Читать книгу Fire in the Placa - Dorothy Noyes - Страница 10

1

Between Representation and Presence: The Onlooker Problem

T’HI FICARÀS O NO? they demanded. Are you going in there or not?

I was surprised at the insistence of this question in the weeks before the feast of Corpus Christi. Earlier, I had been given lots of advice on how to protect myself at the Patum of Berga. “The first time you have to watch from a balcony. Don’t go into the plaça until you know what it’s about.” “Always move counterclockwise in the plaça or you’ll be trampled.” “Tie up that hair under a good hat or you’re going to lose it!” “Don’t try to do the Patum in those shoes! Get some heavy boots.” “Don’t wear synthetics, only wool or cotton; they don’t burn as easily.” I am not brave and they easily convinced me that I had to be careful. “If you lose your wallet, if you lose your shoes, if you lose your pants, don’t stop for anything!” an old man warned me. “Once the plens have started, not even God enters!”

Suddenly my willingness to get burned was the test of my seriousness. If I really wanted to know what people in Berga were like, I had to enter the crush of the Plaça Sant Pere during the salt de plens, the final unleashing of fiery devils that is the culmination of the Patum. I had come to Berga to live for six months, of which I had been there three. I had earnestly read in the library and combed the municipal archives; I had talked to old people and requested interviews of patumaires—until I realized that the Patum comes up in half the conversations in Berga anyway and the interviews just made people self-conscious. My welcome had been enthusiastic, and so far most people in Berga seemed to approve of me, interpreting my speaking Catalan, singing with the Easter carolers, and lunching in the “popular” bars as marks of my willingness to play by their rules. But I had not expected to be invited into this particular game: I had planned to be a spectator.

La Patum s’ha de viure, they said over and over as I asked for analyses, anecdotes, and personal histories. It’s no use my trying to put it in words; the Patum has to be lived. And when the Patum came, I found that Berguedan goodwill was intent on making me live it properly. “I saw you up on that balcony!” said one woman after I’d retreated to get a better view and to rest my unaccustomed feet. “What do you think this is, theater? You can’t understand the Patum by looking at it.” During the evening passacarrers, the nightlong passage of Patum effigies through the streets, they made sure I did more than look. A bar owner I knew was jumping the maça, a club with firecrackers affixed to the top. As it burned lower, she thrust it into my hands, and I had no choice but to start skipping, bouncing the pebble-filled maça up and down to keep it lit, showering myself with sparks until my turn was over. The Guita Xica, the smaller and more mobile of the two fire-breathing mules, chased me into a corner every time it set eyes on me: I cowered with my hands over my head until it tired of shaking the flame over me and went after someone else. Agustí, the guide at the head of the beast, was unabashed when I later taxed him with his pursuit. “Daughter,” he said, “this is the baptism by fire we all have to suffer.” Through the five days of the festival, I opened my mouth to fierce alcoholic mixtures in leather flasks and glass porrons; I let children take up my arms and dance me across the plaça; I ducked inside the Eagle and the Black Giant; I was given a ride on the back of the Guita Grossa and exulted over the black waves of the crowd beneath me; I put a shoulder under the Guita Xica when the guitaires’ girlfriends carried it up the Carrer Major and shouted with the rest of them as we lowered the neck to charge; I went out to eat supper every night at five in the morning, drank champagne and sang until eight, and rose three hours later in an unsuccessful effort to get myself to Mass—so as properly to document the complete event. My much-ridiculed little notebooks became progressively less legible. I began to lose sight of the symbolic oppositions that had seemed so obvious in the written accounts and at last to attain a glimmering of what they’d been trying to tell me: the Patum is not a mere spectacle of traditional dances but a force that runs through you.

Et surt de dintre, ran their third refrain. It comes up from inside you. The Patum, with all its antiquity, all its complexity, is not fundamentally a part of the external world: it lives in the body of each Berguedan, who has heard the beat of the Tabal since infancy, danced along with the giants as a toddler, “sucked in the Patum with the mother’s milk,” as more than one person has told me. The Patum bursts out of Berguedan bodies on joyous occasions—an out-of-town reunion of Berguedans, a victory of the Barcelona Football Club—and is simply bottled up the rest of the time. Agustí Ferrer, then mayor of Berga, wrote: “At Corpus, the Patum which beats inside you all year explodes all at once” (Ferrer i Gàsol 1989, 2).

