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The Patum and the Body Politic
A STORY THEY TELL THEMSELVES about themselves? Well, yes, but apparently they don’t listen to it. By the fifth day of dancing and drinking, after multiple repetitions of the Patum in the plaça, the plebeian mule spins into the royal eagle with no sense of disjuncture or surprise. And even at a distance from the confusions of performance, people are reluctant to talk about meaning directly.
“What does it mean?” is, of course, the classic outsider’s question. As a rule, insiders are more immediately interested in what it does, particularly when “it” is a performance repeated annually in the same place by the same people with little scope granted to improvisation. The native Berguedan’s relation to the Patum is not typically one of reader and text or audience and performance. The child’s first contact with the Patum is not with a distant spectacle but with an enveloping realm: held up to the hand of the giantess, danced on her father’s back in the crowd, the child first knows the Patum as something tactile and kinetic, a mass in motion around her and herself in motion within it. She is encouraged to learn the steps and gestures at the same time she is learning to walk; as she grows older, she is allowed and obliged to participate in more and more of the event. It is a great blurry world which she enters by degrees; she finds increasingly familiar clearings from year to year, but she is always aware of surrounding thickets of complexity, some of which she will never penetrate. If she is of an intellectual bent, she may try to mark paths and chart a map, but even so, she knows the Patum by moving through it. It is unlikely that she will ever feel the need to draw back from the Patum, survey it from beginning to end, and declare what it means. What it means was danced into her as she became part of its history and it of hers. The Patum is less an object of analysis than of recognition: an annual return and renewal.
Convivència and Representation
That is the orthodox Berguedan view, and it is true in part—true as an ideal in any case. There are good practical and historical reasons to leave the Patum unexamined—not, as with everyday habit, by declaring it too trivial to merit attention, but rather by making it sacred: superorganic, eternal. In a deeply factionalized community with a history of civil war and a present of economic threat, the incorporation of individuals into active community membership is the primary goal of the Patum, and the history that militates against that incorporation must be overtly silenced and covertly transformed. “For the Patum, all are one.” “For the Patum, we Berguedans make a pinecone”—a Catalan idiom used to express solidarity or unity in diversity.
First, the silencing. Catalonia has a language problem, of which the choice of Catalan or Castilian is only the most conspicuous dimension. Unlike, say, postwar Germany, where the Nazi regime was unambiguously defeated and had to be unequivocally repudiated, not least through a cleansing of language, the Spanish transition expelled nothing and no one. Rather, it brought opposing political elements together in a coalition by means of agreement to let bygones be bygones. No idiom was wholly discredited, but neither was any idiom sufficiently unmarked for the voicing of collective aspirations, which had to be reduced to the blandest, emptiest formulas to win assent. The formulation of meanings was relegated from the dangerous public realm to subgroups in which a vocabulary was shared.
Thus convivència—a slogan word of the Transition meaning not simply coexistence side-by-side, but getting along together and sharing a social world—became possible. In Catalonia, the challenge of political convivència was complicated by that of native and immigrant convivència in a region where the proportions were half and half.1
Provincial communities such as Berga face the problem more directly: in so small a city, convivència is a matter of face-to-face relationships. The poor and the well-off are inescapably visible to each other; political enemies must pass each other daily on the Carrer Major; immigrants live for the most part not in new suburbs outside the city but next door to old Berguedan families.
Like most Catalan mountain towns, Berga has a manufacturing tradition dating from the Middle Ages. Its economy has always been dependent on commerce and industry. It has never been self-sufficient in food production: too cold for vines and olive trees, the terrain irregular, and the soil poor. The ability to eat, for Berguedans, does not depend entirely on their own labors but on their relations with each other and with outsiders.
Physical isolation is a second factor in interdependence. Berga had no great landowners or nobility with extralocal interests. The prosperity of the upper class depends on general Berguedan conditions, and the Berguedan elite has always been provincial with respect to larger Catalan cities. Within Berga, the classes are at no great physical remove from each other and no great cultural distance either. Patron-client and employer-employee relations are affective as well as instrumental and entail a great deal of mutual knowledge and evaluation.
In such a place, the metaphor of the social body is not problematic. For the Berguedans, Berga as a relatively bounded and cohesive entity is not an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) but a fact of life. This distinguishes it from the hegemonic projects in the form of imagined communities long foisted on the Berguedans: the universal Catholic Church, Franco’s “imperial Spain” or the Socialists’ “new Spain,” the neomedieval Catalonia of the early twentieth century or the “Catalonia-city” of today, to name only a few. All of these require heavy investments in representation, mediatic and political, to compensate for a deficit in lived interaction and succeed in proportion to the intensity of the latter and its compatibility with the former.
Berga’s self-representation, the Patum, is also compensatory: not for a lack of interaction but, on the contrary, for its tensions. Differentiation generates interdependence and even desire; it also creates mistrust and resentment. Convivència is at once a practical necessity and, in its deeper sense, an ideal recognized as utopian. It is strained by the fact that there is rarely enough to go around—not enough jobs, not enough prestige, not enough money. Although it would be a stretch to suggest that the “idea of limited good” or zero-sum worldview often attributed to peasant cultures holds sway in industrial Berga, it is a commonsense reality there that the gain of one is frequently the loss of another. Competition exists; it is bitter and painful. People are suspicious and factionalized.
Public life therefore vacillates—in tandem with the self-control of Berguedans—between careful avoidances and bitter conflict. Off the Carrer Major, partisan language cultivates itself in innumerable bars, associations, periodicals, and performances. “In Berga everything is double,” they said: it has two music schools, two ski clubs, two choirs, two theater groups, two history magazines, two political parties personally opposed and ideologically identical, two of anything you can think of that might profitably be combined to accomplish something worthwhile. Thus, for them, the Patum’s contest of interpretations—for me so revelatory, so “democratic”—was so obvious as not to be worth talking about, and it obscured the festival’s supreme achievement: wholeness.
It is nonetheless important that the Patum, formed through accretion and negotiation over several centuries, achieves wholeness by a radically different semiotic strategy than that of most political ceremonies created since the transition to democracy.2 The Patum relies on multivocal pluralism rather than abstract singularities. That is, rather than offering single collective emblems empty enough for a particular content to be projected into them, it provides a heterogeneous ensemble of concrete references allowing multiple points of entry into the whole and multiple stances within it. In Durkheim’s terms, rather than a mechanical solidarity in which everyone stands in identical and individual relation to a thinly defined collectivity, the Patum defines an organic solidarity, a true social body that reflects the sense of everyday economic and social interdependence between different positions. These links of the Patum to the lived social world are not merely semiotic but performed in modes of festival interaction that mimic and intensify everyday encounters, as Part II will show. This union of representation and interaction is what gives the Patum its intensity and Berga its reality.
The rest of the chapter will lay out the representational dimensions of the process; but a final point must be made about representation in the political sense. Berga, although geographically it can be seen as isolated, is in no way self-sufficient: it must speak downward to attract clients and upward to attract patrons. Since its emergence in the early seventeenth century, the Patum has been the language through which Berga proclaimed itself to its hinterland; since at least the eighteenth century, when the Patum began to savor of archaism, it has been its most conspicuous cultural capital for trading with the metropolis.
While the peasants who came in for the festival participated in a relatively direct and sustained way, the Patum had to be interpreted to the less accommodating outside forces of church, state, and market. This has been the task of the professional class—clergy, lawyers, and doctors—and later of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, teachers, and journalists. All of these derive their power from their intermediary position, representing the metropolis to the local and vice versa. But they are doubly dependent as much as doubly powerful. Without the constraint of force or the incentive of resources (and the latter, at least, have been scarce enough in Spain to make even the former difficult to sustain at the local level), their power to impose hegemonic languages upon their constituencies is limited. Instead they must, to some degree, adapt themselves to the population that constitutes their clientele. They can give to the metropolis only what the local has to offer—but in a voice the metropolis is willing and able to hear. They are thus professional interpreters, through whom local interests and cultural models reach the center; they translate, with greater or lesser fidelity according to their ability and the degree of distance, from the restricted code of the local to the elaborated code of the metropolis (Bernstein 1971).3 Occasionally—and later we will see a prime example in Berga’s Mossèn Armengou—a gifted interpreter can succeed in teaching a local model to the metropolis.
