Fire in the Placa - Dorothy Noyes

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The dwarfs are the orderly lower class that trusts to the hegemonic promise. They do not make their own meanings or direct their own action.

      PLENS

      The “full ones” or full devils wear the same heavy felt costume as the Maces, red with green trim or vice versa, and the same masks with horns. Three fuets are affixed to each horn, and two more are tied to the tail; the head is protected with a leather hood, and a wreath of Clematis vidalba, a green vine that grows along the streams above town, prevents sparks from falling down the neck of the costume; more vidalba at head and tail reduces the impact of the fuets. About seventy come out in a given salt.11

      Each ple dances with an acompanyant, an uncostumed friend whose job it is to light the ple and lead him or her safely through the plaça. The salt de plens is the climax of the Patum in the plaça, done only at night. For it, the lights are turned off and the plens come out slowly and distribute themselves in the crowd. When an acompanyant stationed at the lamppost lights his bengala, a thick sparkler, all the plens are lighted up and the music, fast and repetitious, begins, the Tabal also playing to a rhythm of its own. The plens and the entire crowd salt counterclockwise around the plaça, hopping from foot to foot. The crowd is a rolling black mass with thick flames dancing above it. The fuets begin to burst, a few scattered, and then all at once: a long complex ferocious explosion like multiple orgasm (as the Berguedans explain in their cups—a salt de plens has a double meaning in Berga). The smoke pushes up from the plaça as from a chimney, and the spectators on the balcony are blackened with it. The music repeats itself until the last fuets have exploded and the tension subsides.

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      Figure 8. The Plens wait for their masks below city hall. Photo by Luigi, Berga.

      The Plens are nominally the same comparsa as the Maces, and in the early Bulla this connection was more obvious: “the devils go full” in their second sortie. Although today they are considered the most primitive element of the festival, widely supposed to be pre-Christian and tied to vegetative spirits, it is not clear that the present profusion of vines and green is more than a century old, and the “infernal orgy” of fire is an effect of the great increase in the number of plens since 1960, when there were still only sixteen of them. Nonetheless, devils are chthonic figures in the Catalan mountains, associated with caves and water—as are the black Madonnas and the mules—and, like the Moors, credited with responsibility for otherwise inexplicable constructions in the landscape.

       TIRABOL

      The tirabol is not a comparsa, but the final dance or salt—it is both—of each night of the Patum. The meaning of the name is uncertain: sometimes in older texts it appears as tirabou (pull the ox) and seems to have been a kind of crack-the-whip dance when the numbers were smaller. Today the usage is most often plural, as the tirabols have burgeoned in number. They are in effect a continuation of the Plens, who lift their masks and keep dancing, with the entire crowd salt-ing counterclockwise in the plaça, in small arm-in-arm groups, to any of three lively melodies used: one in 6/8, a waltz-jota, and an inauthentic but much-loved pas-doble.12 The Gegants Veils spin in place in the corner of the plaça by Cal Quimserra, the geganters competing with each other against vertigo and exhaustion. The two guites dance through the plaça with a long loping gait, and friends are given rides on the back. The Tabal accompanies the guites: if the fuets have not yet exploded at the end of the dance, the quites and the Tabal keep going. Four or five tirabols are played after the noonday Patum and twenty or more at the end of the night Patum. For the passacarrers there are tirabols in the Plaça Sant Joan—usually three—and another dozen or more in the Plaça Sant Pere at the end.

      OTHER PARTICIPANTS

      Apart from the comparses, the Patum has its dignitaries and functionaries. Above all, it requires a public, large and actively participating, for its success. This has not been a problem for the past thirty years: rather, the overcrowding of the plaça has interfered with the comparses, who do not have enough room to dance comfortably. The public, insofar as its years and energies permit, salts along with the comparses or behind them in the passacarrers, hopping from foot to foot to permit the maximum of motion in the minimum of space. Other personnel essential to the event include:

       Musicians

      The Patum music is played by two town bands, the Banda de l’Escola Municipal de Música and the Cobla Pirineu, who alternate days in the Patum. The students of the Escola Municipal play for the children’s Patum. The musicians are placed on a scaffolding next to the church steps and wear no special costume. As well as playing for the Patum in the plaça, they accompany the giants on the Wednesday passada and the Wednesday and Saturday night passacarrers.

       Autoritats

      The “authorities” include the Ajuntament or city council, the commandant of the local army post, the captain of the local Guardia Civil, the heads of local institutions such as the hospital and the Red Cross, and by extension the dignitaries and celebrities invited by the Ajuntament for the occasion. They sit in the balcony of City Hall during the Patum in the plaça, and walk in the passacarrers in front of the musicians. They also attend the daily masses and attend and give receptions. Their Patum is one of good clothes and good food and drink inside City Hall’s ceremonial rooms; guests move back and forth between the balcony and the inside, and in the years of democracy, some celebrated Barcelonans have left Berga with celebrated hangovers.

       Administradors

      The “administrators” were formerly wealthy residents of Berga’s four quarters, entrusted with collecting money and putting on the neighborhood festivals of the Octave of Corpus Christi.13 Since the suppression of the Octave in the twentieth century, and since the emptying of the four quarters in favor of more modern housing on the periphery of the old town, the administrators have become a purely ceremonial role, representing the community among the authorities. They are now four couples married within the previous year, and being administrators is in theory part of their rite of passage to full community membership. (In fact many couples deeply integrated in public life forego the opportunity because of the tedium it entails.) They sit with the authorities in the balcony and at mass, the men in black suits and the women in black dresses with comb and mantilla, an Andalusian borrowing from the end of the last century. Each couple is attended by little girls in their first communion regalia, one carrying a palma, a stalk of artificial flowers and ribbons representing one of the four old quarters.

      The Syntax of Events

      Corpus Christi is a movable feast sixty days after Easter, falling always on Thursday. May 21 is the earliest possible date, June 24 the latest.

      PRELIMINARIES

      At 11 A.M. on the Sunday after Ascension Day, three weeks before Corpus, the Ajuntament holds an extraordinary plenary session with only one question on the agenda: Will there be Patum? There is a unanimous “yes,” except in time of war or famine; not since 1938 has a Patum been cancelled. The band stands below in the plaça, and just before twelve o’clock, plays the Ball de l’Aliga. On the stroke of twelve, the tabaler, who has been waiting in the portal of City Hall, steps out and hits the first Pa-tum! of the season. The tabaler steps out and, playing all the while, goes across the plaça, up through the Casc Antic, down through the lower part of the city to the Passeig de la Pau, and out along the Carrer del Roser to the old city limits. There he stops for a drink while the children who have been following take possession of the Tabal. When he comes out, he turns back to the old city and down the Carrer Major. Back in the Plaça Sant Pere, he plays his final pa-tums.

      Sunday before Corpus is the Quatre Fuets (Four Firecrackers), a ceremonial testing to see if they explode loud enough. They say this was necessary in the days when the fuets were of local artisanal manufacture; now it’s just because people

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