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 are eager. Four maces are dressed and, led by the Tabaler, march out of City Hall down to the Vall. There the crowd delineates a rectangle; the fuets are lit, and the maces begin to salt. People stand in line to take a turn: the four original maces yield their places. After the fuets burst—there is always a competition to make one last longest—the crowd cheers. Tabaler and maces go back up to City Hall, crossing paths with the Tabaler, eight maces, and two angels of the Children’s Patum, who repeat the ceremony with their own smaller fuets.
THE PATUM PROPER
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