There is thus a rich history—dating back at least to 1725, when the bishop complained about disorder on Corpus Christi—of Berguedan explications of the Patum (Farràs i Farràs 1979; Noguera i Canal 1992; Noyes 1992). Such accounts typically provide both an allegorical interpretation of the dances and, since the nineteenth century, an origin narrative. The allegory allows the Patum’s combats to be read as the triumph of the current orthodoxy: the Church Triumphant over irrational nature, Carlists over liberals, liberals over Carlists, Catalonia over the Castilian invader, the people over feudalism, Imperial Spain over the infidel reds, democracy over repression, and so forth. The origin narrative places the Patum at the founding moment claimed in the current political master narrative: this has traditionally been medieval and, more recently, pre-Christian.
Both allegory and origin narrative serve a second purpose, especially in periods of political repression. In performing submission to the dominant order, they deflect outside interference. The emphasis on origins as determining factor was especially important during and after the Franco regime as a protective means of “denying coevalness” to the festival (Fabian 1983), which thus makes no controversial commentaries on the present nor threatens to transform it.
There are some popular origin legends too, although they reach us so much colored by their elite transcribers that not much can be made of them. But in general it can be said that elite origin narratives valorize the symbols of order in the festival and view the danced combats as the conquest of the disorderly elements, imagined as both lower-status and external to the community. Conversely, the popular narratives, many of which feature emergence from caves, celebrate these lower elements—the mules and the devils, even the Moors—as indigenous forces able to hold off impositions from above and outside the community. The fundamental story that the community tells itself about itself through the Patum has thus to do with social divisions and what each class fears in the other.
From Corpus Mysticum to Body Politic
Most historians of the Patum have been so urgently imbricated in the dialogue between local and metropolis—the latter primarily Catalanist Barcelona—that their work must be used with enormous caution: where documents have not actually been fabricated to fill the voids left by the frequent burning of the archives in civil war, the reading of them has at least been highly interested. The skepticism fostered by life under Francoist representations encouraged the emergence of a different kind of historian, and the three principal scholars of the Patum—Mossèn Armengou at the end of the Franco regime, Jaume Farràs i Farms during the Transition, and more recently Josep Noguera i Canal—have been progressively more critical of the historiography and less committed to a given line on the event; this ironic turn, of course, also reflects a change in dominant representations and Berga’s relationship to them. Based on their historicizing rereadings of earlier scholarship, their new primary research in local archives, and the comparative data available on Catalan Corpus Christi celebrations in other towns, we can reconstruct the early history of the Patum in its large outlines, and suggest the continuities of meaning over time which give the Patum its depth and richness.4
The Patum is an outgrowth of the late medieval Corpus Christi procession, particularly elaborate in Catalonia because when the liturgical feast was made obligatory in 1311, the King of Aragon had just come out of papal interdiction and urgently needed to demonstrate his orthodoxy and that of his subjects. These processions, in the first instance, paid homage to the sacrament of the Eucharist. The consecrated Host was carried in a raised monstrance under a canopy supported by the highest-ranking members of the community, clerical or secular. Around the Body of Christ, the entire Corpus Mysticum of which Christ was the head articulated itself. The various corporations and elements of the local community lined up in much-contested hierarchical order—and the feast thus immediately became an occasion for civic display and competition, both between and within cities. This assembly of the Church Militant, Christ’s kingdom on Earth, was complemented, insofar as local resources permitted, by representations of the Church Triumphant: allegorical figures or mobile tableaux of Biblical figures, saints, and all the company of heaven.
These representations, generally sponsored by guilds and confraternities, had to be acted by community members not important enough to be marching in their own persons; and they called upon the performance repertoires of that lower level of the community, sometimes incorporating older genres. As medievalists know, different vernacular traditions emerged from these processions, including both the English mystery plays and the Castilian autos sacramentales. In Catalonia, the procession featured entremesos, dances with masked performers and/or effigies animated by a carrier. Often these might be the emblem of a saint, such as the Lion of Saint Mark or the Eagle of Saint John, or the supporting figures of a Biblical tableau, such as the ox and the ass of the Nativity.
It took little time for the animal and fantastic figures to become dissociated from their liturgical occasions: for some scholars, an argument for their older and indigenous status. The verifiable contemporary reasons have rather to do with their popularity among festival spectators and the consequent disruptions of the procession’s solemnity. Because of the guild sponsorship and the popularity, however, the entremesos survived various phases of ecclesiastical repression, gradually moving to the head of the procession as entertainments safely distanced from the culminating Host or separating from the procession entirely and furnishing a parallel, secular celebration, in some cases moving from Corpus Christi to a community’s patronal festival.
By the time we have verifiable evidence of what would become the Patum—the first unambiguous document in the municipal archives dates from 1632—this separation has largely taken place. The entremesos consist only of the turcs i cavallets, the devils and angel, the drum, and the mule—still today the noisiest elements of the Patum—and they constitute a separate entertainment paid for by the city, known as les bolisies and later La Bulla—nouns deriving from the verb “to boil” and referring to a noisy, mobile assembly. The elements of the Bulla marched at the head of the procession and then performed separately in the main square of the town, the Plaça Sant Pere.
It seems clear that the Bulla and parallel celebrations of the period represent a popular response to the procession’s inadequate representation of the social body: they were born of a desire for inclusion—if necessary, through violent irruption. Both women and the lower classes were excluded from the procession, and its symbolic language was so ethereal, with its gold and silver and solar symbolism, so insistent on transcendence (and on wealth as the means to it), as to provide a very dubious account of humble corporeality—the liturgical point of the festival.5 The Bulla, with its firecrackers, bells, drum, and reputed provocations to immorality, restored sensuality to the social body.
In the seventeenth century, such festivals were still prestigious means of civic self-assertion in all the cities of Spain. Berguedan records show repeated municipal decisions, despite persistent poverty, “if other communities are dancing, to dance also in the present town” (quoted in Farràs i Farràs 1982, 73). In the eighteenth century, both ecclesiastical pressures and emerging rival forms of display induced festival decay—but not in poor, out-of-the-way Berga, where the bishop had been staved off with a good allegory, where no rival entertainments were available, and where the festival brought the peasants of the surrounding comarca to spend their money at the accompanying fair. La Bulla, indeed, expanded with Berga’s increasing importance in textile manufacture, acquiring a giant and an eagle during the course of the century. By 1790, the local notary’s response to a royal questionnaire identified the festival as distinguishing Berga from other towns and its entremesos as notable “antiquities” (Pedrals 1989, 9).
This status as antiquity is the next major construction of the festival for outsiders. In the letter of a soldier quartered in Berga in 1820 we see it as the “patum patena, a dance so called that from festivals immemorial is a custom in this town” (quoted in Sales 1962, 212). But contemporary meanings were clearly more important within the town. The word patum is onomatopoeic, related phonetically to other words illustrating the sound of a sudden impact: feet striking the ground, a blow struck, projectiles striking their target, and so forth.6 Notably, the morpheme pat-is associated, particularly in this region in the early nineteenth century, with popular disorder and local bands of bandits and irregular troops—the latter not always readily distinguished (Noyes 1992, 347–51).
The nineteenth century completed the partial domestication of the Patum’s disorder. New entremesos asserting authority and submission—giants, eagle, and dwarfs—were gradually incorporated in order to balance the rebellious performances of mule, Turks, and devils (the Christians and angels being, as they are today, merely nominal victors over the latter two). The town band—such as it was—not only enhanced the appeal of the festival but also set music against the noise of the drum: every entremes except for the mule and the devils now had a melody and a choreography to control it. The order of performances was gradually reshaped to highlight the contrasts of order and disorder and, to a certain extent, to contain the latter. The containment was never fully successful, and we may suspect that the Patum’s eventual symmetries result rather from the polarizing tensions between public, performers, and city.
