Читать книгу Fire in the Placa - Dorothy Noyes - Страница 13

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The Gaze and the Touch: Personhood and Belonging in Everyday Life

De lluny me miro l’amor,	I gaze at my love from afar,
que de prop no goso gaire	for up close I hardly dare
—Berguedan folksong

ON ONE OF MY FIRST EVENINGS IN BERGA, I was out with the municipal music school colla after a rehearsal. They asked why I wanted to study the Patum, and I tried delicately to explain, without overt references to class or politics. I said I wanted to know how the people who did it felt about it. I proclaimed that understanding was shaped by everyone’s own circumstances and experience rather than some universalizing “meaning” attributed to it from outside; I was not after the Patum, but Patums. Queralt, a twenty-year-old university student, became impatient as I stumbled over my prepared phrases. “Look,” she said. “You want to know what the Patum means to me? I’ll tell you. It’s personal liberation. It’s a time when I can forget everything, all my obligations—Well, for example, I can dress however I like. In Berga, you always have to follow the fashion. People are always watching to see what you come out with on Sunday, and they make commentaries—if it’s old, if it’s always the same. It’s only during the Patum that I can dress for me and be comfortable. That’s really all there is to it. Alliberament personal.”

She said it with great firmness and I was silenced but not convinced: I wanted symbols, not side effects. It was an article of my folklorist’s faith that people are conscious performers. Was I going to be disillusioned? Nonetheless, I heard a great deal of the same sort of thing in the next few weeks. Ramon, a manager in an insurance company, said, “Just imagine if I were seen drunk in the street on a normal evening. The next day in the office everyone would know about it, everybody would be whispering behind their hands. It’s only during the Patum that nobody watches you—of course, they’re all drunk themselves.” Lluís, an office worker, commented, “I sit at a desk all year long, I never do anything. I go to work and I come home again. The Patum is the only time I do anything physical, I can unleash.” And the day before the Patum, one of the more obstreperous local politicians declared to the newspaper and again to me, “For the Patum I can be drunk in the daytime, I can yell at my wife …”

In those first weeks I heard little but these remarks about unwinding and the equally endless insistence that the Patum was a time of unity and brotherhood. The first assertion seemed trivial, the second disingenuous; together, surely, they were contradictory?

But of course they are closely related and both, up to a point, exact. Individuals in Berga live under powerful social constraints that act upon the body to make visible the distinctions within the social structure. The Patum releases the individual from these constraints by equally powerful manipulations of the body, which blur social distinctions. In this part of the book I describe Berguedan convivència, the uneasy balance between personhood and collectivity, as it is worked out in everyday life and intensified in the Patum. More generally, I describe the reciprocal incorporation of Berga into individuals and individuals into Berga—the purposeful, never final constitution of a Berguedan social body.¹

The Middle-Class Need to Be Seen

It took me a long time to understand the constraints people were talking about. But the issue of dress forced itself upon my notice at Easter. I had gone out on Saturday evening with the caramelles choir, the group that goes from plaça to plaça singing about springtime. I had dressed up slightly, putting on my one white blouse, on which I had promptly spilled red wine as they tried to teach me to drink from a porró which someone had brought out from a house to refresh the singers. Evidently singing in the street was an informal activity. On Sunday morning I came out to join the choir in jeans and a black sweater, only to find myself surrounded by suited men and women in pastel linen dresses with eyelet collars.

I realized then that not merely Easter but every Sunday brought the middle class out in their best clothes. They were clothes I would never dream of wearing, always white or starched or pleated or ruffled, calling for plenty of labor in the maintaining and plenty of care in the wearing: clothes for standing up straight, not for drinking wine or eating lunch or embracing.

As I began to go out on the Saturday night supper and bar-hopping routine of the unmarried middle class, I was further perplexed and intimidated by women’s clothes. At the time, I almost always wore jeans and sweaters without jewelry; I don’t know how to apply makeup, and I last entered a beauty parlor at the age of seven. On Saturday night in Berga I was hardly classifiable as female.² Other women my age were rather heavily made-up and bejeweled and wore outfits darker and more alluring but every bit as troublesome as the Sunday clothes.

