Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 44

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Popular Culture Review

forgotten memory of the brigand king and his gold. Through one
chamber after another she proceeds and finds other remains, utensils,
gold jewelry, and precious treasures. When she comes back to the
lucumo, she watches in horror as the "form of the dead warrior"
crumbles away. In an awkward move, Ouida crosses romance with
realism in a scientific explanation: "The air and light entering with
her, after exclusion for two thousand years or more, reached the
oxidized armor, the recumbent corpse, and melted them back to dust.
Soon, where the warrior, who looked to her but sleeping, had been
stretched on his cold bed, there was nothing but a few gray ashes.
She stood motionless as though she were changed to marble; a sort of
trance had fallen upon her" (504). Musa feels "sublimity of awe" and
"infinite" pity for the dead king. (The contents of other chambers do
not suffer the lucumo's fate because they had been partially exposed
to air!) Her Christian upbringing only confuses her. "Was it death?
was it life?" Was it a "god" or a "devil"? "Why had he not taken
her too?" Death is a male: "she had broken in upon [Death], and he
in wrath had claimed her." On this thought she loses consciousness.
When she wakes it is night: "The dead had risen and fled:" the
lucumo is in the "lustre" of the sky, the moon is the dead lucumo's
shield, the shooting star his spear. In her reverie she has
transformed the dead lucumo into an all-powerful god. To Joconda's
inquiry as to where she had been, Musa responds, "I have seen E>eath,
and it is beautiful" (506), as if beauty no less than love were to ease
the path between life and death, llte child has obviously found a
tomb and Joconda tells her to keep it secret--the "father" remains the
secret—though Joconda cannot fathom the process of oxidation and the
lucumo's disappearance which she puts down to the fact that Musa
must have "dreamed" (507). "But the earth,—is it all a grave?"
Musa asks, "Did God make men and women?" Musa had been
abandoned by her real father; her experience of the uncanny, the
vanished lucum o as a substitute father, prompts her sexual
awakening. Referring to the sensual, orgiastic, and bestial forms, she
remarks, "Those people [in the tomb] are my kindred," to which
joconda replies: "no one knows whence you come" (507).
From time to time Musa returns to the lucumo's tomb, wanting to
learn the "secrets" (510) of the grave, which have been fused in her