In the 1890s, the final entremesos of the present Patum were incorporated as part of an attempt to dress up both the festival and the town for potential investors, tourists, and political patrons. The Patum had stabilized the Berguedan social body in representation at least, balancing an orderly upper body with an unruly lower one in an ongoing conflict that, rather than leading to the victory of one side, held the members together—in contrapposto, as it were. The dichotomy was reproduced at several levels of the festival: between procession and Patum, between entremesos, and between the elite spectators in the balcony and the working-class participants in the plaça. Then as today, the Patum’s syntax drew both connections and contrasts:
| Turks and Cavallets. A battle turned into a dance, where order triumphs in the choreography as well as in the mimesis. | Maces. A battle where the nominal victory of order is belied by the protagonism of the devils, who burn themselves out before St. Michael and the angel dare attack them. |
| Àliga. The dance of a hardsurfaced and crowned heraldic bird, which commands attention at the same time it holds the public at a distance. | Guites. The improvisatory movement of two cloth-covered farmyard monsters, which scatter the public as they engage with them. |
| Old Dwarfs, Giants, and New Dwarfs. A sequence where the climax is framed in miniatures of itself; the claims of the higher social status are supported by the emulations of the lower. | Plens and tirabol. Infernal figures without angels to conquer them, whose music is undermined by the separate rhythms of tabal and fuets, followed by a dance “without order or concert” (Armengou 1994, 91) within which symbols of high and low are intermingled. Everyone is still alive at the end. |
The Comparses and Their Performances
The individual numbers of the Patum comprise effigies or masked figures and a prescribed dance or set of movements. The historical term for these numbers was entremesos: in contempory Catalan they are usually called comparses, from comparèixer, to appear. Each comparsa is controlled by a small group of people—overwhelmingly male—and a cap de colla (head of the gang), who distribute the salts (here, the turns as performer) among themselves and those upon whom they choose to confer the privilege. There are nine comparses plus the final tirabol, appearing always in the following order even in acts in which not all elements appear:
1. Tabal
2. Turcs i Cavallets
3. Maces
4. Guites
5. Àliga
6. Nans Veils
7. Gegants
8. Nans Nous
9. Plens
10. Tirabol
Apart from the Tabal, which has a framing role, and the final tirabol, a hybrid, the comparses can be divided into balls and salts. A ball (dance) is choreographed and accompanied by music, hence fixed in time and space. These include the Turcs i Cavallets, the Àliga, the two sets of dwarfs, and the giants. The salts or coses de foc (things of fire) are the Guites, the Maces, and the Plens: comparses accompanied by the Tabal, with music later incorporated in the Plens and the midday Maces. All feature the use of fuets, slow-burning firecrackers about one and a half feet long, which trail sparks until the flame hits the charge at the bottom. The effigies, masks, and costumes of these comparses are much less well made than those of the dances: they suffer fire damage and require constant repair. Their motion, although it consists of prescribed gestures and movements, is less fixed than that of the balls. It is timed not to the music (if there is any), but to the burning of the fuet, which takes about three minutes, depending on humidity. The verb used for the motion is saltar, which means “to jump” or “to leap” in modern Catalan, but in the Patum retains something of its old Latin sense of disorderly, unholy dancing.7
TABAL
The Tabal is a big red bass drum with the shield of Berga emblazoned on its sides, carried by a man in seventeenth-century dress: red velvet slitsleeved coat over a yellow blouse and red velvet knee breeches, white lace cuffs and collar, yellow sash, white stockings, buckled black shoes, and a broad-brimmed red velvet hat with a white plume. He plays a slow even beat: “PA-TUM,” which speeds up slightly to “pa-TUM TUM TUM TUM TUM” before a pause. The Tabal’s role is twofold: to announce and open the Patum and to accompany certain other comparses. Its sound is penetrating: the verb atabalar means “to bewilder someone,” so they have el cap com un bòmbol, a head like a drum—the older phrase being un cap com un tabal (Alcover and Moll 1927–62, entry “tabal”).
On the Sunday after Ascension Day, the Tabaler comes out of City Hall and processes through Berga to announce the city council’s decision to have Patum. On the Wednesday before Corpus Christi, he leads the giants along the same route: this is the opening of the Patum. On Wednesday and Saturday night he leads the passacarrers—or, to speak accurately, opens it up. He foregoes his fancy dress and yields the Tabal to a series of deputies as it passes through the streets, because this is a very long night.
During the Patum in the plaça he is located in a small balcony of his own, and accompanies the coses de foc: the Maces, the Guites, and the Plens. There is only one tabaler at a time, and for the past two hundred years individual families have controlled the role for a few generations each. The present Tabaler is the son and grandson of the last two, and will leave it to his younger brother.
Figure 2. The tabal at the head of the Corpus Christi procession on the Carrer Major, ca. 1960, followed by turcs i cavallets, maces, and Guita Grossa. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
TURCS I CAVALLETS
Literally, Turks and little horses. This is a simple variant of the Moors-and-Christians dances common in southern Europe; on the Catalan coast in the early modern period the Turks were the relevant threat and the entremes seems to have travelled inland.8 The turcs wear no masks but show their identity by turbaned helmets and wooden scimitars. They wear flowered jackets and loose, full, red knee breeches, with white stockings and espardenyes de set vetes, the rope-soled cloth shoes laced to the knee traditionally worn by Catalan mountain people.
Figure 3. The Maces in the Plaça Sant Pere in the first decade of the twentieth century. “Els pagesos a la barana”: the countrypeople seek safety and a good view behind the barana. Photo from Arxiu Luigi, Berga.
The cavallets are the variety of hobbyhorse known in French as chevaux-jupons (horse-skirts). The brown horse, girded for battle in approximately late-medieval fashion with a red and yellow fringe, is made out of papier-mâché reinforced with plaster and suspended from the carrier’s shoulders at waist level. Tiny legs make the carrier appear to be riding in the saddle. The rider wears a helmet and is dressed like the turc with inverse colors. He carries a straight sword in his right hand and a flat wooden block strapped to his left palm.
The Turcs i Cavallets appear only in the Patum in the plaça and are its first number. Their dance begins with a bright brassy march: they gallop out of City Hall, turn around, line up in two rows, and bow to the city council in the balcony. Then the music turns to a slower 2/4 time. The Turcs form an inner circle, the Cavallets an outer circle, and they skip clockwise, the last cavallet spinning on his axis. When the music reaches its cadence, each turc strikes the wooden block in the hand of the nearest cavallet with his scimitar. The melody and the blow are repeated three times. On the last repetition, the Cavallets strike the Turcs instead, and the latter kneel in a sign of submission.9
The Turcs i Cavallets are a relatively open comparsa, and a few young women dance as turcs.
MACES
The “maces” are masked and horned devils in heavy red or green felt suits. Each carries a maça, a red-and-green pole topped with a metal drum full of pebbles that rattle when it is bounced. A painted devil’s face decorates the drum, and a fuet is affixed to the top. In addition to its connotations as a weapon, the maça is a convenient way of carrying pyrotechnia, and the bouncing motion helps to keep the fuet alight in the often-rainy season of Corpus: the salts have thus a technical as well as a symbolic raison d’etre.
The Maces perform with music and a semblance of choreography at the noon Patum in the plaça: this music was not added until the 1950s, in yet another municipal moment of revitalizing and domesticating the Patum. During the night Patum, the passacarrcrs, and the Quatre Fuets (see below), they salt to the accompaniment of the Tabal alone. The four of them (eight at noon) stand in a long rectangle, two at each end. Their fuets are lit, and they begin to skip toward the opposite end of the rectangle, bouncing the maça up and down so that the sparks falling in the air describe thick arabesques, a favorite subject of Berguedan photographers. They move back and forth along the rectangle until a fuet explodes: then the devil falls to the ground.
During the Patum in the plaça, there are two angels, Saint Michael and a smaller helper, who skip across the middle of the rectangle after each passing of the devils. When a devil falls, Saint Michael steps over him and, with his lance, gives him the coup de grâce, the angel helping with his short sword. The number is thus understood as a battle.
The angels are called a separate comparsa, since it would be unseemly to group them with the devils, but because there are only two of them and their role is very minor, they don’t really count. They are generally played by pubescent boys or by women. They dress like the angels of the old Holy Week processions, winged medieval knights. Both wear blond curly wigs, Saint Michael with a silver helmet and the angel with a wreath of flowers. They have red velvet capes over white tunics embroidered with gold and the usual white stockings and espardenyes.
The Maces are theoretically the same comparsa as the Plens, and there is significant overlap between those who salt the maces and those who dress the Plens. The Maces are somewhat fluid, dividing salts between themselves, and there are women among them. In the evening passacarrers and also during the Quatre Fuets, the official Maces begin the salt and then let other people take a turn, exchanging the maça after each crossing of the rectangle over and back.
