But it was out of my hands. I asked a man so anticlerical and profane that he is nicknamed “The Priest” about how the Patum had changed after the 1971 suppression of the Corpus Christi procession. He said it was a pity, that the procession had been a lot of fun, and what was especially sad was that the Patum didn’t smell right anymore because the hazelnut branches used to decorate houses for the procession were no longer there to break off and wave away sparks with. The olor de Patum, they all said: it’s not the same, but you’ll smell it anyway. The odor of Patum! How on earth was I to talk about it?
Here it was—the body—and for the Berguedans it was straightforward enough. Like many peoples who have known poverty in the not too distant past, they tend to be philosophical realists. There was no great epistemological gulf fixed between them and me. The Patum is known by participation; I had but to participate as they did. I could have their experience by living in their bodies, and I could do this by eating what they ate, dancing what they danced, and, in general, by spending time with them: acquiring a history in common with them.
Eating and drinking turned out to be central to my assimilation. Community in Berga is largely understood through alimentary metaphors, and again, I attribute this to the simplest material cause: the long experience of the threat of hunger. Everyone fed me and everyone was anxious to know how I liked the local food. One old man was gratified but astonished to learn that the change in diet had not injured my health. Several people warned me that the “change of waters” would surely affect me, not because Berguedan water is bad but because the combination of minerals varies from place to place, and everyone becomes accustomed to his or her native mixture. Berguedan bodies have been created by a unique diet formed from a unique ecology, and it was a good sign that I could take it in.
Berguedans are highly self-conscious about the way things are done in Berga, a distinctiveness they attribute to their supposed long isolation as a cul-de-sac in the foothills of the Pyrenees—though the self-consciousness has more to do with their long dependency on external powers. This is how we do it here, they would say, and watch to see if I could follow them. They amused themselves by testing me: can she drink out of a porró? I spilled wine all over myself during my first ventures with the narrow-spouted glass pitcher, but mastered it and won approval. Can she drink a camjillo? Certainly I can, I said, provoked. I had two—fierce concoctions of espresso and sweet rum—and lay awake all night twitching like a marionette. They laughed at my account the next day, and they laughed even more when I told them that I felt like a monkey in the zoo with children poking things between the bars of my cage to see what I’d do. They made a rendezvous with me at Cal Blasi on the Vall, and I walked up and down the Vall for half an hour. Cal Blasi is not in the phone book, it is a nickname, and the sign above its door says Bar Marc. It never occurred to them to give me an address, and it took me quite a while to ask someone on the street for help.
But they were not just playing with me: there was system in it. I had said I wanted to understand their experience, not impose my perceptions from outside; they had heard me say so on Ràdio Berga my first week in the town. They took me at my word and took it upon themselves to teach me.
It was a job for them to get my body off the balcony and feeling with them. Think what it means to be an urban academic. What has my whole life been but an effort to escape the body? I was a child who was good at reading and bad at games, and books were a refuge from persecution. Later, free of the playground, my life was still spent sitting in libraries or discoursing with friends nearly as unbalanced as I was. Then there was my habitual environment. Philadelphia in the 1980s was constituted of refinery emissions, uncollected garbage, and human effluvia in the heavy air of the Delaware Valley; horns, sirens, boom boxes, quarreling neighbors; trees yellow with blight; sidewalks strewn with broken bottles, fast food trash, cigarette butts, and, as one passed through dark streets, heaps by the curb that suddenly moved and revealed themselves as human. I did not have moral courage enough and tried not to see or hear or smell. I lived in the city by refusing to live in it: numbing my senses, thickening my skin, hardening my heart. Even on the days when the wind blew the miasma away and I was tempted into good humor and physical expansiveness, a remark on the street would remind me of the danger of too much relaxation. I would tighten my lips and freeze my smile, turn my eyes to the pavement, clutch my purse to my side, and stiffen my gait.
For the first three months at least, I walked through Berga at my normal metropolitan pace. “Where are you running off to in such a hurry?” they would ask. The evasions of years caught up with me. I had to learn to slow down and look at people passing, offer myself to the gaze of the community.
The breakthrough in my integration was the Societat Unió Coral Berguedana, one of the innumerable worker’s choirs established in Catalonia at the end of the last century. By good fortune, my arrival in Berga coincided with the last rehearsals for the caramelles, songs about new life and pretty girls and the farewell to salt cod that are sung in the streets and squares during Easter. I had met Queralt, a music student who conducted the choir, and she was perfectly at ease with my timid suggestion that I might listen in on a rehearsal. The second time she said, “You can come again, but only if you sing!” I came; some people were unabashedly off-key and the music was easy to grasp. So I sang too. The singers were curious and friendly: through the choir’s varied membership I gained entree into many social milieux. And my appearance in the choir after so short a time in the town garnered me a good deal of recognition and good will.
Then came the sardanes of Sant Jordi, the feast of the patron of Catalonia on April 23. The caramelles had not been so bad, but the prospect of dancing in public brought back all of those humiliating evenings at the Evanston Women’s Club, where a crowd of spotty twelve-year-olds were put through the waltz, the cha-cha, and other disciplines judged desirable for the acquisition of gender decorum. With me, left-handed and undergrown, it had left nothing but a determination never to dance again. Now I was standing behind the dancers in the ring, trying desperately to ascertain which foot went forward first. They kept saying, “Just try it!” as I insisted that I hadn’t gotten it down yet. It’s Sant Jordi, their looks said; are you with us or aren’t you? Queralt took me by the hand and dragged me into the circle; the other dancers gave me encouraging smiles, and Queralt’s sister Alba counted the steps for me. On the next occasions I bounced through as best I could, and by the last sardanes after the Sunday night Patum I had it almost down. After the last shout of “Visca!” the boy next to me, Jordi, turned to me and said, “Girl, I congratulate you! An American who speaks Catalan and dances sardanes! There are people who’ve lived here all their lives and never learned to do either.” Jordi is the child of Galician immigrants and earned his integration through performance: the Scouts, the town band, political demonstrations, the sardana, speaking Catalan. He more than anyone understands the importance of participation.
Beyond that came the Patum and all the coercions of which I have spoken; the insistence that I participate fully and as a Berguedan would. The Berguedans demanded certain kinds of performances from me and offered in exchange true understanding.
The Berguedans do not believe in translation, but in socialization. To know them, they say, you must become one of them. I was not a child, of course, and could not regain the time lost; I would never have the depth of historical experience that they do, through their own and their parents’ memories. But they made allowances for this, telling me things, taking me on excursions, and digging through their attics for old programs and pictures to show me. I was allowed enough “research” to repair in part the unavoidable deficiencies of my socialization.
They humbled me too. At the end of my second visit I was sitting with two men who began to talk about an old patumaire, now dead, who had been famous for … Agustí saw my professional ears prick up and said to me, “You, Dorothy, know many things but you don’t know everything yet.” “Not by a long shot,” I said, to please him. “Not by a long shot,” he agreed complacently. Another time Ritxi, the director of the municipal music school, grinned at me and said, “Ah, there’s lots that you don’t know! I’ve got old scores from the Patum that you’ve