The Patum had to beat inside of me before I would be qualified to talk about it. To open myself up to this went against my whole history as a person and a scholar. I am not brave: this was the challenge of my fieldwork. The Patum brought me face to face with a reality that could not be known by reading.

I had learned Catalan in my senior year in college because there was no course in Provençal that year, and I was interested in the troubadours. In graduate school, after too many years of reading nothing written after 1914, I had studied folklore as a way of reconnecting myself with the world I lived in. However, my disinclination to engage myself with the guilt and pain of contemporary America persisted, and I looked for research projects at a certain distance. Not in Africa or Asia or Latin America, where my well-meaning liberalism, trying to forget its ancestry, again interfered with my ability to concentrate, but in continental Europe, where my retrograde cultural preferences were less out of place than at home and where people’s problems were not my fault. (I am making no generalizations here about ethnography and ethnographers: it simply happened that I approximated more closely than most a certain stereotype of the ethnographer as E. M. Forster heroine.)

I came upon a book, La Patum de Berga, by Josep Armengou i Feliu, a priest of Berga ([1968]1994). It described a Corpus Christi festival in a small city in the Pyrenees. “La Patum” was a sequence of dances by fabulous creatures in plaster and papier-maché: giants dressed as kings, little knights in horse-shaped skirts, a green monster called a mule that breathed fire like a dragon, devils covered in firecrackers that set themselves alight. The event had evidently obsessed the town for centuries, and the commentaries amassed by Mossèn Armengou included a range of contradictory origin narratives clearly shaped by the exigencies of the historical moment of narration. Elite accounts shaped a civil-religious ceremony of order and decorum. Underneath, rising in the flames of the devils and the green monster, was the threat of revolution.

What really drew me to Berga for my fieldwork was that green thing, the guita. As a child I had been much attached to a fifteenth-century painting in the Art Institute of Chicago, a Saint George and the Dragon by Bernat Martorell—who, as it turned out, was a Catalan. In my junior year abroad I collected reproductions of dragon-slayer images: Uccello, Donatello, Piero di Cosimo. In graduate school I read many versions of that most famous of folktales, Aarne-Thompson type 300, as I learned to identify it, and the related founding myths in which the conquered dragon is nature tamed by civilization. But nature’s submission, as we know, cannot be counted on for long, and the paintings make it clear that the princess, once returned to her palace and her father, must have yearned for the dragon and the cave. As for me, you can draw your own conclusions.

Of course I had my theoretical reasons too. The festival was proving resistant to the ethnography-of-communication approach then dominant in folklore studies, not only because so many actors were involved but also because of its continuity over time: though the context of the moment affected it, it tended rather to make its own context, subduing participants to its own rules instead of vice-versa. The creative individual agent, beloved of folklorists since the 1960s, here submitted shamelessly to tradition, the collective, and the inarticulate, reckless of all the trouble we had taken to dismande survivalist and superorganic assumptions.

In designing my field research I hadn’t yet gotten that far: I intended only to get beyond semiotic approaches locating meaning in the fixed program of the festival and was confident of finding self-conscious, heterogeneous actors if I looked hard enough. To begin with, I was preoccupied with the problem of observation. The ethnographer can attain a kind of omniscience through collecting and collating data from many sources: a good seat in the balcony, local documentation, and multiple reports of what is happening elsewhere. But we had become more interested in the “aura” of proximity to the center: what it’s like to be up close, what the participant is feeling. How do people understand their cultural performances? How do symbols convince their makers and beholders? In short, how do cultural forms and the mind of the native work upon each other?