GUITES
The guita or “kicker,” from an adjective applied to mules, is one of the mulasses or mule effigies common in Catalonia: these, in turn, are one local subgroup of the festival effigies we may call tarasques from the better-known Provençal example. Widespread in Languedoc and formerly in Castile, these creatures share several features: an appearance indeterminate between dragon and domestic animal; aggressive behavior (especially in relation to women) often enhanced by fireworks and snapping jaws; and legendary association with the origins of the city, stressing either agricultural fertility or defense against invasion (Dumont 1951; Very 1962, 51–76; Fabre and Camberogue 1977; Le Goff 1980; Gilmore 2002).
Figure 4. The two Guites on either side of the barana during the calmer daytime Patum. The musicians’ balcony against the church and the Bar La Barana can be seen in the background. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
Berguedans often speak of the Guita in the singular, although since 1890 there have been two, because the second is in a sense a redoubling: both number and gender are indeterminate. Its body is a metal frame with wooden slats in the form of a half-barrel, with a light wooden rim which rides on the shoulders of the carriers. A long wooden neck, distinct to Berga and more proper to a giraffe than a mule, is held in a leather holster around the waist of a man under the front of the half-barrel; behind him, another man inside supports a transverse bar. Body and neck are covered with green canvas, with the shield of Berga emblazoned on each side. The head is a grinning green papier-mâché mule’s head of sorts, with ears and a short horsehair mane. Inside its jaws is a metal support for three fuets, and a bell hangs just below the head.
The small guita needs at least eight carriers, the large one more. The cap de colla or another responsible person goes in front to lead the animal and direct the man inside, who controls the mobile neck. The weight is mostly supported by the outside carriers, who take the rim on their shoulders.
The guites come out for the Wednesday and Saturday passacarrers and for the Patums in the plaça, and no one has ever tried to set music to them. They chase the crowd with the fuets in their mouths (one fuet for the noon Patum and the passacarrers, three for the night Patum), and move through the available space as the spirit of the moment moves them. Each guita, however, has its characteristic gestures.
The Guita Grossa (Big Guita) runs through the plaça, then lowers its neck and spins so that the surrounding crowd has to fall to the ground to avoid getting hit. It lifts its head to the first-floor balconies and rattles its fuets against the metal rails, forcing the spectators back. Its most typical play is against the barana, the broad stone barrier rising along the north side of the plaça. The guitaire in front jumps up on the barana, which has crowds of people leaning against it; he takes the neck of the Guita and runs it up and down the length of the barana. The crowd ducks down, away from the fuets: at the bottom, some brave soul always clings to the lamppost long enough to get burned before jumping down. Some people bring old umbrellas—often full of holes from a previous Patum—to engage the Guita in combat. The Guita draws back as it is about to burst, and after the explosion takes a few humping steps forward, swinging its head back and forth and ringing its bell.
The Guita Xica (Little Guita) is also called the Guita Boja (Mad Guita) because of its greater speed and flexibility. Like the Grossa, the Xica runs and spins in the plaça; the crowd chases it and has to react quickly. The Xica’s neck is too short for much play with balconies and barana. Rather, it specializes in invading inappropriate spaces: it will go behind the barana, where the crowd is huddling for protection, or up in the musicians’ balcony or inside a bar or up the stairs of City Hall. There is greater scope for improvisation during the passacarrers, so the Xica often has more protagonism there than in the plaça.
The mule is a richly evocative animal in the Catalan mountains. Stronger, hardier, and more surefooted than a horse, it was of great practical importance in forestry, farming, hauling, and even mining. At the same time, its obstinacy and temper were proverbial. It was associated with disruptive, nonreproductive female sexuality in a host of proverbs: “Do not trust the back of a mule or the front of a woman” (Amades 1950–69, 2, 1200); its uneasy presence in the farmyard was like that of the young wife in the household. Several blasons populaires advise the prudent man not to get a wife or a mule from certain villages: they were foreign elements that had to be introduced with great case. In early-modern elite culture in Catalonia, it was the most common simile for manual laborers, who required a strong hand to be kept obedient (Amelang 1986, 150–51). Its particular untrustworthiness was that of workers and women, whose apparent domestication could not be counted on: “a meek mule kills its master” (Gomis 1910, 162). Catalan landowners could not maintain their estates without workers, wives, or mules, but each was felt to threaten the precariously enclosed order and to require repression accordingly. The name change of Berga’s Guita—unique among Catalan mules—from mulassa to mulaguita and finally, by the early twentieth century, simply guita—highlights the mule’s disruptive qualities.
The guitaires are divided into two comparses of about twenty young men each, but dress the same, in black smocks with red felt fringe, and battered shapeless hats to protect themselves from the sparks. These smocks or bates are workmen’s clothing, and distinguish the guitaires from all other comparsa members.
ÀLIGA
The Àliga (eagle) is a papier-mâché and plaster effigy on a wooden armature with a grille in its breast for its carrier, concealed to the legs, to see through. It is painted a dark greenish brown and is meticulously sculpted, with an elegant curve to its head and neck, scalelike “feathers,” and a long, straight tail. It wears a crown—at present that of the Counts of Barcelona rather than the Kings of Spain—and carries carnations or boxwood tied with Catalan-flag ribbon in its beak; in the old days it carried a live dove. The three aligots—the carrier and the two men who dance on either side of him—wear blouses and loose flowered knee-breeches with kerchiefs of the same material, and the standard espardenyes. Tight around each waist is the faixa, a broad wool sash once worn by peasants, which supports the back under the great weight of the eagle.
The Àliga dances only for the Patum in the plaça. Its dance begins with the Àliga in the middle and the two aligots on either side mimicking its steps. It bows to the parish church and to City Hall, and the music begins in a slow 2/4. The dancers do a punteig (pointing, or lacing), each marking a square around himself on the stones of the plaça with the tips of his toes. When the music changes to a faster 6/8, the eagle starts to sway and then skip from side to side, each time increasing the breadth of the movement. The two aligots are now assisting the eagle from without, helping the carrier to keep his balance. With another accelerando in the music, the eagle breaks out of position and skips in a larger circle, the crowd following the tail, and the aligots helping it to turn. At the end of the dance the Àliga spins quickly on itself, aligots and crowd dropping to the ground to avoid a blow from the hard tail, which is reputed to have killed a soldier once. The aligots help the dizzy dancer to stop, and the eagle bows once more to the church and the Ajuntament before retiring.
The Àliga is the most jealously guarded comparsa: to dance the eagle requires great strength and balance, and there has never been any question of letting a woman do it. There are only three aligots at a given time, who take turns at dancing the eagle itself.
Unique to the Països Catalans, the àliga is historically an entremes with special privileges, dancing alone inside the church or in front of the Sacrament in the Corpus Christi procession. Though its original processional role may have been as the emblem of Saint John, its heraldic associations soon added another resonance, and its primary significance in Catalan processions has been as a civic symbol, the predominant interpretation in Berga. In any case, if not a two-headed eagle, it is on excellent terms with both Church and State. It was a prestige entremes, expensive to make and maintain, belonging only to important populations, and the balance of the evidence suggests that it was not a stable part of the Patum until the late eighteenth century, when the city’s increasing importance as a textile center both enhanced its prosperity and encouraged its ambitions.
Figure 5. The Àliga bowing. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
Like mules, eagles have proverbial status in the Catalan Pyrenees, embodying not humility but the opposite extreme. The local varieties of eagle are the “royal” and the “imperial,” and the eagle is familiar as the king of birds (as in the internationally known “Cant dels Ocells,” the Carol of the Birds). The eagle is conscious of its station and dignity: “the eagle does not chase flies” (Gomis 1910). Like royalty and like the Host before which it walked in the procession, the eagle is associated with light and sun and the gaze. “To see more than an eagle” is to have superlative sight; the eagle is said to be the only animal able to look directly into the sun (Gomis 1910). Flying higher than any other bird, the eagle has the omniscient gaze of power, seeing the world as God sees it, and in turn is visible to the admiring gaze of the earthbound, like the elite in the festival balcony. Not that those below will always admire: to take down a pretentious person is “to throw the eagle to the ground” (Gomis 1910). But eagles must be treated with care, as their anger is redoubtable: to abandon oneself to rage is “to give oneself up to the eagles”—sometimes “to give oneself up to the devils.” The Berguedan eagle shares the gesture of the threatening spin with its antithesis, the Guita, and the tender live dove it once carried in its curved beak is a nice emblem of the ambiguities of power.
