The Cadence of Gypsies

by Barbara Casey

  Jennifer was a wild child. A musical prodigy from the age of two, she had kept her parents in a state of exhaustion with her sudden and unexplained emotional outbursts followed by days of deep depression. A long line of pediatricians was consulted, along with an equally long list of different drugs prescribed, but Jennifer remained a child who could not and would not be controlled. Public schools were out of the question; she had to be taught by private tutoring.

  By the time she reached the age of puberty, she had composed a symphony for full orchestra, a fugue that she had also transcribed into a rondo, numerous individual pieces that focused on two or three single instruments such as the piano, violin and cello, and a piano sonata. It was the sonata that gained her world-wide prominence when she performed it at Carnegie Hall over Thanksgiving the year she turned 13. She had not performed again since then, at least not in public.

  The temper tantrums and bouts with depression became less frequent for a while, and her parents began to travel to Europe. Sometimes they would take Jennifer. As long as she had her portfolio filled with blank, eight-stave paper with her in which she could write down the music that filled her very being, then things might be all right. But not always. There were still problems and, often, embarrassing moments. Gradually, Jennifer’s parents began leaving Jennifer behind with an assortment of hired help. They were escaping from her and her unpredictable behavior, and Jennifer knew it. They didn’t know how to control her, any more than she knew how to control herself.

  Ironically, it was when they had returned from a trip to England and had gone to the neighborhood grocery store for a few items when the accident occurred. Both were killed instantly. There were no close relatives, at least none who were willing to take on the responsibility of caring for Jennifer. So with a little over a year to go before she could be considered an adult, Jennifer was placed in the Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women. They had an excellent music department and art department, both nationally recognized, she was assured, where she could continue her studies.

  The “excellent” music and art departments, however, weren’t prepared for Jennifer. At 16 years of age she possessed more talent than the six faculty members making up the two departments put together. It would have been a disaster if it hadn’t been for Dara and Mackenzie. Like Jennifer, they also were considered different—because they were. They understood what it was like to try to communicate on a level where others would understand, but not succeed. To want to be included, but feeling resentful because they never were and, after all, what difference did it make? To want desperately to be like everyone else, but knowing that was impossible—because they weren’t.

  Jennifer immediately fit in as a FIG. When her temper got out of control, it was Dara who could calm her. When she needed space and solitude because the pictures filling her head had changed into so many notes that she couldn’t write them down fast enough, Mackenzie understood and protected her. For a while, they just had each other—the three of them. Then Carolina came. Instinctively they knew Carolina was one of them, and they loved her for it.

  Now, in the quiet of her room, Jennifer concentrated on the colorful picture in her mind as it changed into a musical cadence. What was it saying? What was its meaning? It was beating out musical notes, and she began rapidly writing them down on eight-stave musical paper illuminated by a flashlight.

  * * *

  Signora De Rossa couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about the gypsy she had seen that day on her way to lunch. Even though it had been many years ago, she recognized her. Her dark skin and high cheekbones; and those eyes—penetrating all that she saw, yet revealing nothing. She had always known that one day she would return.

  Young and still impressionable, the signora had just started working at the records office all those years ago. Anthony Liruso was head of the department then, an outsider from the Calabria region, and he was determined to get rid of the gypsies in the area. “They are a nuisance, and they bring crime,” he had told her. He had taken her with him on that particular day to where he had heard a gypsy was selling potions with a small child. He found them in the gardens of the Old Villa. She would never forget how the gypsy had screamed at him as he ripped the little girl from her arms. She pleaded with him to return the child to the gypsy. Even though the child didn’t look like a gypsy, she felt that she really belonged to the gypsy woman. But he was determined. In just a short time, Liruso arranged for an American couple to adopt her.

  The gypsy woman came one time after that, seeking her out, carrying a small wooden box that was to be given to the child when she reached the age of 18. Because the gypsy woman trusted her, Signora De Rossa had taken it, promising to somehow get it to her daughter. It was only days later when Liruso suddenly died. Heart attack, the coroner said. Some of her colleagues said it was because he wasn’t from the Lazio region, he didn’t know their ways. He had been brought up on thick tomato sauces instead of the lighter garlic sauces; the olive oil wasn’t as good in the Calabria region—it had weakened his heart. But she knew better. She had heard the screams of the distraught gypsy mother; and she knew she had placed a curse on him.

  Eventually, after years of hard work and dedication to her job, Signora De Rossa became head of the records office, and it was soon after that she was contacted by a woman from America trying to get information on her birth and adoption. Signora De Rossa knew immediately who the young woman was, and more than anything she wanted to help her. She wanted to help her for the gypsy woman’s sake. But the Italian laws forbade her from giving her what she asked. So, instead, she gave her information about Italian adoptions in general, and about how the system worked against the gypsies and why. Each bit of information she gave to Carolina was a clue to Carolina’s past.