We cannot get inside the native’s head, said the symbolic anthropologists I had been reading. We are no longer so naive or ethnocentric as to suppose that they think like we do; we are not so presumptuous as to claim to understand. What we can do is hermeneutics: we can read the texts they have made. The “stories they tell themselves about themselves”—to use a key phrase of the school—are framed performances of which the outsider may quietly join the audience (Geertz 1973).

Having come to folklore from literary studies, I was reassured by this “interpretive turn.” But my department at the University of Pennsylvania, having a strong sociolinguistic bent, had also discovered practice. Our teachers never let us forget that our informants were not just culturally constructed intellects reflecting on themselves for the pleasure of it: they were constrained by the struggle to sustain bodily existence in more or less difficult material and political conditions. Moreover, they were individuals with whom we engaged in real relationships, implying mutual obligations and real-world consequences.

I had two concerns, then, in my project of reading texts. The first was to remember that texts have authors and readers with purposes (folklore had to assert this before it could begin to deconstruct it). The second was to spare myself and my informants as far as possible the dreadful weight of mutual obligations and real-world consequences.

The Patum itself could not be treated as a text, I decided. It had no author—although many nineteenth-century commentators had attempted to create one for it. It had no puppeteer pulling the strings from above and coordinating the action; there was no one consciousness that could perceive, much less direct, the whole. It was a genuinely collective and emergent creation, too shifting and evanescent to pin down. Each participating individual would not merely interpret the whole from his or her own position—on a balcony, inside an effigy, and so on—but would have to imagine the whole as well: interpretation would entail the creation of a text.

So I devised a study of the multiple “texts” of the Patum that exist in public and semipublic space. From Mossèn Armengou’s book and other readings, I knew about festival programs, monographs, sermons, poems, children’s drawings, videos, souvenirs, photographs, civic decor, proverbs, musical compositions, conversations in bars, newspaper articles, cartoons, advertising, liturgical objects, house decoration, costume, impromptu performances, miniature and neighborhood performances, festivals modeled on the Patum, and festivals created in antithesis to and parody of the Patum. Through these inscriptions, which I could examine more or less at my leisure, I could map local interpretation according to historical period, social class, gender, political affiliation, age, native and outsider identity, or whatever other social categories emerged from the study. And there was surely a contest of interpretations: I could look at the rhetorical tactics used to gain adherents to a particular interpretive community and the influence of power relations on interpretive hegemony. Finally, by comparing interpretations at a deep-structural level, I could perhaps understand something about the constraints placed on interpretation by the form of the event.

This strategy, I realized, would be biased toward elite productions, and I would have to take that into account; popular interpretation of the Patum was no doubt found in the performance itself. For this I would observe styles of participation and perhaps collect taped narratives of festival experience. But I would be dealing primarily with information in the public domain, things that anyone could discover merely by looking. I would not be intruding in anyone’s life. Nor would I presume, I thought, to say what the Patum itself was or meant; I would not risk oversimplifying. I would address the event only through its inscriptions.

But turn it around: I would enter into their thoughts without entering into their feelings. It sounds heartless and superficial—even if it had been possible. I would attend not to the central event but to the texts that were its epiphenomena. Is not aura more than this? The Berguedans thought so: when I expected them to speak of symbols in the Patum, they spoke of bodily states and emotions. “It’s a feeling—a brotherhood—” said Rossendo of the devils when I asked what they did down there under City Hall all that time. “How can I express it?” “I can’t explain the Patum to you,” said Ramon Forés, the bartender at the Casino, where I lived that first year. “When you do a salt de plens, and they kneel you down to dress you, it’s a feeling like, a feeling—I can’t explain it to you.”