NANS VELLS
The Old Dwarfs belong to the common Iberian genre known as nans or capgrossos (bigheads) in Catalonia and cabezudos (bigheads) in Spain. A nan is a papier-mâché and plaster head worn over the head of the dancer, who sees through the open mouth. Very well-made, the dwarfs are caricatures rather than idealized figures. The four Nans Veils are all male, with long noses, melancholy eyes, black tricorn hats, and yellow wigs with eighteenth- century pigtails. The dancers wear red tunics trimmed with gold, reminiscent of the gramalla worn by municipal councillors in Catalonia before 1714. They first appear in municipal records in 1855 (Farràs i Farràs 1979, 215), probably in imitation of other mountain cities such as Olot or Vic. They were easily damaged and repaired as the city could afford it, and were not considered essential to the Patum until the early twentieth century (Armengou [1968, 1971]1994, 108).
The dance of the Nans Veils imitates that of the giants and shares their tunes: it is a simple waltz with some changing of partners and exchange of positions, and the dancers play castanets in the first section. The second section is a faster 4/4 time with the same movements. The inner circle of the crowd helps to guide the dancers, who can see very little and, imbalanced by the heavy heads, are prone to vertigo. At the end, each nan spins in place.
GEGANTS
There are two pairs of giants, tall effigies on wooden armatures with a carrier hidden in the skirts.10 Head and hands are beautifully sculpted out of fortified papier-mâché, and they wear natural wigs which must be coiffed every year by hairdressers. The clothes are rich and expensive, in varying tones of red and green with gold trim; the giantesses wear jewelry. In late nineteenth-century Barcelona, the costume of the giantess announced the summer fashions; Berga was too poor to dress its giantesses anew every year, but their coiffures served the same purpose.
The Gegants Vells (Old Giants) are tan in complexion, and the male is dressed as a Moor, with a turbaned helmet and a scimitar in his belt. He wears a moustache, and brown hair curled below his ears, and a red jacket with a paler tunic beneath. He carries a mace in his right hand, resting on his shoulder. The geganta, slightly fairer, is dressed as a queen with a tiara and a green veil over her brown hair; she carries a bouquet in her lifted right hand. The Moorish dress does not make the giant alien in popular eyes: in the first known drawing of the Patum, from 1838 in the middle of the first Carlist War, he is shown wearing the emblematic beret of Carlist Berga.
The Gegants Nous (New Giants), from 1891, are usually known as the Gegants Negres or Black Giants because of their complexions. They are, however, dressed as Christians, and their blackness dates from the turn of the century, when the black Madonna of Montserrat was being promoted as the national patron: it is associated with the chthonic rather than the foreign. They are among the tallest giants in Catalonia and require exceptional strength to dance. The giantess is very handsome; like her sister, she wears a tiara, back veil, and earrings. Her ample skirts are green with yellow trim, and her left hand holds a bouquet. The Black Giant, with his black beard, silver helmet, huge mace, and imposing figure, is the cynosure of all eyes when his crimson velvet cloak spins in the plaça; he is the object of numerous erotic fantasies on the part of both sexes, and it is the cap de colla and his intimates who have the privilege of dancing him.
Figure 6. The Gegants begin their spin. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
The giants process, waltz, and spin. In the Wednesday noon passada through the streets and the Wednesday and Saturday night passacarrers (in which only the two Old Giants participate), the giants are walked by the geganters, who take turns; according to the energy of the carriers and the visibility of the place, they dance instead of processing; at the stops in the route they do a full dance. In the Patum of the plaça they dance to the same waltz tunes used for the nans vells. Their movements are limited by their size, and in the night Patums the crossovers between pairs are eliminated. The faster section and especially the final spin are tests of prowess among the geganters and the high point of the middle section of the Patum for the public. In the tirabols at the end of the Patum the two Gegants Vells are spun in a corner, with the geganters taking turns and defying each other to resist vertigo the longest.
Most major cities in Catalonia kept their giants as the last remnant of the early modern entremesos, so festival giants are familiar sights and widely invoked in popular idiom to comment on both social inequality and state administration. “If everyone were equal, who would carry the giants?” asks one proverb, and a 1929 protest song from the textile factories near Berga repeats the theme:
Els burgesos ens volien fer la por
però els obrers del Llobregat no en tenim, no
Que no es pensin que encara és com abans
que pertot allà on passaven ens fèien bailar els gegants.
The bourgeois wanted to frighten us
but the workers of the Llobregat aren’t afraid, no
They’d better not think that it’s still like before
when everywhere they passed they made us dance the giants.
(Ramon Vilardaga, personal communication)
In fact, up through the 1950s the heavy entremesos of the Patum were danced by lower-class men given both a cash payment and a new pair of espardenyes by the Ajuntament.
The Ajuntamen’s expenditures also feature in giant idiom. When city officials are observed to be conspicuously consuming resources it’s not clear they possess, then the giantess pays: paga la geganta. Those people fortunate enough to have bureaucratic sinecures or merely secure, well-paid government positions, such as a schoolteacher or a firefighter, cobren de la geganta (are paid by the giantess) or, more pointedly, mamen de la geganta, suckle her.
The geganters are a large comparsa of perhaps twenty men: unlike the more fluid turcs i cavallets or nans, in which only those doing the immediate salt are costumed, all the geganters are marked by their red shirts, white trousers; and a faixa for support. Those not dancing the giants are supporting and guiding them from outside. Except within the single dances of the Patum in the plaça, the geganters have to take frequent turns because the effigies are so heavy.
NANS NOUS
Introduced in 1890, when the Patum was being dressed up for summer visitors, the New Dwarfs represent two couples, an old one and a young one. The old man scowls slightly and wears a brimless black hat with gold braid. Because of the ambiguous hat, he is sometimes called “the priest;” he is also known as “the notary” or “the ugly one.” The old woman wears a cloth bonnet; the young one has a sculpted pink hat with an upturned brim. The young male is the most difficult to dance because of his heavy broadbrimmed light blue hat, for which he is known as el barret blau. Their general effect was best characterized by Xavier Fàbregas: “sundayed up … like the commercial petty bourgeosie who want to show off to their neighbors, and distinguish themselves in every possible detail from the country people” (1976, 140).
These dwarfs have the most complex dance steps of the Patum, involving hand clappings, skips in place, and spins between couples. The two comparses of nans are fairly open to female participation. The caps de colla of both Old and New Dwarfs are in their thirties, and the dancers tend to be in their teens or twenties because it is quickness and agility rather than strength that are required. They are often recruited directly from the Children’s Patum.
Figure 7. The crowds of the 1980s dance with the Nans Nous. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
In Catalonia as elsewhere in Spain, dwarfs always appear in relation to giants, and each takes meaning from the other: often as parents and children, or as graceful upper class and clumsy lower class (Amades 1934, no; Brandes 1980, 27–32). Entering the festival in the nineteenth century, the dwarfs are always seen by Catalan scholars as an indicator of democratic tendencies: “the common people incorporating themselves into the traditional mythology” (Armengou [1968, 1971]1994, 109). But in truth the configuration is more complex, and especially in the Patum: the common people were already there, in devils and guita. Unlike these, the dwarfs are controlled; they do not salt upwards, but dance in place; they emulate the giants in dress and motion, flattering them by the very clumsiness of the imitation. The dwarfs are the orderly lower class that trusts to the hegemonic promise. They do not make their own meanings or direct their own action.
