Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

The Czar entered the oak tree through an opening in the trunk and did not come out. Cristina waited for several hours, immobile as a statue. Raucous snoring from within the tree startled her out of her stillness. She walked cautiously through the opening and found seven stairs that led down to a cave. On a straw pallet with neither blankets nor pillow lay Alexander I. Wearing a white cassock and a crippled Christ that hung from a bone necklace, he was deeply asleep, lit up by a candle.

Aside from three dead serpents on a hook and an icon of the Virgin surrounded by sheep, offering her bosom to the Child, the place was empty — movingly so in its voluntary poverty. The Czar, master of immense Russia, was living there, solitary, eating reptiles, transformed into a saint, a degenerate. Cristina bowed over the bridegroom of her nightly dreams, made the sign of the cross, and left without turning her back on the Czar. She galloped back to the manor. A hurricane-like rain soaked her to the skin, but she never noticed; her body and soul were burning.

She shouted to wake the servants. She had the furniture from the grand salon thrown out into the yard and installed a herd of sheep. She lived for a month among the animals with the windows closed, never leaving, not caring that the animals’ dung was staining the sumptuous Turkish rugs. She suffused herself with animals’ odor. When the full moon came, she drove the sheep to the edge of the forest, tied them up at the foot of a tree, and killed one in order to skin it. Then, naked, she covered herself with the still-warm skin and got down on all fours, her backside toward the oak.

She’d chosen a corner covered by a thicket so the moonlight wouldn’t expose her. The bleating of the sheep attracted the Czar who, transformed into a monster, threw himself on top of the most appetizing sheep. Cristina felt the impact, stifling a shout of happy pain. Her hymen, hardened by so many years of waiting, exploded into fragments that cut her like shards of glass. None of this kept her from pushing toward the testicles, squeezing out the longed-for liquor. The hermit ejaculated with monumental spasms and then sank his teeth into the Cristina’s neck, trying to sever her aorta. Cristina had developed masculine muscles in her legs from so much riding: they were as strong as tree trunks. She slipped free and fought her attacker, squeezing his torso between her thighs and cutting off his air. Then she tied him on his back to some roots. Paying no attention to his howls of fury, she sat on top of him, making herself seven times the repository of his sperm. At the end of the final orgasm, the man wept, muttering, “Forgive me, my God!” and fainted.

Cristina carried him in her arms to the great oak and, after bathing him in the cold water, brought him to where her flock was, dressed him in the white cassock, and put him to sleep. Soon fever made the Emperor delirious. He was seeing lascivious sheep coming to devour his testicles, all wearing his mother’s velvet and ermine dresses. At dawn, when his fever dropped and he recovered his senses, he kissed Cristina’s hands to show his gratitude. Nothing had ever been easy for him. Dominated by his family, forced into marrying a woman he did not love, unable to make her pregnant, obliged to be an accomplice to his father’s murderers, overwhelmed by power, unsuccessful in leading his people to freedom, he abandoned everything, trying to become a saint. But his soul was rotten.

As a child, he was often sent to study with his grandmother, Catherine the Great. On her lap, he learned military strategy, politics, and many other things. As she spoke to him about her battles, court intrigue, and the engagement of her granddaughter to King Gustav of Sweden, the old woman slid her arthritic hand into his trousers and played with his penis. Then on her knees before him, with an rapacious, imperious look on her face, she sank her rotten teeth into his foreskin. He didn’t dare move, for he feared amputation. Later, after an interminable moment, she would release him and laugh like a crow, showing the stinking depths of her throat.

He hated his grandmother, his mother, and his wife. Three women but at the same time one woman. He sought refuge in the Virgin Mary. He thought that in the solitude of his arboreal hideaway, he would attain sainthood, but one night, when the moon was full, the nightmare began. Possessed by a bestial desire, he was forced to rape and slaughter herds of sheep. Now, after what Cristina had done for him, he realized that beneath the skin of those animals he was seeing the naked bodies of the women who smothered and perverted his youth: Catherine, Maria Feodorovna, and Isabel.

Cristina, her eyes wet with tears, listened without saying a word. It wasn’t an emperor speaking to her, but God. Alexander I picked up a shepherd’s crook, kissed her on the forehead, and bade farewell to her and the world. He would walk to Siberia, and beyond, reaching the polar ice where he would die in the whiteness and purifying cold. Cristina watched him drift away among the trees. The green leaves that hid him also made him disappear from her life. Feeling herself to be pregnant, she returned to her manor; gathered together servants and administrators to announce that she would be living in the forest as a hermit. She promised to visit them every lunar month to see to the proper functioning of the estate, and then she returned to the oak of her dreams.

There, dressed in a white cossack, she prays, bathes in the waterfall, eats snakes, gives birth to Ivan, cuts the umbilical cord with her teeth, and devours the placenta. She goes on living that way for fifteen years. She sprouts a white moustache and a beard of fine, translucent hair. She doesn’t teach her son to read or write. When the boy’s pubis blackens and he starts to get erections every time he looks at the icon of the Virgin, Cristina offers him a sheep so he can vent his passion. For many days the boy doesn’t touch the animal, but when the full moon comes, he throws himself on top of it, penetrates it, bellowing angrily, ejaculates, bites open its stomach, and enjoys himself while pouring out its guts. His mother thinks it’s a miracle. She believes that within Ivan’s body lives the spirit of the Emperor. She brings sheep until the boy, transformed into a powerful giant, rolls around in the mud and then leaps from tree to tree, making his way to the farms of her servants. At dawn, he returns, covered with blood. Then he sleeps, smiling and satisfied. In the morning, when Cristina goes to the manor house and delivers her monthly abuse to the servants, she hears talk of the night before, when eight women were raped and torn apart. Cristina takes a knife from the kitchen and gallops out to the oak tree to castrate her son. She’s caught in a blizzard. Dropping from fatigue, she reaches the refuge, where a hungry bear attacks her. Hearing her screams, Ivan comes out of the oak tree just in time to see the enormous beast bite off his mother’s head. He picks up the kitchen knife and buries it in the bear’s heart. He feels happy as never before. He looks toward heaven and says, “I forgive you, my God.” With the skin of the bear he makes a coat and a mask. He then takes possession of his mother’s estate and chooses ten of the most muscular servants. He cuts off their testicles and makes them his personal guard. So the authorities will suspect nothing, he commits his murders in the Jewish villages, covered by anti-Semitism. One day, he attacks the school of the Vilna Gaon. When he sees Felicidad, he realizes that his entire being, transformed into a beast, was seeking a tamer. That fragile woman is his soul. To destroy her would mean immersing himself forever in darkness. He gives himself to her as only an animal can. His ferocity now is obedience. Felicidad is the Law. If she unleashes him, he will eviscerate the world. Felicidad, descendant of countless lion tamers, understands that her existence only acquires meaning by dominating the beast. That beast is a part of her, her home, her foundation. If before she languished, far from the wetlands that could nourish her flower of fire, now, standing before that beautiful monster, she feels herself reborn. By dominating vice, she will bring virtue to the world. Virtue, which is nothing more than putrefaction transformed. In order for the man to become light, the woman will have to extinguish her lamp in the darkness. She will unite her life to that of the murderer to calm his voracity, make him release the prey, convert his roars into prayers, teach him to give and receive at the same time, transform him into a prism that will absorb colors and transform them into a single ray.