LETTER FROM VENICE:THE WATER seeps up through the cracks in St Mark's Square. A croaking priest in the basilica stumbles mid-hymn: the dripping damp has given him a cold. To his left and right are pillars whose ankles have been eroded. Kneeling ledges along the altar have crumbled, appearing as gnawed cheese, ripped orange foam.
It’s a couple of weeks ahead of the annual carnival and Venice seems to all intents and purposes dead.
Andrew tends a bar just minutes from the square. He commutes an 80-minute trip each day from his home, describing its whereabouts to barfly ignorants as somewhere in the direction of Trieste. The door swings open and a regular arrives. There are few orders placed in here, as he knows what each familiar face wants: coffee, beer, red wine or prosecco.
Andrew also knows Silvio, a bon viveur who tends a couple of restaurants in San Marco himself. Silvio cropped up on American TV recently and, larger than life, has continued to broadcast himself jovially ever since. He and his wife divorced some 15 years ago. They decided the plan of action in Padua at a concert by a certain world-famous Irish band.
Down by the Rialto fish market, the seagulls lust after live eels; they flock together as a fur-coated Venetian buys a slithering bag of the black snakes. There is a polystyrene crate of fish entrails at the edge of the colonnade and the birds tilt bloodied beaks as they swallow morsels of flesh.
The best bits seem to wind up in a small, standing-room only establishment some hundreds of yards away, where a staff of three prepare unlikely and dainty bread rounds bearing deep-fried sardines with pine nuts, prawns and roughly chopped cod in white sauce. These are scoffed by snacking locals. They do it every Saturday. Many times. Washing it all down with prosecco.
Right now the Bridge of Sighs is billboarded off to facilitate repairs. A fog rolls in from the direction of the Lido and makes a fable of the musician in Florians’, playing a curious re-engineered version of a Bee Gees song on piano to a handful of tourists.
Across the square, an austere vault in the Doge's Palace echoed the previous night with all of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The quintet's somewhat flawed performance of the city's theme music seemed to reflect the effects of palpable erosion.
An old guy uses a stick to divine his way towards a cafe across from the small church of San Giovanni Battista. This is where a sickly young child was taken to be baptised in 1678. He went on to write pieces called Spring, Summer, Autumnand Winter, dying at 63.
Today half of this city of some 60,000 (a figure itself just one-third of the 1950s population) is over 60. There’s not too many in their teens, 20s, 30s or 40s. But if you go over the Rialto Bridge at night, you’ll see alienated youth enjoying the techno music that booms from two or three bar stalls set deep in the colonnades.
Door signs announce vacancies on hotel doors. There is an unhurried pace, a lull in business, an amplification of the near echo of steps. There is someone walking a few twists ahead of you in the overall maze. But who?
One night you walk over the bridge into the sestiere of San Paulo. Coming towards you are three sentinels with machine guns. No wonder there is little graffiti or vandalism in the city, which breathes easy as a living museum.
At 1am, the wind-scarred square gleams under yellowy light. The winter hoarding around its campanile creaks like a gallows.
Now the stone surface starts to shimmer, beginning to throw back the camera flash and glare from its eager 18 million tourist visitors every year. Sea water, its lifeblood, seeps up between cracks. At each corner of each flagstone, it finds its way free. The first signs of a flood, it crawls along as a gathering lake from the basilica. It laps forwards and upwards, alive.
Venice is not sinking, it floats.
jfleming@irishtimes.com