The guites come out for the Wednesday and Saturday passacarrers and for the Patums in the plaça, and no one has ever tried to set music to them. They chase the crowd with the fuets in their mouths (one fuet for the noon Patum and the passacarrers, three for the night Patum), and move through the available space as the spirit of the moment moves them. Each guita, however, has its characteristic gestures.
The Guita Grossa (Big Guita) runs through the plaça, then lowers its neck and spins so that the surrounding crowd has to fall to the ground to avoid getting hit. It lifts its head to the first-floor balconies and rattles its fuets against the metal rails, forcing the spectators back. Its most typical play is against the barana, the broad stone barrier rising along the north side of the plaça. The guitaire in front jumps up on the barana, which has crowds of people leaning against it; he takes the neck of the Guita and runs it up and down the length of the barana. The crowd ducks down, away from the fuets: at the bottom, some brave soul always clings to the lamppost long enough to get burned before jumping down. Some people bring old umbrellas—often full of holes from a previous Patum—to engage the Guita in combat. The Guita draws back as it is about to burst, and after the explosion takes a few humping steps forward, swinging its head back and forth and ringing its bell.
The Guita Xica (Little Guita) is also called the Guita Boja (Mad Guita) because of its greater speed and flexibility. Like the Grossa, the Xica runs and spins in the plaça; the crowd chases it and has to react quickly. The Xica’s neck is too short for much play with balconies and barana. Rather, it specializes in invading inappropriate spaces: it will go behind the barana, where the crowd is huddling for protection, or up in the musicians’ balcony or inside a bar or up the stairs of City Hall. There is greater scope for improvisation during the passacarrers, so the Xica often has more protagonism there than in the plaça.
The mule is a richly evocative animal in the Catalan mountains. Stronger, hardier, and more surefooted than a horse, it was of great practical importance in forestry, farming, hauling, and even mining. At the same time, its obstinacy and temper were proverbial. It was associated with disruptive, nonreproductive female sexuality in a host of proverbs: “Do not trust the back of a mule or the front of a woman” (Amades 1950–69, 2, 1200); its uneasy presence in the farmyard was like that of the young wife in the household. Several blasons populaires advise the prudent man not to get a wife or a mule from certain villages: they were foreign elements that had to be introduced with great case. In early-modern elite culture in Catalonia, it was the most common simile for manual laborers, who required a strong hand to be kept obedient (Amelang 1986, 150–51). Its particular untrustworthiness was that of workers and women, whose apparent domestication could not be counted on: “a meek mule kills its master” (Gomis 1910, 162). Catalan landowners could not maintain their estates without workers, wives, or mules, but each was felt to threaten the precariously enclosed order and to require repression accordingly. The name change of Berga’s Guita—unique among Catalan mules—from mulassa to mulaguita and finally, by the early twentieth century, simply guita—highlights the mule’s disruptive qualities.
The guitaires are divided into two comparses of about twenty young men each, but dress the same, in black smocks with red felt fringe, and battered shapeless hats to protect themselves from the sparks. These smocks or bates are workmen’s clothing, and distinguish the guitaires from all other comparsa members.
ÀLIGA
The Àliga (eagle) is a papier-mâché and plaster effigy on a wooden armature with a grille in its breast for its carrier, concealed to the legs, to see through. It is painted a dark greenish brown and is meticulously sculpted, with an elegant curve to its head and neck, scalelike “feathers,” and a long, straight tail. It wears a crown—at present that of the Counts of Barcelona rather than the Kings of Spain—and carries carnations or boxwood tied with Catalan-flag ribbon in its beak; in the old days it carried a live dove. The three aligots—the carrier and the two men who dance on either side of him—wear blouses and loose flowered knee-breeches with kerchiefs of the same material, and the standard espardenyes. Tight around each waist is the faixa, a broad wool sash once worn by peasants, which supports the back under the great weight of the eagle.
The Àliga dances only for the Patum in the plaça. Its dance begins with the Àliga in the middle and the two aligots on either side mimicking its steps. It bows to the parish church and to City Hall, and the music begins in a slow 2/4. The dancers do a punteig (pointing, or lacing), each marking a square around himself on the stones of the plaça with the tips of his toes. When the music changes to a faster 6/8, the eagle starts to sway and then skip from side to side, each time increasing the breadth of the movement. The two aligots are now assisting the eagle from without, helping the carrier to keep his balance. With another accelerando in the music, the eagle breaks out of position and skips in a larger circle, the crowd following the tail, and the aligots helping it to turn. At the end of the dance the Àliga spins quickly on itself, aligots and crowd dropping to the ground to avoid a blow from the hard tail, which is reputed to have killed a soldier once. The aligots help the dizzy dancer to stop, and the eagle bows once more to the church and the Ajuntament before retiring.
The Àliga is the most jealously guarded comparsa: to dance the eagle requires great strength and balance, and there has never been any question of letting a woman do it. There are only three aligots at a given time, who take turns at dancing the eagle itself.
Unique to the Països Catalans, the àliga is historically an entremes with special privileges, dancing alone inside the church or in front of the Sacrament in the Corpus Christi procession. Though its original processional role may have been as the emblem of Saint John, its heraldic associations soon added another resonance, and its primary significance in Catalan processions has been as a civic symbol, the predominant interpretation in Berga. In any case, if not a two-headed eagle, it is on excellent terms with both Church and State. It was a prestige entremes, expensive to make and maintain, belonging only to important populations, and the balance of the evidence suggests that it was not a stable part of the Patum until the late eighteenth century, when the city’s increasing importance as a textile center both enhanced its prosperity and encouraged its ambitions.
Figure 5. The Àliga bowing. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
Like mules, eagles have proverbial status in the Catalan Pyrenees, embodying not humility but the opposite extreme. The local varieties of eagle are the “royal” and the “imperial,” and the eagle is familiar as the king of birds (as in the internationally known “Cant dels Ocells,” the Carol of the Birds). The eagle is conscious of its station and dignity: “the eagle does not chase flies” (Gomis 1910). Like royalty and like the Host before which it walked in the procession, the eagle is associated with light and sun and the gaze. “To see more than an eagle” is to have superlative sight; the eagle is said to be the only animal able to look directly into the sun (Gomis 1910). Flying higher than any other bird, the eagle has the omniscient gaze of power, seeing the world as God sees it, and in turn is visible to the admiring gaze of the earthbound, like the elite in the festival balcony. Not that those below will always admire: to take down a pretentious person is “to throw the eagle to the ground” (Gomis 1910). But eagles must be treated with care, as their anger is redoubtable: to abandon oneself to rage is “to give oneself up to the eagles”—sometimes “to give oneself up to the devils.” The Berguedan eagle shares the gesture of the threatening spin with its antithesis, the Guita, and the tender live dove it once carried in its curved beak is a nice emblem of the ambiguities of power.
NANS VELLS
The Old Dwarfs belong to the common Iberian genre known as nans or capgrossos (bigheads) in Catalonia and cabezudos (bigheads) in Spain. A nan is a papier-mâché and plaster head worn over the head of the dancer, who sees through the open mouth. Very well-made, the dwarfs are caricatures rather than idealized figures. The four Nans Veils are all male, with long noses, melancholy