating garments, men in wraparound skirts held by belts of shells and flowers. She wandered and dreamed that something of such remarkable delight might lie beneath the surface of her own meadow, waiting to burst from the earth to sing.