Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
themselves disadvantaged.
Berga is part of Old Catalonia, the northeastern region that was fully reconquered from the Saracens by the ninth century: it belongs to what is in many respects the most conservative part of the country. It is part of the traditionalist area that fought for God, king, and local rule in the Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century; that collaborated with Barcelona industrialists to create the turn-of-the-century Lliga Regionalista, a right-wing Catalanist party that tried to model the new order upon the old; and that now gives Convergència i Unió, the center-right Catalanist coalition that has governed Catalonia since the restoration of autonomy in 1979, the bulwark of its power. In everyday practice, Berguedans are almost monolingual in Catalan, and middle-class townspeople as well as the farmers go to Mass on Sundays; they hold fast to their festivals and to tradition for tradition’s sake. There is a substantial working-class socialist vote (local socialists are strongly Catalanist), a respectable minority supporting Catalan independentist parties, and, through the 1980s and 1990s, a growing level of political disaffection. In each case, localism—seen as realistic selflimitation to achievable or at least necessary goals—tends to override faith in any larger political entity.
Architecturally, Berga is a typical Old Catalan city (Map 3), with a medieval core and nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions. The Casc Antic, or old city, is narrow and irregular, with small places dotting tangled streets and no buildings of special distinction. The top of the town has a stream flowing through it which provided power to several factories. Below, the long Carrer Major (Main Street) stretches between the Plaça Sant Joan, with the palace of the old lords of Peguera and the templar’s church of Saint John, and the Plaça Sant Pere, the site of the parish church of Santa Eulàlia and the city hall. Above and to the east of this plaça is the oldest part of the city and the last surviving medieval gate, the Portal de Santa Magdalena.
The first eixample (broadening) of Berga dates from the midnineteenth century: it is the long Plaça Viladomat, popularly known as the Vall, which extends into an avenue leading to factories, the cemetery, the high school, and the twentieth-century xalets (detached houses with gardens) on the little Serra de Casampons. The Vall and its extension are below and to the east of the Plaça Sant Pere.
Map 3. The city of Berga
The second eixample is the Carrer del Roser, the beginning of the highway to the episcopal seat of Solsona, built up in the late nineteenth century with the villas of Berga’s upper class. Xalets were built above it in the twentieth century, and the Plaça de la Creu was expanded into the long Passeig de la Pau, lined with banks and modern apartment blocks, which descends to the main highway. Past the Carrer del Roser and the old park is the municipal annex of La Validan, with its Romanesque church and its old roadside inn. The boundary is marked by the caserna, the Spanish army post built after the Civil War on land used during the Second Republic as a fresh-air school for poor Barcelona children. Resented as the army has been, much of the population regrets that the Ministry of Defense decided to shut down the caserna in the early 1990s: soldiers spent money in restaurants and bars.
The Casc Antic is the scene of the Patum, and the present route of the passades is close to that of the processional route documented in the early eighteenth century. The narrow gray stone streets and constricted squares give the Patum its brightness and the bang of the fuets its resonance. The Plaça Sant Pere, center of the action (Map 4), has all its features exploited.
The Plaça Sant Pere was long known as the Plassa Cremada, the Burned Square, a name taken from a 1655 French visitation that was to be repeated by Napoleon’s troops, the Carlists, and the liberals during the course of the nineteenth century. It is an indefinable polygon; in 1929 its remodelers tried to turn it into a triangle with paving stones patterned to lead to the apex of city hall, but failed to impose perfect regularity. The church is on the north side, at a rough right angle to the wall of houses on one side of the Ajuntament, with the Carrer Major opening between them. Beyond the church, the Carrer Buxadé rises along the north side of the plaça, with the stone barana to delineate it. The part of the crowd that prefers to look on or likes to fight with the Guita Grossa stands behind the barana. A space between the end of the barana and the block of houses jutting into the plaça on the east is used for scaffolds of seating in the Patum—mostly used by older people and young children; behind it, the Berruga, a wooden-beamed avenue beneath the houses, leads into more medieval streets.
The city hall is at roughly the southwest corner of the plaça; the architects of its 1929 renovation adapted the building to the corner site by covering the unassuming portal with a huge convex balcony supported by four Doric columns, suitable for presiding over the Patum and anything else. The effigies of the Patum are stored in a warehouse space on the ground floor below the balcony, and it is here that most comparses and their families tend to congregate during the Patum.
Map 4. The Plaça Sant Pere
The south wall of the plaça comprises more houses, formerly of the wealthiest citizens. The balconies are a favored site for viewing the Patum, and these families are obliged to entertain every day of the festival.
The southeast part of the plaça gives way to a smaller placeta, site of the old hospital and now of the Ateneu Berguedà (an old working-class Republican club), the museum, and the municipal police station. A narrow stair to the south at the entry to this plaça descends to the back of City Hall; it is there that the plens are dressed, so this stair is much transited. The placeta itself receives the overflow of the Patum. Below it is the Vall; to the east are the streets of the old Jewish quarter.
“We know the plaça with our feet,” one patumaire said affectionately of its dingy, irregular stones and its rises and falls in unexpected places. Since my first fieldwork, the plaça has been restored, its facades cleaned up and strengthened, the barana rebuilt, the crumbling church steps replaced and given a handicapped-access ramp, and the pavement redone (to erase its former “fascistic” tendencies, according to the architects). The architects of the Catalan Generalitat were prevented by Berguedan traditionalists from making any major changes, much to their annoyance (“why should four days have to prevent the plaça from working the rest of the year?”), but still, the texture of the Patum has been changed.
PART I
REPRESENTING THE FESTIVAL
1
Between Representation and Presence: The Onlooker Problem
T’HI FICARÀS O NO? they demanded. Are you going in there or not?
I was surprised at the insistence of this question in the weeks before the feast of Corpus Christi. Earlier, I had been given lots of advice on how to protect myself at the Patum of Berga. “The first time you have to watch from a balcony. Don’t go into the plaça until you know what it’s about.” “Always move counterclockwise in the plaça or you’ll be trampled.” “Tie up that hair under a good hat or you’re going to lose it!” “Don’t try to do the Patum in those shoes! Get some heavy boots.” “Don’t wear synthetics, only wool or cotton; they don’t burn as easily.” I am not brave and they easily convinced me that I had to be careful. “If you lose your wallet, if you lose your shoes, if you lose your pants, don’t stop for anything!” an old man warned me. “Once the plens have started, not even God enters!”
Suddenly my willingness