The norms of behavior are particularly difficult in times of transition, when rules tend to multiply rather than replace each other. Today, unmarried young women must observe not only the traditional respectability of Sunday afternoon but also the newly mandated sexiness of Saturday night. But rules have always been context dependent. Having become anxious about the likely effect on my liver of living six months in Berga, I was astonished to hear Ramon, a member of the professional class, remark that drunkenness was the most scandalous vice in provincial towns such as Berga. I had been introduced to Ramon in a bar and had spent innumerable evenings with him and his friends over long and well-irrigated dinners (ben regat, as they say in Berga) and hours in bars “doing copes” afterward. I was certain that I was not the only person affected by our imbibings.

That was it, of course: that I was not the only person. Drinking in a group is acceptable, because the whole group alters: the perception of the group changes to match the changes in behavior. The scandal is the drunk person who is alone, the person seen weaving down the street by others in a state of cold sobriety.

To be seen—this is at once the need and the fear that constrains everyday life in Berga. Folk speech bears out its importance: a practice or person can be mal vist, badly seen, or, less commonly, ben vist, well seen. Visual apprehension is translated into verbal commentary—gossip—by males llengües, evil tongues. One never hears of good tongues, although of course many people are well spoken of. But the natural tendency of the eye is to catch imperfections, the natural tendency of the tongue to criticize. Against these dispositions one must protect oneself, put up the armor of an impenetrable surface. The eyes of the community exact a heavy tribute: all those expensive clothes, all that ironing, and extreme self-control. Never to be exalted or upset while people are watching, always to conceal one’s weaknesses with a show of serenity: these are disciplines learned young.

There is, as I suggested, one primary occasion that ritualizes the need to see and be seen: the Sunday afternoon promenade down the Carrer Major. Then the habitual vigilance of every day becomes a more conscious display, with fine clothes the outward and visible signs of an orderly life.

The Carrer Major, Berga’s narrow medieval main street, does not dominate commerce the way it used to, but as an escenari, a social setting, it is still preeminent. Walking down it, I was always amazed that so small a city could have such crowded streets, until I noticed that the rest of the streets were empty. If I walked to the post office and back along La Canya, the bypass below the old city, the trip took me twenty minutes. If I took the Carrer Major—the more direct route—I had to plan for at least an hour, because I always ran into people: I would chat with one, duck into a bar for a coffee with another, and so forth. An older woman who returns to Berga for the summers confessed to me that she no longer shops on the Carrer Major because she doesn’t have the energy for the social interactions it forces on her.

The street’s attraction holds even when no one is on it. Once I was leaving a bar at about 2 A.M., walking with Quirze, who also lives on the Vall. I started to turn to the bypass, the quickest way home, as we were not in search of social encounters. But my companion looked at me as if I were mad. “Let’s go by the Carrer Major, no?” So we took an extra ten minutes and walked along the cool stone street. Quirze pointed out its beauty to me, rather censoriously, and I acquiesced; in the silence, it was unreal as an abandoned stage set. New streets on the edges of the old city offer better shopping and far more efficient communications, but they are purely functional. Social identity is enacted on the Carrer Major, and even the empty street retains the echo of its inhabited power.

The traditional Sunday afternoon donar la volta (taking the turn) on the Carrer Major can be a matter of two hours to make the two-minute trip from the Plaça Sant Joan down to the Placeta de la Ciutat and back again. The street is packed with people and they keep to the right—as on a road—so that forward motion, however slow, can be accomplished. Families come out together, and the children split off to find their contemporaries; everyone still wears the Mass-going clothes of the morning.³ Adults greet each other, nod at some, notice even those to whom they do not speak. Alliances and interactions are observed: three weeks’ company during the promenade marked a couple as engaged as late as the 1970s (Farràs i Farràs 1979, 30). New clothes, as Queralt pointed out, are noted as well as one’s state of health and the appearance of family amity or lack of it. Who greets—or fails to greet—whom is always of interest, and the street is testing ground, even battlefield, for the quarrelsome Berguedans: the Carrer Major ritual makes it impossible to avoid one’s enemies. One could walk more comfortably under the trees along the Vall, where there is fresh air and room to spread out, but that is not the point of the exercise. One must be seen.⁴

Working-class Bodies

For working-class people and institutions, other practices dominate interaction. I have another set of friendships in Berga centering on the popular bar, La Barana, a favorite local for central patumaires. There the simplicity of my wardrobe does not impede gallantry or gender deference. Relatively few women frequent the bar, but those who do are well integrated into the bar’s network.⁵ Unlike middle-class contexts, where friendship goes by peer groups and tends to diminish in closeness after marriage, the bar mingles all ages in friendship: unrelated sixty-year-old and thirty-year-old men seek out each other’s company, and even teenagers participate freely in the bar’s social life—though not many of them are inclined to do so.

