Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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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).
PART II
PERSONIFICATION AND INCORPORATION
3
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