Mossèn Armengou’s assertions had seemed overblown. “The Patum is the baptism of our citizenship …”; “The Patum is the miracle which Berga has known how to make and perpetuate …”; and on and on. But it came from all sides: the Patum was considered not only with humor, pride, and possessiveness but with passion. University students postponed their exams by a year when they coincided with Corpus Christi: there are always exams, but only one Patum. One man told me of a friend who had gone AWOL from his military service so that he could say he’d never missed a Patum. Another one spoke of a Berguedan scientist who’d gone to live in America. She made great efforts to return every year, but on the few occasions when it was not possible she called up friends at City Hall and made them hang the telephone out of the window for an hour at a time, long-distance from the West Coast. Another story was told when I turned off the tape recorder: a man who had cancer and expected to die before another Patum came. He had had a colostomy two weeks before Corpus Christi and was still in the hospital in Barcelona. Could he leave to go up to Berga for the Patum? Out of the question: it would kill him. But sooner that than missing his last Patum. He made himself so miserable, virtually going on a hunger strike, that the hospital and his family found a way: he was borne up to Berga in an ambulance and carried to the balcony of a house on the plaça. There he pulled himself up by the railings to see the dancing and collapsed back on the bed during the breaks (the Patum seems to have cured him, for he subsequendy recovered and is now alive and well and dressing the plens).

The Patum was ineffable: there was no one who did not say this. What it signified was something about Moors and local history—the stories varied and few cared very much—but the important thing was the way it made them feel. The Patum has to be lived. Some people encouraged me to live it; a few politely informed me that my project was useless, for, without having grown up in Berga and lived the Patum all my life, I was incapable of understanding anything about it. The more intellectual allowed that my work could have some utility in clarifying the Patum’s history, but the frankest speakers insisted that I was overlooking the heart of things in order to tinker with trivialities.

How was I to get inside the festival, then? My advisor, Roger D. Abrahams, had said to me, “It’s Corpus Christi, you know. Isn’t the body important?” No, it didn’t seem so. And in any case, I thought but did not say, 90 percent of the academy is working on the body now, and I want to do something different. But it was out of my hands. I asked a man so anticlerical and profane that he is nicknamed “The Priest” about how the Patum had changed after the 1971 suppression of the Corpus Christi procession. He said it was a pity, that the procession had been a lot of fun, and what was especially sad was that the Patum didn’t smell right anymore because the hazelnut branches used to decorate houses for the procession were no longer there to break off and wave away sparks with. The olor de Patum, they all said: it’s not the same, but you’ll smell it anyway. The odor of Patum! How on earth was I to talk about it?

Here it was—the body—and for the Berguedans it was straightforward enough. Like many peoples who have known poverty in the not too distant past, they tend to be philosophical realists. There was no great epistemological gulf fixed between them and me. The Patum is known by participation; I had but to participate as they did. I could have their experience by living in their bodies, and I could do this by eating what they ate, dancing what they danced, and, in general, by spending time with them: acquiring a history in common with them.

Eating and drinking turned out to be central to my assimilation. Community in Berga is largely understood through alimentary metaphors, and again, I attribute this to the simplest material cause: the long experience of the threat of hunger. Everyone fed me and everyone was anxious to know how I liked the local food. One old man was gratified but astonished to learn that the change in diet had not injured my health. Several people warned me that the “change of waters” would surely affect me, not because Berguedan water is bad but because the combination of minerals varies from place to place, and everyone becomes accustomed to his or her native mixture. Berguedan bodies have been created by a unique diet formed from a unique ecology, and it was a good sign that I could take it in.

Berguedans are highly self-conscious about the way things are done in Berga, a distinctiveness they attribute to their supposed long isolation as a cul-de-sac in the foothills of the Pyrenees—though the self-consciousness has more to do with their long dependency on external powers. This is how we do it here, they would say, and watch to see if I could follow them. They amused themselves by testing me: can she drink out of a porró? I spilled wine all over myself during my first ventures with the narrow-spouted glass pitcher, but mastered it and won approval. Can she drink a camjillo? Certainly I can, I said, provoked. I had two—fierce concoctions of espresso and sweet rum—and lay awake all night twitching like a marionette. They laughed at my account the next day, and they laughed even more when I told them that I felt like a monkey in the zoo with children poking things between the bars of my cage to see what I’d do. They made a rendezvous with me at Cal Blasi on the Vall, and I walked up and down the Vall for half an hour. Cal Blasi is not in the phone book, it is a nickname, and the sign above its door says Bar Marc. It never occurred to them to give me an address, and it took me quite a while to ask someone on the street for help.