  Carolina was bright. It didn’t take her long to make the correct assumptions. And now her mother—the gypsy woman—had returned. Signora De Rossa would call Carolina, this time giving her the background information of her birth name. She would do it because Liruso had made a mistake by taking the little girl from her mother. She would do it for the gypsy woman.

  Chapter 9

  Lyuba was awakened by shouts coming from the Bandoleer’s trailer. She covered herself with her robe and stepped out into the early morning light. It was Rupa, Bakro’s mother.

  “I will not have your son frightening Bakro. You need to punish Milosh. He has no compassion for others.”

  Djidjo, the Bandoleer’s wife, placed her fists on her wide hips. “Maybe you make your son timid,” she yelled into the face of the other woman. “You always wanted a daughter.” This was a terrible insult, and the other gypsies who had been awakened by the arguing women watched in stunned silence.

  Lyuba had watched the Bandoleer leave camp in the night—to where, she did not know. He needed to be here now and stop this nonsense before it got worse. It was not good for the morale of the tribe. Now, more than ever, they needed to be united.

  Rupa spat on the ground in front of Djidjo, then turned and walked away. She had made her point, as had Djidjo. Nothing more needed to be said—until next time.

  Milosh watched from the darkness of the trailer. He knew he had gotten away with it again—putting curses on the younger children. None of the other children had told on him though—only Bakro. He would make Bakro pay. Quietly he slipped back into his bed and pretended to be asleep when his mother came in and stood over him. Her anger would cool and she would forget. But he would not; he would make Bakro regret telling his mother.

  Lyuba went back inside her hut and began preparations for the day. She would work extra hard with Milosh when he and the other children came to learn. She needed to stop the evil that was filling his spirit before it was too late.

  * * *

  The FIGs were awake, showered, and dressed hours before the other residents. They spent that quiet time they had before breakfast in Dara’s room going over the manuscript together and getting more familiar with its unusual constru
ction: the so-called divisions.

  “What we have here is the equivalent of 246 quarto pages, but there seems to be some pages missing,” said Dara, her back pressed against the headboard of her bed. “Which might be what Carolina has.”

  Jennifer was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, manuscript pages scattered around her. “There are 212 pages with text and drawings, 33 pages contain text only, and the last page contains what might be the Key.”

  “The way I see it, this is how the five categories of the manuscript are divided.” Mackenzie’s calculator, which applied logarithms and other difficult mathematical calculations and stored information much like a tiny computer, was attached to the waistband on her skirt. She detached it from her waist and punched several buttons. “The first and largest section—the botanical—contains 130 pages of plant drawings with accompanying text. The second, which is the astrological and astronomical section, contains twenty-six pages of drawings. The third section contains four pages of text and twenty-eight drawings, which appear to be biological in nature. The fourth section contains thirty-four pages of drawings which are pharmaceutical in nature. Finally, the last section contains twenty-three pages of text arranged in short paragraphs, each beginning with a star. This section is sometimes referred to as the recipes section, and might have been some sort of calendar or almanac. Page 24 of this section contains the Key only, which might have been a previous owner’s attempt to decipher the thing.” She put the calculator back in its holder. “I applied ELS—Equal Distance Letter Sequence Code—to the entire text, and nothing works out.”

  “Have you been able to tell anything about the language?” Jennifer asked Dara.

  “For one thing, none of the Romance languages could be the base for the words in the text, but there is a certain syntax and language-specific word order similar to Sanskrit. Also, there is a repetitiousness of the text.”

  “Like a cadence,” Jennifer said.

  Dara nodded. “I also checked the entropy, which is a numerical measure of the randomness of text. The lower the entropy, the less random and the more repetitious it is. The entropy of what we have here is lower than that of most human languages; only some Polynesian languages are as low.” She picked up several pages. “There are also some peculiarities worth noting: The text has very few apparent corrections; the structure of words is extremely rigid; and some characters in the key-like sequences don’t appear anywhere else in the manuscript.

  “When I use Zipf’s law of word frequencies, the text follows roughly the 1st and 2nd, characteristic of a natural language.”

  “And Zipf’s law is what?” asked Jennifer.

  “Originally, Zipf’s law stated that in a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. So, the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, and so on. The term has come to be used to refer to any of a family of related power law probability distributions.”

  “If I didn’t know any better, I would say someone wrote the same manuscript in several languages, cut them all up into pieces, threw them into the air, and then pieced them back together again no matter which piece with what language landed where,” said Mackenzie. “Anything special about the drawings, Jennifer?”

  “Many of them are crudely drawn, and according to what I was able to find on the Internet last night, many scientists feel that some of the drawings of plants and galaxies were invented.”

  “What if…” Dara hesitated, thinking about what she wanted to say, “What if this is something that was written over 500 years ago by gypsies? After all, they were known to borrow whatever they needed to suit their purposes—including language. What if this was like their bible or book of life as they understood it, each section addressing particular issues—like medicine, or religion, or science, or astronomy.” She looked at her two friends to see if they were following her. They were. “I mean, it would be nothing for them to create an entirely unique language unknown to man with pieces and bits taken from their own experiences as well as taken from other sources.”