PLENS
The “full ones” or full devils wear the same heavy felt costume as the Maces, red with green trim or vice versa, and the same masks with horns. Three fuets are affixed to each horn, and two more are tied to the tail; the head is protected with a leather hood, and a wreath of Clematis vidalba, a green vine that grows along the streams above town, prevents sparks from falling down the neck of the costume; more vidalba at head and tail reduces the impact of the fuets. About seventy come out in a given salt.11
Each ple dances with an acompanyant, an uncostumed friend whose job it is to light the ple and lead him or her safely through the plaça. The salt de plens is the climax of the Patum in the plaça, done only at night. For it, the lights are turned off and the plens come out slowly and distribute themselves in the crowd. When an acompanyant stationed at the lamppost lights his bengala, a thick sparkler, all the plens are lighted up and the music, fast and repetitious, begins, the Tabal also playing to a rhythm of its own. The plens and the entire crowd salt counterclockwise around the plaça, hopping from foot to foot. The crowd is a rolling black mass with thick flames dancing above it. The fuets begin to burst, a few scattered, and then all at once: a long complex ferocious explosion like multiple orgasm (as the Berguedans explain in their cups—a salt de plens has a double meaning in Berga). The smoke pushes up from the plaça as from a chimney, and the spectators on the balcony are blackened with it. The music repeats itself until the last fuets have exploded and the tension subsides.
Figure 8. The Plens wait for their masks below city hall. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
The Plens are nominally the same comparsa as the Maces, and in the early Bulla this connection was more obvious: “the devils go full” in their second sortie. Although today they are considered the most primitive element of the festival, widely supposed to be pre-Christian and tied to vegetative spirits, it is not clear that the present profusion of vines and green is more than a century old, and the “infernal orgy” of fire is an effect of the great increase in the number of plens since 1960, when there were still only sixteen of them. Nonetheless, devils are chthonic figures in the Catalan mountains, associated with caves and water—as are the black Madonnas and the mules—and, like the Moors, credited with responsibility for otherwise inexplicable constructions in the landscape.
TIRABOL
The tirabol is not a comparsa, but the final dance or salt—it is both—of each night of the Patum. The meaning of the name is uncertain: sometimes in older texts it appears as tirabou (pull the ox) and seems to have been a kind of crack-the-whip dance when the numbers were smaller. Today the usage is most often plural, as the tirabols have burgeoned in number. They are in effect a continuation of the Plens, who lift their masks and keep dancing, with the entire crowd salt-ing counterclockwise in the plaça, in small arm-in-arm groups, to any of three lively melodies used: one in 6/8, a waltz-jota, and an inauthentic but much-loved pas-doble.12 The Gegants Veils spin in place in the corner of the plaça by Cal Quimserra, the geganters competing with each other against vertigo and exhaustion. The two guites dance through the plaça with a long loping gait, and friends are given rides on the back. The Tabal accompanies the guites: if the fuets have not yet exploded at the end of the dance, the quites and the Tabal keep going. Four or five tirabols are played after the noonday Patum and twenty or more at the end of the night Patum. For the passacarrers there are tirabols in the Plaça Sant Joan—usually three—and another dozen or more in the Plaça Sant Pere at the end.
OTHER PARTICIPANTS
Apart from the comparses, the Patum has its dignitaries and functionaries. Above all, it requires a public, large and actively participating, for its success. This has not been a problem for the past thirty years: rather, the overcrowding of the plaça has interfered with the comparses, who do not have enough room to dance comfortably. The public, insofar as its years and energies permit, salts along with the comparses or behind them in the passacarrers, hopping from foot to foot to permit the maximum of motion in the minimum of space. Other personnel essential to the event include:
Musicians
The Patum music is played by two town bands, the Banda de l’Escola Municipal de Música and the Cobla Pirineu, who alternate days in the Patum. The students of the Escola Municipal play for the children’s Patum. The musicians are placed on a scaffolding next to the church steps and wear no special costume. As well as playing for the Patum in the plaça, they accompany the giants on the Wednesday passada and the Wednesday and Saturday night passacarrers.
Autoritats
The “authorities” include the Ajuntament or city council, the commandant of the local army post, the captain of the local Guardia Civil, the heads of local institutions such as the hospital and the Red Cross, and by extension the dignitaries and celebrities invited by the Ajuntament for the occasion. They sit in the balcony of City Hall during the Patum in the plaça, and walk in the passacarrers in front of the musicians. They also attend the daily masses and attend and give receptions. Their Patum is one of good clothes and good food and drink inside City Hall’s ceremonial rooms; guests move back and forth between the balcony and the inside, and in the years of democracy, some celebrated Barcelonans have left Berga with celebrated hangovers.
Administradors
The “administrators” were formerly wealthy residents of Berga’s four quarters, entrusted with collecting money and putting on the neighborhood festivals of the Octave of Corpus Christi.13 Since the suppression of the Octave in the twentieth century, and since the emptying of the four quarters in favor of more modern housing on the periphery of the old town, the administrators have become a purely ceremonial role, representing the community among the authorities. They are now four couples married within the previous year, and being administrators is in theory part of their rite of passage to full community membership. (In fact many couples deeply integrated in public life forego the opportunity because of the tedium it entails.) They sit with the authorities in the balcony and at mass, the men in black suits and the women in black dresses with comb and mantilla, an Andalusian borrowing from the end of the last century. Each couple is attended by little girls in their first communion regalia, one carrying a palma, a stalk of artificial flowers and ribbons representing one of the four old quarters.
The Syntax of Events
Corpus Christi is a movable feast sixty days after Easter, falling always on Thursday. May 21 is the earliest possible date, June 24 the latest.
PRELIMINARIES
At 11 A.M. on the Sunday after Ascension Day, three weeks before Corpus, the Ajuntament holds an extraordinary plenary session with only one question on the agenda: Will there be Patum? There is a unanimous “yes,” except in time of war or famine; not since 1938 has a Patum been cancelled. The band stands below in the plaça, and just before twelve o’clock, plays the Ball de l’Aliga. On the stroke of twelve, the tabaler, who has been waiting in the portal of City Hall, steps out and hits the first Pa-tum! of the season. The tabaler steps out and, playing all the while, goes across the plaça, up through the Casc Antic, down through the lower part of the city to the Passeig de la Pau, and out along the Carrer del Roser to the old city limits. There he stops for a drink while the children who have been following take possession of the Tabal. When he comes out, he turns back to the old city and down the Carrer Major. Back in the Plaça Sant Pere, he plays his final pa-tums.
Sunday before Corpus is the Quatre Fuets (Four Firecrackers), a ceremonial testing to see if they explode loud enough. They say this was necessary in the days when the fuets were of local artisanal manufacture; now it’s just because people are eager. Four maces are dressed and, led by the Tabaler, march out of City Hall down to the Vall. There the crowd delineates a rectangle; the fuets are lit, and the maces begin to salt. People stand in line to take a turn: the four original maces yield their places. After the fuets burst—there is always a competition to make one last longest—the crowd cheers. Tabaler and maces go back up to City Hall, crossing paths with the Tabaler, eight maces, and two angels of the Children’s Patum, who repeat the ceremony with their own smaller fuets.
THE PATUM PROPER
PASSADA DELS GEGANTS
The “passing of the giants” is the beginning of the five days that constitute the festes de Corpus. Again at noon, the tabal comes out of City Hall, this time followed by the four giants and the band. The giants waltz in the plaça, then, following the same route as the tabal, process through the streets of Berga, dancing most of the time. The band plays the “Marxa del Patumaire,” an amalgam of the music of Turcs i Cavallets and Plens, alternating it with the popular pas-doble of the tirabols. The public follow, the young salt-ing throughout.
P ASSACARRERS
The “passing the streets” is a procession of the Tabaler, Maces, Guites, and Old Giants to do honorific salts for the authorities on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The route is an elaborated version of the one used in the passades and takes at least six hours to cover. At each plaça, Maces, Guites, and Gegants perform, in that order. On Wednesday night, salts are done before the dwellings of municipal councillors and the mayor and in front of the Red Cross, the courthouse, the convents, the army post, and the Guardia Civil.14 On Saturday night, the salts are performed for the administradors.
There are numerous pauses in the passacarrers: you can abandon it to have dinner and find it again two streets further down. Although the official route is from authority to authority, the subterranean geography is from bar to bar, and the Guita Xica in particular tends to disappear during these stops. This is its night to show off: bursting into bars, riding on the back of a dump truck, sneaking into a house on an upper street and out the back door on a lower one, reemerging at the head of the procession.
The climax of the passacarrers is its return through the old city. In the Plaça Sant Joan, after the salts, the band plays the first tirabols of the night and, on Wednesday, of the season. Then, tight as forcemeat in a sausage, comparses and crowd push themselves up the narrow Carrer Major. The band plays “Ella s’ho pensa,” a long-lined, chromatic march never played at any other time. The melody is too broad for the street and makes the crowd strain against its walls: when at last they burst out in the Plaça Sant Pere, they fling themselves straight into the release of more tirabols.
