Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes

      PASSADA DELS GEGANTS

      The “passing of the giants” is the beginning of the five days that constitute the festes de Corpus. Again at noon, the tabal comes out of City Hall, this time followed by the four giants and the band. The giants waltz in the plaça, then, following the same route as the tabal, process through the streets of Berga, dancing most of the time. The band plays the “Marxa del Patumaire,” an amalgam of the music of Turcs i Cavallets and Plens, alternating it with the popular pas-doble of the tirabols. The public follow, the young salt-ing throughout.

       P ASSACARRERS

      The “passing the streets” is a procession of the Tabaler, Maces, Guites, and Old Giants to do honorific salts for the authorities on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The route is an elaborated version of the one used in the passades and takes at least six hours to cover. At each plaça, Maces, Guites, and Gegants perform, in that order. On Wednesday night, salts are done before the dwellings of municipal councillors and the mayor and in front of the Red Cross, the courthouse, the convents, the army post, and the Guardia Civil.¹⁴ On Saturday night, the salts are performed for the administradors.

      There are numerous pauses in the passacarrers: you can abandon it to have dinner and find it again two streets further down. Although the official route is from authority to authority, the subterranean geography is from bar to bar, and the Guita Xica in particular tends to disappear during these stops. This is its night to show off: bursting into bars, riding on the back of a dump truck, sneaking into a house on an upper street and out the back door on a lower one, reemerging at the head of the procession.

      The climax of the passacarrers is its return through the old city. In the Plaça Sant Joan, after the salts, the band plays the first tirabols of the night and, on Wednesday, of the season. Then, tight as forcemeat in a sausage, comparses and crowd push themselves up the narrow Carrer Major. The band plays “Ella s’ho pensa,” a long-lined, chromatic march never played at any other time. The melody is too broad for the street and makes the crowd strain against its walls: when at last they burst out in the Plaça Sant Pere, they fling themselves straight into the release of more tirabols.

      PATUM DE LLUÏMENT

      The Patum of “Display” or “Brilliance” is the short noon Patum, to which people come in their Sunday clothes. Toward the end of the Mass, the comparses of the Patum line up along the church steps and below, forming a corridor from the church to City Hall. As the band plays the hymn of the city (a lugubrious nineteenth-century march), the Ajuntament, other authorities, Administradors, and little girls file out of the church and follow this corridor; they go up to the balcony to preside over the Patum. The comparses go back to their places—the Guites on the edges of the plaça, the Tabaler in his balcony, and the others under City Hall. Then there is a full tanda—the official word—or salt—the popular one—of Patum; that is, one performance of each dance in sequence, minus the Plens. A few tirabols round off the event.

      PATUM COMPLETA

      The complete Patum is done at night. It is much longer, more crowded, and less polished than the Patum de Lluïment. There are four tandes instead of one, and the Plens are done after the second and fourth. At the end, the tirabols go on for another hour or more. Even the Ajuntament is dressed more comfortably; the Tabaler has abandoned his hot heavy velvet; the giants do a simpler choreography; and the Maces, now only four instead of the noontime eight, go without music.

      MINOR ACTS

      A variety of religious, municipal, and commercial events surround the Patum. At ten o’clock each morning from Thursday to Sunday, a rocket is shot off to announce the beginning of the festival acts. The band escorts the Administradors to the parish church for daily Mass. On Thursday, Corpus Christi Day, it is a High Mass sung by the Orfeó Berguedà, with Ajuntament and authorities in attendance, and the two angels, Saint Michael and his deputy, at the front of the nave. The rector—who is not from Berga—takes advantage of the unusual crowd to give a common post-Vatican II festival sermon: we must celebrate and defend our local traditions, which are the marks of our faith, but always remember that the celebration is occasioned by a liturgical festival, which itself serves only to call to mind things we should bear always in our hearts; it is to be wished that the devotion shown during the festival were part of our daily routine; and so forth.

      The Ajuntament holds several ceremonies to integrate itself in the festival, including cocktail receptions for the Administradors on Friday and for Berguedans living outside the city on Saturday—this latter providing a valued occasion to address a population of long-standing importance to the local economy. On Saturday there is a ceremony to award títols de patumaire, certificates of ten and twenty-five years’ participation in the Patum, as well as the prizes for the annual poster and children’s drawing competitions.

      Until the 1960s, the Patum was augmented, like any provincial festa major, by a variety of entertainments not otherwise available locally, intended to increase the number of visitors and intensify the appeal of the festival. Today the Patum is considered sufficient attraction; however, a few extra acts survive to fill the empty hours and serve the overflow crowds. In addition to the carnival attractions stationed at the end of the Vall, a Barcelona company offers a recent success in the Municipal Theater on Friday night. In the late 1980s, with the rise of the new Catalan rock music and increasing festival hooliganism in the region, a concert in the sports pavilion was instituted to get the young off the streets in the traditionally explosive hours of early Sunday morning. Earlier on Saturday evening there is a fireworks display to create closure for families with young children on the wildest night of the festival. On Sunday afternoon there is a competition of sardanes, with visiting sardana societies.

      The sardana has special status as the national dance and a symbol of fraternity, so sardanes punctuate the entire festival. One or two cobles (traditional wind bands) from outside the city are hired to play in the Vall after each act of Patum. Many people still have the strength to dance. The final sardana at night is always “Corpus a Berga,” composed by a local priest and incorporating melodies from the Patum.

      The Comparses as Political Models

      When I was still new, I asked several people, “Who organizes the Patum?”

      Eh? They looked at me as if I were mad.

      Well, who makes sure that everybody’s in their proper place, who keeps things going, who runs it?

      A sigh of ostentatious patience. Nobody organizes it, we’ve all been doing it since we were children, it organizes itself. You’ll see.

      But some explained, Well, you know, each comparsa has its own head, and he decides who’s in and who’s out. The giants have a tendency to boss the other groups around—they’re strong, big men. They make order in the plaça, they make the circle for the other groups to dance in. Massana is the head of the giants, he’s tot un personatge. (The phrase doesn’t translate, as it would seem to, into “a real character”: rather, a “personage” is someone of more distinction than other people.)

      “Massana is the mayor of the Patum,” some said. But els de la guita fight with the geganters, they don’t like being pushed around by people with no right to give them orders. Mixo put the whole Patum on strike one year. Mixo said “no Patum” and there was no Patum until he got what he wanted.

      Don’t