Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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or less difficult material and political conditions. Moreover, they were individuals with whom we engaged in real relationships, implying mutual obligations and real-world consequences.
I had two concerns, then, in my project of reading texts. The first was to remember that texts have authors and readers with purposes (folklore had to assert this before it could begin to deconstruct it). The second was to spare myself and my informants as far as possible the dreadful weight of mutual obligations and real-world consequences.
The Patum itself could not be treated as a text, I decided. It had no author—although many nineteenth-century commentators had attempted to create one for it. It had no puppeteer pulling the strings from above and coordinating the action; there was no one consciousness that could perceive, much less direct, the whole. It was a genuinely collective and emergent creation, too shifting and evanescent to pin down. Each participating individual would not merely interpret the whole from his or her own position—on a balcony, inside an effigy, and so on—but would have to imagine the whole as well: interpretation would entail the creation of a text.
So I devised a study of the multiple “texts” of the Patum that exist in public and semipublic space. From Mossèn Armengou’s book and other readings, I knew about festival programs, monographs, sermons, poems, children’s drawings, videos, souvenirs, photographs, civic decor, proverbs, musical compositions, conversations in bars, newspaper articles, cartoons, advertising, liturgical objects, house decoration, costume, impromptu performances, miniature and neighborhood performances, festivals modeled on the Patum, and festivals created in antithesis to and parody of the Patum. Through these inscriptions, which I could examine more or less at my leisure, I could map local interpretation according to historical period, social class, gender, political affiliation, age, native and outsider identity, or whatever other social categories emerged from the study. And there was surely a contest of interpretations: I could look at the rhetorical tactics used to gain adherents to a particular interpretive community and the influence of power relations on interpretive hegemony. Finally, by comparing interpretations at a deep-structural level, I could perhaps understand something about the constraints placed on interpretation by the form of the event.
This strategy, I realized, would be biased toward elite productions, and I would have to take that into account; popular interpretation of the Patum was no doubt found in the performance itself. For this I would observe styles of participation and perhaps collect taped narratives of festival experience. But I would be dealing primarily with information in the public domain, things that anyone could discover merely by looking. I would not be intruding in anyone’s life. Nor would I presume, I thought, to say what the Patum itself was or meant; I would not risk oversimplifying. I would address the event only through its inscriptions.
But turn it around: I would enter into their thoughts without entering into their feelings. It sounds heartless and superficial—even if it had been possible. I would attend not to the central event but to the texts that were its epiphenomena. Is not aura more than this? The Berguedans thought so: when I expected them to speak of symbols in the Patum, they spoke of bodily states and emotions. “It’s a feeling—a brotherhood—” said Rossendo of the devils when I asked what they did down there under City Hall all that time. “How can I express it?” “I can’t explain the Patum to you,” said Ramon Forés, the bartender at the Casino, where I lived that first year. “When you do a salt de plens, and they kneel you down to dress you, it’s a feeling like, a feeling—I can’t explain it to you.”
Mossèn Armengou’s assertions had seemed overblown. “The Patum is the baptism of our citizenship …”; “The Patum is the miracle which Berga has known how to make and perpetuate …”; and on and on. But it came from all sides: the Patum was considered not only with humor, pride, and possessiveness but with passion. University students postponed their exams by a year when they coincided with Corpus Christi: there are always exams, but only one Patum. One man told me of a friend who had gone AWOL from his military service so that he could say he’d never missed a Patum. Another one spoke of a Berguedan scientist who’d gone to live in America. She made great efforts to return every year, but on the few occasions when it was not possible she called up friends at City Hall and made them hang the telephone out of the window for an hour at a time, long-distance from the West Coast. Another story was told when I turned off the tape recorder: a man who had cancer and expected to die before another Patum came. He had had a colostomy two weeks before Corpus Christi and was still in the hospital in Barcelona. Could he leave to go up to Berga for the Patum? Out of the question: it would kill him. But sooner that than missing his last Patum. He made himself so miserable, virtually going on a hunger strike, that the hospital and his family found a way: he was borne up to Berga in an ambulance and carried to the balcony of a house on the plaça. There he pulled himself up by the railings to see the dancing and collapsed back on the bed during the breaks (the Patum seems to have cured him, for he subsequendy recovered and is now alive and well and dressing the plens).
The Patum was ineffable: there was no one who did not say this. What it signified was something about Moors and local history—the stories varied and few cared very much—but the important thing was the way it made them feel. The Patum has to be lived. Some people encouraged me to live it; a few politely informed me that my project was useless, for, without having grown up in Berga and lived the Patum all my life, I was incapable of understanding anything about it. The more intellectual allowed that my work could have some utility in clarifying the Patum’s history, but the frankest speakers insisted that I was overlooking the heart of things in order to tinker with trivialities.
How was I to get inside the festival, then? My advisor, Roger D. Abrahams, had said to me, “It’s Corpus Christi, you know. Isn’t the body important?” No, it didn’t seem so. And in any case, I thought but did not say, 90 percent of the academy is working on the body now, and I want to do something different. But it was out of my hands. I asked a man so anticlerical and profane that he is nicknamed “The Priest” about how the Patum had changed after the 1971 suppression of the Corpus Christi procession. He said it was a pity, that the procession had been a lot of fun, and what was especially sad was that the Patum didn’t smell right anymore because the hazelnut branches used to decorate houses for the procession were no longer there to break off and wave away sparks with. The olor de Patum, they all said: it’s not the same, but you’ll smell it anyway. The odor of Patum! How on earth was I to talk about it?
Here it was—the body—and for the Berguedans it was straightforward enough. Like many peoples who have known poverty in the not too distant past, they tend to be philosophical realists. There was no great epistemological gulf fixed between them and me. The Patum is known by participation; I had but to participate as they did. I could have their experience by living in their bodies, and I could do this by eating what they ate, dancing what they danced, and, in general, by spending time with them: acquiring a history in common with them.
Eating and drinking turned out to be central to my assimilation. Community in Berga is largely understood through alimentary metaphors, and again, I attribute this to the simplest material cause: the long experience of the threat of hunger. Everyone fed me and everyone was anxious to know how I liked the local food. One old man was gratified but astonished to learn that the change in diet had not injured my health. Several people warned me that the “change of waters” would surely affect me, not because Berguedan water is bad but because the combination of minerals varies from place to place, and everyone becomes accustomed to his or her native mixture. Berguedan bodies have been created by a unique diet formed from a unique ecology, and it was a good sign that I could take it in.
Berguedans are highly self-conscious about the way things are done in Berga, a distinctiveness they attribute to their supposed long isolation as a cul-de-sac in the foothills of the Pyrenees—though the self-consciousness has more to do with their long dependency on external powers. This is how we do it here, they would say, and watch to see if I could follow them. They amused themselves by testing me: can she drink out of a porró? I spilled wine all over myself during my first ventures with the narrow-spouted glass pitcher, but mastered it and won approval. Can she drink a camjillo? Certainly I can, I said, provoked. I had two—fierce concoctions of espresso and sweet rum—and lay awake all night twitching like a marionette. They laughed