Instead of the careful surfaces and distances maintained in the Carrer Major promenade, social life in the bar is directed toward establishing and maintaining connections, to performing a solidarity embodied in tactile contact. In the bar there are no booths or even stools: we lean on the counter to talk to Pere, the owner, or huddle in shifting groups. The dining room has long tables, where people are wedged together as best as possible. We jostle elbows, pass plates and bottles, and change tables to have our coffee with another group if our companions have to leave. Bon profit (bon appetit) is wished to every table as one walks in or out. Pere and Carme, the mestressa, come out to have their own lunch later, and talk, like salt, is passed from table to table. Talk differs in emphasis from middle-class encounters: more of it is joking indexical to the immediate situation and participants, and less is gossip. What goes on in the bar is eminently “phatic communion,” as Malinowski called it: “each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker” ([1923]1972, 315). A Berguedan idiom, fer petar la xerrada, expresses this. A xerrada is a session of chat, and petar means “to burst or pass wind”—the word also used for the Patum firecrackers. What is said is of no importance: it’s the act of speaking together that matters. And talk is not the most important channel of phatic communion.

There is a great deal of physical horseplay in the bar. Back slappings, pinchings, and play wrestling are the ordinary accompaniments to aperitifs and even to meals. The soda-water siphon is used to spray people. My hair was once braided into the beaded ropes of the doorway while I looked another way. A middle-aged truckdriver and dresser of the Plens named Pepito, nicknamed la fera (the wild beast) by Agustí, another regular, is perhaps the chief provocateur of community in the bar: he initiates much of the teasing and roughhousing, and he also arranges more peaceful encounters, such as excursions to restaurants in the mountains above town. The two kinds of action have the same effect: extending and intensifying relationships in the bar. One week Pepito began to steal the flan of Pep Xino. When the flan arrived, he would snatch it away, and begin spooning it into all of our mouths, regardless of the course we were eating. “One for the little girl,” he would say. “One for the little boy. One for—” “My flan!” cried the hapless Xino, wincing and grinning at once. “You ask for it, I think,” said Pep Escobet. “Why do you keep sitting next to him?”

It was a kind of communion, and the people in the bar are not unconscious of the parallels, though they are rarely made explicit. Preneu i beveu, said Agustí one day as he was pouring out champagne. “Take; drink; this is my blood which is shed for you …” On Holy Saturday morning 1991 I was sitting at the long table in back having breakfast with the usuals. Ritxi from the music school came in and saw me at the foot of the table between Pepito and Agustí. “Sitting there, Dorry,” he said, “you know who you look like? Jesus Christ between two thieves.” Pepito and Agustí, at whom this was directed, got up in the ritual response to verbal teasing—simulated physical aggression—and grabbed Ritxi by each arm, pretending to rain blows on him. “Now! Now,” Ritxi cried, “I’m Jesus Christ and this is the Flagellation!” “No, no,” somebody in the middle of the table said. “This is the Last Supper.” This image satisfied them, and everyone sat down again.

For the Bar La Barana regulars, the Saturday morning breakfast, which is substantial and long, is a ritual comparable to the Carrer Major promenade. Sitting down at table and eating together—and especially drinking together—is a means to social integration that was vital to my own acceptance in the bar. My popularity began with an appreciation of my excellent appetite: my eagerness to incorporate “the good things of here,” as Pere calls the food and drink they serve, made them eager to incorporate me. They even used my embracing of native habits to tease each other. “Your face should fall with shame!” said Agustí, the defender of Berguedan authenticity, one morning to a man resting his liver with Coca-Cola. “Dorothy, who’s not even from here, is drinking champagne. But look at you!”⁶

When my parents came to visit Berga in 1990, I received a proof of the importance of commensality, and of drinking in particular. I had brought them to lunch at La Barana on a couple of weekdays, and they had met most of the colla either there or on the street. On the Saturday morning they were to leave, I came to breakfast alone: because my parents could not converse, I reasoned, there was no point in bringing them. But Pepito started scolding me at once and demanded that I go and fetch them. “We’ve hardly met them. Go get them. Now! Just so we can spend a little time together.”