But they were not just playing with me: there was system in it. I had said I wanted to understand their experience, not impose my perceptions from outside; they had heard me say so on Ràdio Berga my first week in the town. They took me at my word and took it upon themselves to teach me.

It was a job for them to get my body off the balcony and feeling with them. Think what it means to be an urban academic. What has my whole life been but an effort to escape the body? I was a child who was good at reading and bad at games, and books were a refuge from persecution. Later, free of the playground, my life was still spent sitting in libraries or discoursing with friends nearly as unbalanced as I was. Then there was my habitual environment. Philadelphia in the 1980s was constituted of refinery emissions, uncollected garbage, and human effluvia in the heavy air of the Delaware Valley; horns, sirens, boom boxes, quarreling neighbors; trees yellow with blight; sidewalks strewn with broken bottles, fast food trash, cigarette butts, and, as one passed through dark streets, heaps by the curb that suddenly moved and revealed themselves as human. I did not have moral courage enough and tried not to see or hear or smell. I lived in the city by refusing to live in it: numbing my senses, thickening my skin, hardening my heart. Even on the days when the wind blew the miasma away and I was tempted into good humor and physical expansiveness, a remark on the street would remind me of the danger of too much relaxation. I would tighten my lips and freeze my smile, turn my eyes to the pavement, clutch my purse to my side, and stiffen my gait.

For the first three months at least, I walked through Berga at my normal metropolitan pace. “Where are you running off to in such a hurry?” they would ask. The evasions of years caught up with me. I had to learn to slow down and look at people passing, offer myself to the gaze of the community.

The breakthrough in my integration was the Societat Unió Coral Berguedana, one of the innumerable worker’s choirs established in Catalonia at the end of the last century. By good fortune, my arrival in Berga coincided with the last rehearsals for the caramelles, songs about new life and pretty girls and the farewell to salt cod that are sung in the streets and squares during Easter. I had met Queralt, a music student who conducted the choir, and she was perfectly at ease with my timid suggestion that I might listen in on a rehearsal. The second time she said, “You can come again, but only if you sing!” I came; some people were unabashedly off-key and the music was easy to grasp. So I sang too. The singers were curious and friendly: through the choir’s varied membership I gained entree into many social milieux. And my appearance in the choir after so short a time in the town garnered me a good deal of recognition and good will.

Then came the sardanes of Sant Jordi, the feast of the patron of Catalonia on April 23. The caramelles had not been so bad, but the prospect of dancing in public brought back all of those humiliating evenings at the Evanston Women’s Club, where a crowd of spotty twelve-year-olds were put through the waltz, the cha-cha, and other disciplines judged desirable for the acquisition of gender decorum. With me, left-handed and undergrown, it had left nothing but a determination never to dance again. Now I was standing behind the dancers in the ring, trying desperately to ascertain which foot went forward first. They kept saying, “Just try it!” as I insisted that I hadn’t gotten it down yet. It’s Sant Jordi, their looks said; are you with us or aren’t you? Queralt took me by the hand and dragged me into the circle; the other dancers gave me encouraging smiles, and Queralt’s sister Alba counted the steps for me. On the next occasions I bounced through as best I could, and by the last sardanes after the Sunday night Patum I had it almost down. After the last shout of “Visca!” the boy next to me, Jordi, turned to me and said, “Girl, I congratulate you! An American who speaks Catalan and dances sardanes! There are people who’ve lived here all their lives and never learned to do either.” Jordi is the child of Galician immigrants and earned his integration through performance: the Scouts, the town band, political demonstrations, the sardana, speaking Catalan. He more than anyone understands the importance of participation.

Beyond that came the Patum and all the coercions of which I have spoken; the insistence that I participate fully and as a Berguedan would. The Berguedans demanded certain kinds of performances from me and offered in exchange true understanding.

