Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 45

Oiuda's Family Romance

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mind with the secrets of sexuality. A few years pass and the aged
Joconda makes Musa vow not to give herself in love without the
"blessing of Church" (517). In a letter to her family in the Alps, she
imparts the secret of Musa's birth. One night, Musa pulls a drowning
man to shore, revives him -he "woke to life" (531)-and shelters him
in the tomb. He is Satumino Mastama, escaped from Gorgona, and
begging her now for a knife and food: "I am dead and buried. But if I
had a knife!" (533). The castration theme is complicated by the fact
that Ouida relates the scene from Musa's perspective: his "bronze
like shoulders glistened . . . he sat erect on the beach regaining
strength and consciousness with each breath; the heat of the night
was around them like steam: it seemed to her startled fancy as if his
eyes and his mouth gave out fire." Again Musa experiences the spell
of the demonic uncanny, the return of the dead lucumo with the
breath of life: "She was rooted to the ground as by some spell."
Mastama even has the "bronze-like" sheen of the lucumo's "lustre."
(Various bronze metaphors link Musa to the lucumo and Mastama
[483,489, 743, 755, 800].) Her one childhood memory of her father is
that he kissed her goodbye so tightly that "something cold and
bright," his dagger, "hurt her" till he put it away; then she recalls
smoke and gunfire: the ambush (488). Now he returns asking for the
dagger, which she goes to procure, thereby giving back his "life."
Mastama's name traces to the Etruscan warrior and strongman
Macstama, one of the heroes of Vulci. In the Francois tomb mural
discovered in 1857, Macstama cuts the cords that bind Caile Vipinas,
an appropriate legend for an escap>ed brigand chieftain. Mac