PATUM DE LLUÏMENT
The Patum of “Display” or “Brilliance” is the short noon Patum, to which people come in their Sunday clothes. Toward the end of the Mass, the comparses of the Patum line up along the church steps and below, forming a corridor from the church to City Hall. As the band plays the hymn of the city (a lugubrious nineteenth-century march), the Ajuntament, other authorities, Administradors, and little girls file out of the church and follow this corridor; they go up to the balcony to preside over the Patum. The comparses go back to their places—the Guites on the edges of the plaça, the Tabaler in his balcony, and the others under City Hall. Then there is a full tanda—the official word—or salt—the popular one—of Patum; that is, one performance of each dance in sequence, minus the Plens. A few tirabols round off the event.
PATUM COMPLETA
The complete Patum is done at night. It is much longer, more crowded, and less polished than the Patum de Lluïment. There are four tandes instead of one, and the Plens are done after the second and fourth. At the end, the tirabols go on for another hour or more. Even the Ajuntament is dressed more comfortably; the Tabaler has abandoned his hot heavy velvet; the giants do a simpler choreography; and the Maces, now only four instead of the noontime eight, go without music.
MINOR ACTS
A variety of religious, municipal, and commercial events surround the Patum. At ten o’clock each morning from Thursday to Sunday, a rocket is shot off to announce the beginning of the festival acts. The band escorts the Administradors to the parish church for daily Mass. On Thursday, Corpus Christi Day, it is a High Mass sung by the Orfeó Berguedà, with Ajuntament and authorities in attendance, and the two angels, Saint Michael and his deputy, at the front of the nave. The rector—who is not from Berga—takes advantage of the unusual crowd to give a common post-Vatican II festival sermon: we must celebrate and defend our local traditions, which are the marks of our faith, but always remember that the celebration is occasioned by a liturgical festival, which itself serves only to call to mind things we should bear always in our hearts; it is to be wished that the devotion shown during the festival were part of our daily routine; and so forth.
The Ajuntament holds several ceremonies to integrate itself in the festival, including cocktail receptions for the Administradors on Friday and for Berguedans living outside the city on Saturday—this latter providing a valued occasion to address a population of long-standing importance to the local economy. On Saturday there is a ceremony to award títols de patumaire, certificates of ten and twenty-five years’ participation in the Patum, as well as the prizes for the annual poster and children’s drawing competitions.
Until the 1960s, the Patum was augmented, like any provincial festa major, by a variety of entertainments not otherwise available locally, intended to increase the number of visitors and intensify the appeal of the festival. Today the Patum is considered sufficient attraction; however, a few extra acts survive to fill the empty hours and serve the overflow crowds. In addition to the carnival attractions stationed at the end of the Vall, a Barcelona company offers a recent success in the Municipal Theater on Friday night. In the late 1980s, with the rise of the new Catalan rock music and increasing festival hooliganism in the region, a concert in the sports pavilion was instituted to get the young off the streets in the traditionally explosive hours of early Sunday morning. Earlier on Saturday evening there is a fireworks display to create closure for families with young children on the wildest night of the festival. On Sunday afternoon there is a competition of sardanes, with visiting sardana societies.
The sardana has special status as the national dance and a symbol of fraternity, so sardanes punctuate the entire festival. One or two cobles (traditional wind bands) from outside the city are hired to play in the Vall after each act of Patum. Many people still have the strength to dance. The final sardana at night is always “Corpus a Berga,” composed by a local priest and incorporating melodies from the Patum.
The Comparses as Political Models
When I was still new, I asked several people, “Who organizes the Patum?”
Eh? They looked at me as if I were mad.
Well, who makes sure that everybody’s in their proper place, who keeps things going, who runs it?
A sigh of ostentatious patience. Nobody organizes it, we’ve all been doing it since we were children, it organizes itself. You’ll see.
But some explained, Well, you know, each comparsa has its own head, and he decides who’s in and who’s out. The giants have a tendency to boss the other groups around—they’re strong, big men. They make order in the plaça, they make the circle for the other groups to dance in. Massana is the head of the giants, he’s tot un personatge. (The phrase doesn’t translate, as it would seem to, into “a real character”: rather, a “personage” is someone of more distinction than other people.)
“Massana is the mayor of the Patum,” some said. But els de la guita fight with the geganters, they don’t like being pushed around by people with no right to give them orders. Mixo put the whole Patum on strike one year. Mixo said “no Patum” and there was no Patum until he got what he wanted.
Don’t you know Sobrevias? said a girl to me incredulously before the whole thing started. But Sobrevias gives the orders. If he says you’re out of the Patum, you’re out. The head of the Plens!
When questions of power come up in the Patum, three groups and three men are regularly cited: Massana, Mixo, and Sobrevias, the caps de colla of the Giants, the Guita Grossa, and the Plens respectively. These are the three comparses that matter, the plats forts (strong dishes) of the Patum. Most Berguedans perceive the three groups as embodying competing models of political authority in contemporary Berga.
Leonil.la Boixader, the librarian, was reminiscing one day about Estanislau, the man who danced the Àliga when she was a child. He was a friend of her father’s, a big man, with snowy white hair and an enormous moustache. “He inspired me with so much respect,” she said. “I felt such respect for him that when he came out of the eagle I used to look at him as if he were—God!”
The authority of the men who carry the comparses stems in the first instance from their imposing physique. A big man is a big man, for starters.15 It is clearest in the case of Massana, the cap de colla of the geganters. Massana is himself a giant: not abnormally tall, but big and solid and handsome. His expression is mild; he is slow to speak and slow to smile, so that the gesture is doubly effective. His whole demeanor bespeaks measure and seny. He is a family man and a prosperous craftsman, and his background is romantic: his uncle was a hero of the anti-Francoist maquis, of whom stories are told throughout north-central Catalonia. One has a sense of strength held back: like Estanislau, he inspires respecte.
Mixo, the cap de colla of the Guita Grossa, is another matter. He is a big man in a different way: broad and squat, suggesting brute strength rather than Massana’s equilibri (the quality needed above all to dance the giants). “Mixo is molt de pagès” they told me, “very peasant. Don’t try to interview him—he’ll just grunt at you.” He worked in the mines and is a pagès de secà, a dry farmer: one who pulls food up from the earth by main force, without benefit of irrigation or modern machinery. He lives on the road up to Queralt and is seldom seen in Berga. Once a year he descends, like the spirit of the mountains, and becomes a protagonist. For the Patum he drinks—the rest of the year he consumes camomile tea during his infrequent appearances in town—and on Sunday night for the last tirabols he sometimes rides on the back of the guita, waving his arms in time to the music, his fly conspicuously undone. One year he stood up—and in due course fell off, banging his head hard against the stones of the plaça, to no apparent ill effect. “If ever I’ve seen the image of perfect happiness,” said the town archivist, “it was Mixo on the back of the Guita.” To Mossèn Bailarín, the priest of Queralt, Mixo in the tirabols sums up the Patum as Harvey Cox’s “feast of fools” (Bailarín 1990; Cox 1969).
Even more than Massana or Mixo, Sobrevias has the charisma of scarcity. Massana gains it by breaking out of his everyday restraint during Corpus, Mixo by his sudden prominence, but Sobrevias is less embodied: his is the hand below City Hall pulling invisible strings. His outward demeanor gives nothing away. He is a small, old man with thick glasses, not very communicative even at the long table of the Bar La Barana with his friends. He spends the entire Patum below the Ajuntament with the dressers. Because of this he is not as well known and not as individuated a figure as the other two: the twenty dressers are more frequently spoken of as aquells, those guys.
The geganters are the Patum’s visible embodiment of traditional authority, edging, like Berga itself, into electoral democracy. As in all the comparses, but better known to the public, the geganters have an internal hierarchy. The Black Giant is danced at the most important points of the festival by the current cap de colla, and the lesser giants and lesser moments are apportioned in descending order. But there is a sort of shadow cabinet, a group of long-standing geganters with ties to the other dominant party. This second group controls the Geganta Negra. It is also understood that the geganters are in closer communication with the Ajuntament than the other comparses during the Patum itself—the identity of the geganter liaison depending on the party in power—and given de facto responsibility for maintaining order.