The Berguedans do not believe in translation, but in socialization. To know them, they say, you must become one of them. I was not a child, of course, and could not regain the time lost; I would never have the depth of historical experience that they do, through their own and their parents’ memories. But they made allowances for this, telling me things, taking me on excursions, and digging through their attics for old programs and pictures to show me. I was allowed enough “research” to repair in part the unavoidable deficiencies of my socialization.

They humbled me too. At the end of my second visit I was sitting with two men who began to talk about an old patumaire, now dead, who had been famous for … Agustí saw my professional ears prick up and said to me, “You, Dorothy, know many things but you don’t know everything yet.” “Not by a long shot,” I said, to please him. “Not by a long shot,” he agreed complacently. Another time Ritxi, the director of the municipal music school, grinned at me and said, “Ah, there’s lots that you don’t know! I’ve got old scores from the Patum that you’ve never seen … We’ll see if you ever make your way to them.”

They wouldn’t let me have it all at once, wouldn’t let me have it simply to take away and make a book of. They pointed the path I had to follow and left the work up to me. As I acquired a history in common with them, I gained more privileges and also more responsibilities. It began simply enough, with an increase in social obligations: by the end of my first visit I was sleeping no more than five hours a night. In the intervals between my first visits, I wrote endless letters to let them know I hadn’t forgotten them. Leaving town became increasingly difficult. The object of socialization, after all, is to make you a functioning member of the society; in my case, it was to make me understand the Patum, but understanding and reponsibility are inseparable for them. Right behavior incarnates right understanding: it is the outward and visible concomitant—or even more than that. To understand the Patum is to dance it.

I wrote my dissertation in medias res: in the middle of the acquisition of scholarly competence, in the middle of puzzling out Berga and the Patum, in the fork of the road between becoming a Berguedan and committing myself to the unwelcoming American academy. In Philadelphia, that last alternative seemed overstated: of course I would stay in America, and someone would hire me someday. In Berga the choice was not so clear. It was complicated by their differing expectations of me. My intellectual friends did not want me to go wholly native but to be their American connection and promote Catalonia to the world. For others, my failure to stay in Berga was proof of my imperfect assimilation. “This feeling we have here among us,” said Pepito at a farewell lunch in the core bar of the Patum, waving his hand at the table of friends. “Stay for this.” “I know, I do understand,” I pleaded. “But I have obligations.” “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “If you did, you wouldn’t leave.” Against this logic I can make no argument. My native notion of understanding has me as subject and the Patum as object: there can be and in fact ought to be distance between me and it. But for Pepito and his friends, knowing is incorporation. They and the Patum and Berga are an indissoluble whole, one body. My observer problem is explicitly epistemological and implicitly moral; their observer problem is simply practical. In a depopulating community desperate for solutions, every onlooker is someone who needs to be working instead.

For several years afterward, I lived between two worlds and two realities, a vacillation tolerated by Berguedans (who share the dilemma) but handicapping me in the less forgiving professional world (as Berguedans too are handicapped). Now, of course, I have surrendered to what the louder voices of the latter world assure us is inevitable; the conflict has been displaced from my life to this book, uneasily incorporating that dissertation written when Berga almost wholly possessed me. I live for my career, such as it is, and live therefore always in motion, riding an arc toward an imagined point not just of rest but of incorporation in some loftier state; in the meantime, while I wait for that indistinct brilliance to materialize, my autonomy and mobility are in practice my chiefest goods. My probable future, while it may encompass formal recognitions and abstract incorporations, will be solitary at the level that matters to Berguedans; at best I will be not just an onlooker, but myself an object of the gaze. And yet that other world beats inside me still. Could I bring anything of it to the life I now recognize as primary, or is this fantasy of integration itself part of the Patum’s inescapable nostalgia? Written at my present distance, back up in the balcony, the question answers itself.

I would not impose my story upon the reader were it not, mutatis mutandis, a point of entry into the Berguedan predicament. I am somewhat more cheerful about the clash of worlds than many of my Berguedan friends are. After all, I started out in the metropolis; the only game in town is my game too, and I was born to a place at the table and dealt a good hand. But they have a genuine dilemma: they belong to a world that cannot sustain itself and must destroy it to enter the world that can sustain them.