  “What an idea,” said Mackenzie.

  “Which might explain why that page with the same script was with Carolina’s birth certificate,” continued Jennifer. “Carolina said her birth parents were gypsies.”

  “Which makes Carolina a gypsy, too,” added Mackenzie.

  “And that might explain why they wanted that page to be part of her inheritance,” said Dara, completing the thought.

  Just then the bell rang indicating it was time to go to breakfast. They had already spent five hours since getting up working on the manuscript. They quickly put away the papers and headed for the cafeteria. Carolina had told them she wanted to take them into town after breakfast that morning to shop for clothes suitable for travel. They had never felt happier.

  * * *

  Carolina had set her alarm for 5 a.m. She wanted to call Signora De Rossa who worked in the records office in the town of Frascati. There was a six-hour time difference, so by calling that early on Eastern Standard Time, she hoped to catch her before she went to lunch. She hoped the signora would be able to suggest a place where she and the FIGs could stay.

  Carolina met Signora De Rossa when she first started researching the information on her birth certificate. She had been surprised to learn there even was such an office, especially in a town with a population that numbered only 22,000, less than half the size of Chapel Hill. Being fluent in Italian, Carolina easily navigated the Italian version of “red tape” until she eventually wound up talking to Signora Lucia De Rossa who was head of the records office. When Carolina explained that she was looking for information about her birth parents and her own birth and infancy, Signora De Rossa seemed to take a special interest. Carolina soon learned why. Hers was one of the first cases the signora had been involved in when she started working in the records office. They had talked several times since then, and each time Signora De Rossa had given Carolina additional information concerning her background.

  “It is so good to hear from you, Carolina.” Carolina smiled when she heard the familiar voice heavily flavored with an Italian accent. “I was going to call you today. I think I have some more information that might interest you.”

  Carolina immediately felt the adrenaline surge as she usually did whenever she talked to Signora De Rossa and grabbed the pad of paper and pen she always kept handy.

  “The Lovel name is from an old and powerful English family. The gypsies who adopted it seem to have imagined that it had something to do with love for they translated it by Camio or Caumio, that which is lovely or amiable. Camio is connected with the Sanscrit Cama, which also signifies love, and is the appellation of the Hindoo god of love. If all tales be true, then those who are born by that divinity are black, which is perhaps why the gypsy tribe adopted it. The Lovel tribe is decidedly the darkest of all the Anglo-Egyptian families. They are generally called by the race the Kaulo Camioes, the Black Comelies.

  “Now, this is where it gets interesting as far as you are concerned. There was a branch of Lovels that split from the original English tribe and settled in Italy, around the area of Frascati, where your birth certificate indicates you were born. I have been able to trace their origins as far back as the fourteenth century. There is a good possibility that they were around even before that, but instead of being known as gypsies back then, they were called land tramps. Does any of this make sense to you, Carolina?”

  Carolina laughed. “Well, it makes sense, Signora De Rossa, except I am not black. I have dark hair, but my eyes are green, and I have a pale complexion with freckles.”

  The signora was prepared. “There might be an explanation for that.” She put her mouth closer to the phone receiver and lowered her voice. “It is common knowledge that gypsies steal children—pretty children—usually in the community near
where they are camped. But they also steal children from other gypsy tribes. It is a problem that continues even today. It is not widely known, but we have a special unit within our guardia di financa who do nothing but search the gypsy camps for children who obviously do not have gypsy characteristics—such as green or blue eyes and fair complexions.”

  “What happens to the children?” asked Carolina.

  “They are removed and placed into State custody.”

  Carolina was astonished. How could the police assume, based on physical appearance alone, that the children had been stolen?

  “There are several published reasons for the removal of these children, the most common being sfruttamento di minori.”

  “Exploitation of minors,” Carolina translated.

  “That is correct. If children are caught begging or selling knick-knacks either on their own or even in the presence of their parents, it is breaking the law. Truancy is another reason given. Mostly, gypsy children are taught within the camps where they live. Their parents do not trust outsiders and, therefore, do not allow their children to attend public schools. Also, unsanitary conditions might be used as a reason to remove a child from its gypsy parents.”

  “What happens to these children once they are in State custody?”

  “Once the child is in State custody, it is rarely returned to the gypsy family. It is usually put up for adoption.” Signora De Rossa waited before continuing. “So, you see, Carolina, there are a number of things that might explain what happened to you. You might have been born into a gypsy family, but stolen by the black tribe, which would explain why you don’t have the typical Lovel characteristics and features. Then, because you obviously didn’t look like a member of the Lovel tribe, you might have been made a ward of the State and later adopted.” The signora waited for Carolina to grasp what she was telling her. “Also, Carolina, there are those instances when a child such as yourself, with no gypsy physical characteristics, is born into the black tribe without any logical explanation. It just happens.”