Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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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