Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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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.”
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