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 always in motion, riding an arc toward an imagined point not just of rest but of incorporation in some loftier state; in the meantime, while I wait for that indistinct brilliance to materialize, my autonomy and mobility are in practice my chiefest goods. My probable future, while it may encompass formal recognitions and abstract incorporations, will be solitary at the level that matters to Berguedans; at best I will be not just an onlooker, but myself an object of the gaze. And yet that other world beats inside me still. Could I bring anything of it to the life I now recognize as primary, or is this fantasy of integration itself part of the Patum’s inescapable nostalgia? Written at my present distance, back up in the balcony, the question answers itself.
I would not impose my story upon the reader were it not, mutatis mutandis, a point of entry into the Berguedan predicament. I am somewhat more cheerful about the clash of worlds than many of my Berguedan friends are. After all, I started out in the metropolis; the only game in town is my game too, and I was born to a place at the table and dealt a good hand. But they have a genuine dilemma: they belong to a world that cannot sustain itself and must destroy it to enter the world that can sustain them.
2
The Patum and the Body Politic
A STORY THEY TELL THEMSELVES about themselves? Well, yes, but apparently they don’t listen to it. By the fifth day of dancing and drinking, after multiple repetitions of the Patum in the plaça, the plebeian mule spins into the royal eagle with no sense of disjuncture or surprise. And even at a distance from the confusions of performance, people are reluctant to talk about meaning directly.
“What does it mean?” is, of course, the classic outsider’s question. As a rule, insiders are more immediately interested in what it does, particularly when “it” is a performance repeated annually in the same place by the same people with little scope granted to improvisation. The native Berguedan’s relation to the Patum is not typically one of reader and text or audience and performance. The child’s first contact with the Patum is not with a distant spectacle but with an enveloping realm: held up to the hand of the giantess, danced on her father’s back in the crowd, the child first knows the Patum as something tactile and kinetic, a mass in motion around her and herself in motion within it. She is encouraged to learn the steps and gestures at the same time she is learning to walk; as she grows older, she is allowed and obliged to participate in more and more of the event. It is a great blurry world which she enters by degrees; she finds increasingly familiar clearings from year to year, but she is always aware of surrounding thickets of complexity, some of which she will never penetrate. If she is of an intellectual bent, she may try to mark paths and chart a map, but even so, she knows the Patum by moving through it. It is unlikely that she will ever feel the need to draw back from the Patum, survey it from beginning to end, and declare what it means. What it means was danced into her as she became part of its history and it of hers. The Patum is less an object of analysis than of recognition: an annual return and renewal.
Convivència and Representation
That is the orthodox Berguedan view, and it is true in part—true as an ideal in any case. There are good practical and historical reasons to leave the Patum unexamined—not, as with everyday habit, by declaring it too trivial to merit attention, but rather by making it sacred: superorganic, eternal. In a deeply factionalized community with a history of civil war and a present of economic threat, the incorporation of individuals into active community membership is the primary goal of the Patum, and the history that militates against that incorporation must be overtly silenced and covertly transformed. “For the Patum, all are one.” “For the Patum, we Berguedans make a pinecone”—a Catalan idiom used to express solidarity or unity in diversity.
First, the silencing. Catalonia has a language problem, of which the choice of Catalan or Castilian is only the most conspicuous dimension. Unlike, say, postwar Germany, where the Nazi regime was unambiguously defeated and had to be unequivocally repudiated, not least through a cleansing of language, the Spanish transition expelled nothing and no one. Rather, it brought opposing political elements together in a coalition by means of agreement to let bygones be bygones. No idiom was wholly discredited, but neither was any idiom sufficiently unmarked for the voicing of collective aspirations, which had to be reduced to the blandest, emptiest formulas to win assent. The formulation of meanings was relegated from the dangerous public realm to subgroups in which a vocabulary was shared.
Thus convivència—a slogan word of the Transition meaning not simply coexistence side-by-side, but getting along together and sharing a social world—became possible. In Catalonia, the challenge of political convivència was complicated by that of native and immigrant convivència in a region where the proportions were half and half.1
Provincial communities such as Berga face the problem more directly: in so small a city, convivència is a matter of face-to-face relationships. The poor and the well-off are inescapably visible to each other; political enemies must pass each other daily on the Carrer Major; immigrants live for the most part not in new suburbs outside the city but next door to old Berguedan families.
Like most Catalan mountain towns, Berga has a manufacturing tradition dating