Estanis of the Guita Xica drew the distinction of his comparsa from the giants thus. “We of the Guita are not the machos, but the muchos.”16 The guitaires play the opposition to the geganters. one year after a dispute when the geganters tried to end the tirabols too early, Mixo declared, “This year there’ll be a change of Ajuntaments!” (Rafart 1989a). But more specifically, the guites are associated with popular resistance, each guita with a different style. The comparsa of the Guita Grossa is largely constituted of young working-class men marginal to the mainstream associative life of Berga, with several from the isolated immigrant quarter of Santa Eulàlia. Like Mixo, they are touched with otherness. This, however, is on the surface: there are family connections between guitaires and the men of the Àliga, and the structure of authority in the comparsa is as present as in the geganters. The Grossa is not antistructural, but asserts traditional working-class order. One year a mayor’s wife, known for her imposing physique and her social arrogance, was in the foyer of the Ajuntament during an altercation. When she expressed her distaste, Mixo said to her, “Woman, go home and wash dishes!” The Guita Grossa’s machismo is less domesticated than that of the geganters, who after all dance their giants in couples; it bears some of the resentment of the miners and the long-enforced submissions of working-class men under the Franco regime.
The Guita Xica is more consciously inversive, wittier, more middle class, and more explicitly political. Its carriers are better known as personalities, more visible on the Carrer Major. Succession in the Guita Xica is collective: an adolescent peer group takes it on, keeps it up until a majority are married and having children, then retires in a body, with one or two hanging on to instruct the next generation. The rest move up to the Plens or even the Giants. They are political Catalanists, some of a militant character, especially during the Transition. Where the Guita Grossa has had more face-to-face confrontations with the Berguedan authorities, as in 1978 when Mixo put the Guita on strike in mid-Patum or in the lesser incident with the mayor’s wife, the Guita Xica has focused more on symbolic action, transgressing spaces such as the Guardia Civil barracks or City Hall, attacking Spanish flags before 1979 and wearing Catalan ones afterward. Today it inverts other norms in conspicuous performances, such as the annual run of women up the Carrer Major during the passacarrers, and it improvises conspicuously also, wearing new decorations or coming out dressed in blue.
The giants and the mule summed up the old lines of power and opposition in traditional Berga. Today, with democracy, the Plens have assumed equal importance. Their numbers in the plaça and their indistinct identities suggest mass, not hierarchy, and the numbers have allowed the widest participation of any comparsa in the Patum: with, say, seventy plens per salt, and four salts in a given year’s Patum, in theory 280 people can participate, and these can be women or ungainly men—the plens require no special strength or talent. And there is strong normative pressure to do a salt de plens, “the baptism of Berguedan citizenship,” at least once. This then is the comparsa of the new democratic order.
Except that not just anyone can salt. You have to “have a salt,” and this is obtained in the same way as a salt in any other comparsa. It comes through a personal connection: it is inherited from family or given in friendship. Some people have more salts than they can use, others—including members of the same long-established families—claim they cannot get one. Uniquely in the Patum, the members of the comparsa are not the plens who dance in the plaça, but the dressers—twenty men who spend the festival underneath City Hall preparing the costumes and dressing the actual plens. Each dresser controls access to a number of salts, the distribution of which is both traditional and contested. The great majority of the salts are retained from year to year by both the dressers and the plens who get them.
There is widespread confusion and disagreement about how this works, and, like everyone else who wins the friendship of a few dressers, I declined to investigate the conditions of my good fortune. From the insider perspective, indeed, there is nothing to investigate. The ownership of a salt is part of the reciprocities of any social network, and this is a particularly large and complex network, crossing class boundaries though centered in “popular” families of long standing in Berga. Children grow up and inherit salts from their parents; they might hang out and help the dressers with the preparatory work and so gradually earn the right of presence and eventually a salt. As an outsider, I performed the same task of self-insinuation, becoming a habituée of the bar where Sobrevias and friends spend their time. At the end of my first field stay in 1989, Sobrevias, who had paid me little overt attention until then, theatrically kissed me goodbye and, in an act of conspicuous patronage, whispered audibly enough for everyone around to hear, “Next year I’ll give you a salt!”—a promise he remembered and kept.
The extraordinary character of this gift and the obligation incurred by it are viewed with suspicion by those outside the network, who tend to translate gift: as exchange. At best, they speak of bottles of cognac presented to dressers on their saint’s days and other forms of mild bribery; but there are widespread rumors of cash payments. Sometimes one hears that as much as $300 is paid for a salt; in some versions it is the Ajuntament that acts as mediator with the dressers, or, more mildly and plausibly, the Ajuntament is said to retain some salts of its own to grant as favors.
It is true that old patron-client relationships facilitated the entry of upper-class participants in the Plens, and some salts are held by members of the Berguedan elite whose families traditionally give employment to some of the dressers, for example. To see this as a quid pro quo is to oversimplify: there are more general reciprocities and genuine, though not egalitarian, personal relationships involved. This is simply how things have always worked in Berga. But from the new standpoint of democracy and its sudden promise of equal access, the old way of distributing resources looks sinister: now it is corruption, trafficking in influences. The dressers are widely referred to as “the Mafia.”
In the 1980s and early 1990s, there were frequent public complaints and more than one formal petition to the Ajuntament demanding transparency and sometimes the “democratization” of the process via a lottery. The Ajuntament routinely denies any power to act in the matter and says that the Plens are a comparsa like any other. Someone let off a canister of tear gas during the first salt de plens of the 1989 Patum: the name was not released “for fear of a lynching,” I was told, and it was said that the first identification of an outside hooligan was a mistake: it was a disgruntled local.
On the whole, though, Berguedans have greater faith in the old personalism than they do in the abstract logics of the new state, not least because they have never seen the latter put honestly into practice. Seen from Berga, political corruption in the new Spain is not greatly different from the old caciquisme of the nineteenth century, which also wore the dress of liberal democracy; nor has the Catalan hinterland done notably better under the new system than under the old. The Plens sum up everyone’s understanding of the system: a show of mass participation concealing an oligarchy that controls access to resources. In the Plens as in government, power has not truly changed hands; in the Plens as in government, position is obtained through money and influence rather than merit. The dressers, in the basement of City Hall, literally undermine democracy.
Màrius Lucas, the cap of the New Dwarfs, was standing in a bar on the Carrer Pietat having a drink with a teenage boy during the Patum. “This is my secretary,” he said, introducing us. “This is the one who will take over when I quit. This is not a democracy, this is dictatorship.” He smiled. “I decide who gets in, I decide everything.” “Look,” said Pep Camprubí of the Guita Xica. “I’m one of the Mafia. That’s just the way it is.”
“I never had a godfather,” insisted one prominent patumaire to me. “I did it all myself.” But he does have older relatives, and today his son has assumed his own coveted position. “The ones who complain are the ones who can’t get in,” said one member of the patumaire elite, which seems to imitate the modus operandi of the sociopolitical elite. “These are the things that we used to say shouldn’t happen,” said one Berguedan intellectual, smiling ruefully as a mutual friend called the editor of a Barcelona newspaper to ensure a prominent place for a story on a local event. In the Patum as in scarce-resource Berga as a whole, no one can be high-minded enough to refuse a proferred connection.
A postscript: the ambiguous call for democratization led in the late 1990s to an ambiguous solution, still acutely debated as of 2002. A Patronat de la Patum has been established, a foundation intended “to administer, preserve, and coordinate the development of the Festival of the Patum, as well as all the activities derived from it and strictly related to the performance of the comparses and their members” (Article 1, Estatuts del Patronat). It was declared that the Patronat would open up the Patum to wider and more democratic participation. Although I have been unable to observe the Patronat and its consequences directly, its composition gives one pause: it has a Junta General, an executive commission, a president, and a manager. Only a few caps de colla belong, though some younger geganters active in municipal politics are enthusiastic promoters of the Patronat and its activities. Many people see the Patronat as necessary to sustain the Patum in a more complex world. Others believe that the political class is reclaiming the only area of public life that was under working-class control; they see the Patronat as a rival mafia to that of the comparses. This is, certainly, democracy as many local people have experienced it. Not incidentally, the word patronat also means the employer class, and the Patronat has recently appropriated an insider phrase to apply to Patum comparsa members: the plantilla, or workforce (Pedrals 2000).
