Fire in the Placa - Dorothy Noyes

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to the newspaper and again to me, “For the Patum I can be drunk in the daytime, I can yell at my wife …”

      In those first weeks I heard little but these remarks about unwinding and the equally endless insistence that the Patum was a time of unity and brotherhood. The first assertion seemed trivial, the second disingenuous; together, surely, they were contradictory?

      But of course they are closely related and both, up to a point, exact. Individuals in Berga live under powerful social constraints that act upon the body to make visible the distinctions within the social structure. The Patum releases the individual from these constraints by equally powerful manipulations of the body, which blur social distinctions. In this part of the book I describe Berguedan convivència, the uneasy balance between personhood and collectivity, as it is worked out in everyday life and intensified in the Patum. More generally, I describe the reciprocal incorporation of Berga into individuals and individuals into Berga—the purposeful, never final constitution of a Berguedan social body.1

      The Middle-Class Need to Be Seen

      It took me a long time to understand the constraints people were talking about. But the issue of dress forced itself upon my notice at Easter. I had gone out on Saturday evening with the caramelles choir, the group that goes from plaça to plaça singing about springtime. I had dressed up slightly, putting on my one white blouse, on which I had promptly spilled red wine as they tried to teach me to drink from a porró which someone had brought out from a house to refresh the singers. Evidently singing in the street was an informal activity. On Sunday morning I came out to join the choir in jeans and a black sweater, only to find myself surrounded by suited men and women in pastel linen dresses with eyelet collars.

      I realized then that not merely Easter but every Sunday brought the middle class out in their best clothes. They were clothes I would never dream of wearing, always white or starched or pleated or ruffled, calling for plenty of labor in the maintaining and plenty of care in the wearing: clothes for standing up straight, not for drinking wine or eating lunch or embracing.

      As I began to go out on the Saturday night supper and bar-hopping routine of the unmarried middle class, I was further perplexed and intimidated by women’s clothes. At the time, I almost always wore jeans and sweaters without jewelry; I don’t know how to apply makeup, and I last entered a beauty parlor at the age of seven. On Saturday night in Berga I was hardly classifiable as female.2 Other women my age were rather heavily made-up and bejeweled and wore outfits darker and more alluring but every bit as troublesome as the Sunday clothes.

      The norms of behavior are particularly difficult in times of transition, when rules tend to multiply rather than replace each other. Today, unmarried young women must observe not only the traditional respectability of Sunday afternoon but also the newly mandated sexiness of Saturday night. But rules have always been context dependent. Having become anxious about the likely effect on my liver of living six months in Berga, I was astonished to hear Ramon, a member of the professional class, remark that drunkenness was the most scandalous vice in provincial towns such as Berga. I had been introduced to Ramon in a bar and had spent innumerable evenings with him and his friends over long and well-irrigated dinners (ben regat, as they say in Berga) and hours in bars “doing copes” afterward. I was certain that I was not the only person affected by our imbibings.

      That was it, of course: that I was not the only person. Drinking in a group is acceptable, because the whole group alters: the perception of the group changes to match the changes in behavior. The scandal is the drunk person who is alone, the person seen weaving down the street by others in a state of cold sobriety.

      To be seen—this is at once the need and the fear that constrains everyday life in Berga. Folk speech bears out its importance: a practice or person can be mal vist, badly seen, or, less commonly, ben vist, well seen. Visual apprehension is translated into verbal commentary—gossip—by males llengües, evil tongues. One never hears of good tongues, although of course many people are well spoken of. But the natural tendency of the eye is to catch imperfections, the natural tendency of the tongue to criticize. Against these dispositions one must protect oneself, put up the armor of an impenetrable surface. The eyes of the community exact a heavy tribute: all those expensive clothes, all that ironing, and extreme self-control. Never to be exalted or upset while people are watching, always to conceal one’s weaknesses with a show of serenity: these are disciplines learned young.

      There is, as I suggested, one primary occasion that ritualizes the need to see and be seen: the Sunday afternoon promenade down the Carrer Major. Then the habitual vigilance of every day becomes a more conscious display, with fine clothes the outward and visible signs of an orderly life.

      The Carrer Major, Berga’s narrow medieval main street, does not dominate commerce the way it used to, but as an escenari, a social setting, it is still preeminent. Walking down it, I was always amazed that so small a city could have such crowded streets, until I noticed that the rest of the streets were empty. If I walked to the post office and back along La Canya, the bypass below the old city, the trip took me twenty minutes. If I took the Carrer Major—the more direct route—I had to plan for at least an hour, because I always ran into people: I would chat with one, duck into a bar for a coffee with another, and so forth. An older woman who returns to Berga for the summers confessed to me that she no longer shops on the Carrer Major because she doesn’t have the energy for the social interactions it forces on her.

      The street’s attraction holds even when no one is on it. Once I was leaving a bar at about 2 A.M., walking with Quirze, who also lives on the Vall. I started to turn to the bypass, the quickest way home, as we were not in search of social encounters. But my companion looked at me as if I were mad. “Let’s go by the Carrer Major, no?” So we took an extra ten minutes and walked along the cool stone street. Quirze pointed out its beauty to me, rather censoriously, and I acquiesced; in the silence, it was unreal as an abandoned stage set. New streets on the edges of the old city offer better shopping and far more efficient communications, but they are purely functional. Social identity is enacted on the Carrer Major, and even the empty street retains the echo of its inhabited power.

      The traditional Sunday afternoon donar la volta (taking the turn) on the Carrer Major can be a matter of two hours to make the two-minute trip from the Plaça Sant Joan down to the Placeta de la Ciutat and back again. The street is packed with people and they keep to the right—as on a road—so that forward motion, however slow, can be accomplished. Families come out together, and the children split off to find their contemporaries; everyone still wears the Mass-going clothes of the morning.3 Adults greet each other, nod at some, notice even those to whom they do not speak. Alliances and interactions are observed: three weeks’ company during the promenade marked a couple as engaged as late as the 1970s (Farràs i Farràs 1979, 30). New clothes, as Queralt pointed out, are noted as well as one’s state of health and the appearance of family amity or lack of it. Who greets—or fails to greet—whom is always of interest, and the street is testing ground, even battlefield, for the quarrelsome Berguedans: the Carrer Major ritual makes it impossible to avoid one’s enemies. One could walk more comfortably under the trees along the Vall, where there is fresh air and room to spread out, but that is not the point of the exercise. One must be seen.4

      Working-class Bodies

      For working-class people and institutions, other practices dominate interaction. I have another set of friendships in Berga centering on the popular bar, La Barana, a favorite local for central patumaires. There the simplicity of my wardrobe does not impede gallantry or gender deference. Relatively few women frequent the bar, but those who do are well integrated into the bar’s network.5 Unlike middle-class contexts, where friendship goes by peer groups and tends to diminish in closeness after marriage, the bar mingles all ages in friendship: unrelated sixty-year-old and thirty-year-old men seek out each other’s company, and even teenagers participate freely in the bar’s social life—though not many of them are inclined to do so.

      Instead of the careful surfaces and distances maintained in the Carrer Major promenade, social life in the bar is directed toward establishing and maintaining connections, to performing a solidarity embodied in

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