See Salon story on Destination: Gypsy Europe. Despite their historical distrust of the written word, Europe’s Gypsies have a growing — and captivating — literary tradition.
When he walked off toward a ramshackle shed, leaving the book on the ground, I strolled across to see what he had just smoked — a Slovak translation of the Romanian writer Emile Cioran. Nothing goes without saying. The boy had taken the page down into his lungs.
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When the boy takes Emile Cioran down into his lungs, are we meant to understand that he is taking the writer’s ideas into himself? Cioran was at first (as a Romanian writer, as he’s referenced here) a fan of Hitler, fascism, and totalitarianism. The literal consumption of a book is a great image.
Getting all metaphorical on me before reading the story are you?
I had a gypsy patient once. She was 14, had Asperger’s disorder, a diluted form of autism. Persons with Aspergers have an overwhelming special interest in things like train schedules or mechanical objects. They usually don’t suffer from the cognitive deficits common in autistic children. In fact they can become savants of their special interest.
Her special interest was steamy romance novels. She never tired of reading the same novels over and over. As she was in residential treatment with 11 other teenagers, it was in our best interest to keep her away from these novels as she tended to remove all her clothes when reading them. Don’t ask me why, she just did.
I bought a book on gypsies and used to speak in Romani with her, the gypsy language that sounds something like Sanskrit as the gypsies originated in what is now Afghanistan.
She could name every bush and tree on the property and could tell me their medicinal properties. Her aunt was a herbalist and healer. Her grandfather was banned from the Department of Social Services because he used to put curses on the staff. He was a drabengo, or “man of poison.”
People used to laugh at him, but I thought his curses worked as no one at DSS ever seemed to get any smarter.
Her mother had abandoned her at a truck stop. It was an unhappy family, and unhappy in its own very unique way.
Despite the heroic efforts of the staff and 800 mgs of Haldol a day, we never made a dent in modifying her behavior. The last place an Asperger’s child wants to be is in the company of a lot of strangers. It’s just too much stimulation and they can’t filter it out.
A foster family took her on, and I think her story has (or had, last I heard) a happy ending. She lost a great deal of weight, started attending a real school, and got her own private room where she could consume as many romance novels as shelves would allow.