Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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children poking things between the bars of my cage to see what I’d do. They made a rendezvous with me at Cal Blasi on the Vall, and I walked up and down the Vall for half an hour. Cal Blasi is not in the phone book, it is a nickname, and the sign above its door says Bar Marc. It never occurred to them to give me an address, and it took me quite a while to ask someone on the street for help.
But they were not just playing with me: there was system in it. I had said I wanted to understand their experience, not impose my perceptions from outside; they had heard me say so on Ràdio Berga my first week in the town. They took me at my word and took it upon themselves to teach me.
It was a job for them to get my body off the balcony and feeling with them. Think what it means to be an urban academic. What has my whole life been but an effort to escape the body? I was a child who was good at reading and bad at games, and books were a refuge from persecution. Later, free of the playground, my life was still spent sitting in libraries or discoursing with friends nearly as unbalanced as I was. Then there was my habitual environment. Philadelphia in the 1980s was constituted of refinery emissions, uncollected garbage, and human effluvia in the heavy air of the Delaware Valley; horns, sirens, boom boxes, quarreling neighbors; trees yellow with blight; sidewalks strewn with broken bottles, fast food trash, cigarette butts, and, as one passed through dark streets, heaps by the curb that suddenly moved and revealed themselves as human. I did not have moral courage enough and tried not to see or hear or smell. I lived in the city by refusing to live in it: numbing my senses, thickening my skin, hardening my heart. Even on the days when the wind blew the miasma away and I was tempted into good humor and physical expansiveness, a remark on the street would remind me of the danger of too much relaxation. I would tighten my lips and freeze my smile, turn my eyes to the pavement, clutch my purse to my side, and stiffen my gait.
For the first three months at least, I walked through Berga at my normal metropolitan pace. “Where are you running off to in such a hurry?” they would ask. The evasions of years caught up with me. I had to learn to slow down and look at people passing, offer myself to the gaze of the community.
The breakthrough in my integration was the Societat Unió Coral Berguedana, one of the innumerable worker’s choirs established in Catalonia at the end of the last century. By good fortune, my arrival in Berga coincided with the last rehearsals for the caramelles, songs about new life and pretty girls and the farewell to salt cod that are sung in the streets and squares during Easter. I had met Queralt, a music student who conducted the choir, and she was perfectly at ease with my timid suggestion that I might listen in on a rehearsal. The second time she said, “You can come again, but only if you sing!” I came; some people were unabashedly off-key and the music was easy to grasp. So I sang too. The singers were curious and friendly: through the choir’s varied membership I gained entree into many social milieux. And my appearance in the choir after so short a time in the town garnered me a good deal of recognition and good will.
Then came the sardanes of Sant Jordi, the feast of the patron of Catalonia on April 23. The caramelles had not been so bad, but the prospect of dancing in public brought back all of those humiliating evenings at the Evanston Women’s Club, where a crowd of spotty twelve-year-olds were put through the waltz, the cha-cha, and other disciplines judged desirable for the acquisition of gender decorum. With me, left-handed and undergrown, it had left nothing but a determination never to dance again. Now I was standing behind the dancers in the ring, trying desperately to ascertain which foot went forward first. They kept saying, “Just try it!” as I insisted that I hadn’t gotten it down yet. It’s Sant Jordi, their looks said; are you with us or aren’t you? Queralt took me by the hand and dragged me into the circle; the other dancers gave me encouraging smiles, and Queralt’s sister Alba counted the steps for me. On the next occasions I bounced through as best I could, and by the last sardanes after the Sunday night Patum I had it almost down. After the last shout of “Visca!” the boy next to me, Jordi, turned to me and said, “Girl, I congratulate you! An American who speaks Catalan and dances sardanes! There are people who’ve lived here all their lives and never learned to do either.” Jordi is the child of Galician immigrants and earned his integration through performance: the Scouts, the town band, political demonstrations, the sardana, speaking Catalan. He more than anyone understands the importance of participation.
Beyond that came the Patum and all the coercions of which I have spoken; the insistence that I participate fully and as a Berguedan would. The Berguedans demanded certain kinds of performances from me and offered in exchange true understanding.
The Berguedans do not believe in translation, but in socialization. To know them, they say, you must become one of them. I was not a child, of course, and could not regain the time lost; I would never have the depth of historical experience that they do, through their own and their parents’ memories. But they made allowances for this, telling me things, taking me on excursions, and digging through their attics for old programs and pictures to show me. I was allowed enough “research” to repair in part the unavoidable deficiencies of my socialization.
They humbled me too. At the end of my second visit I was sitting with two men who began to talk about an old patumaire, now dead, who had been famous for … Agustí saw my professional ears prick up and said to me, “You, Dorothy, know many things but you don’t know everything yet.” “Not by a long shot,” I said, to please him. “Not by a long shot,” he agreed complacently. Another time Ritxi, the director of the municipal music school, grinned at me and said, “Ah, there’s lots that you don’t know! I’ve got old scores from the Patum that you’ve never seen … We’ll see if you ever make your way to them.”
They wouldn’t let me have it all at once, wouldn’t let me have it simply to take away and make a book of. They pointed the path I had to follow and left the work up to me. As I acquired a history in common with them, I gained more privileges and also more responsibilities. It began simply enough, with an increase in social obligations: by the end of my first visit I was sleeping no more than five hours a night. In the intervals between my first visits, I wrote endless letters to let them know I hadn’t forgotten them. Leaving town became increasingly difficult. The object of socialization, after all, is to make you a functioning member of the society; in my case, it was to make me understand the Patum, but understanding and reponsibility are inseparable for them. Right behavior incarnates right understanding: it is the outward and visible concomitant—or even more than that. To understand the Patum is to dance it.
I wrote my dissertation in medias res: in the middle of the acquisition of scholarly competence, in the middle of puzzling out Berga and the Patum, in the fork of the road between becoming a Berguedan and committing myself to the unwelcoming American academy. In Philadelphia, that last alternative seemed overstated: of course I would stay in America, and someone would hire me someday. In Berga the choice was not so clear. It was complicated by their differing expectations of me. My intellectual friends did not want me to go wholly native but to be their American connection and promote Catalonia to the world. For others, my failure to stay in Berga was proof of my imperfect assimilation. “This feeling we have here among us,” said Pepito at a farewell lunch in the core bar of the Patum, waving his hand at the table of friends. “Stay for this.” “I know, I do understand,” I pleaded. “But I have obligations.” “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “If you did, you wouldn’t leave.” Against this logic I can make no argument. My native notion of understanding has me as subject and the Patum as object: there can be and in fact ought to be distance between me and it. But for Pepito and his friends, knowing is incorporation. They and the Patum and Berga are an indissoluble whole, one body. My observer problem is explicitly epistemological and implicitly moral; their observer problem is simply practical. In a depopulating community desperate for solutions, every onlooker is someone who needs to be working instead.
For several years afterward, I lived between two worlds and two realities, a vacillation tolerated by Berguedans (who share the dilemma) but handicapping me in the less forgiving professional world (as Berguedans too are handicapped). Now, of course, I have surrendered to what the louder voices of the latter world assure us is inevitable; the conflict has been displaced from my life to this book, uneasily incorporating that dissertation written when Berga almost wholly possessed me. I live for my career, such as it is, and live therefore