Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky Page A

Czar appeared naked, his pubis streaming blood. He offered her his severed member so she could carry it between her legs. Cristina awoke screaming. Someone was knocking on her bedroom door, a messenger: “Alexander I is dead!”
    Foaming with rage, she called the servants and whipped them across the mouth until they cried. Later, in the court, the rumor circulated that the Czar, exhausted by power, had fled to Siberia to live as a holy hermit. The corpse with the rotten face that was seen in the imperial coffin belonged to his syphilitic cousin. To go on living, Cristina forced herself to believe those tales.
    Five years after the possibly false death of Alexander I, the murder of sheep began. With each full moon, there appeared on the farms near the imperial forest female sheep, their sex and anus destroyed and showing traces of sperm a doctor identified as human. The animals were raped, their throats bitten through, their stomachs ripped open, and their intestines scattered in an attempt to form letters.
    One night, when the moon was at its fullest, Cristina tied up a flock of sheep at the entrance to the forest and waited, hiding in a ditch. After a few hours, a naked man covered with mud and grunting like a savage beast appeared. He raped the animals, pulled off their heads, yanked out their intestines and used them to write, “Forgive me, my God.” Then he fled into the brush.
    Cristina, with the skill of a hunter, followed his tracks, which led to an enormous oak. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it would break her ribs. The tree was identical to the one in her dreams. How many times, at the top of the old tree, had she given herself to her beloved? She’d lost count. The man, standing under a small waterfall, began to wash himself with a surprising delicacy. Soon the cold stream cleansed him of mud and blood. In the silvery light, Cristina, hidden in the thicket, could make out some details of that firm body, which seemed to be about fifty years of age. By piecing together the shape of his nails, the arc of his eyebrows, his protruding lower lip, his marmoreal skin, the beauty mark on his left ear, his blue eyes, his slight limp, and the horizontal wrinkle that furrowed the nape of his neck, Cristina concluded that the man was His Majesty Alexander I, Emperor of Russia. Holding back a scream, trying to be silent, she knelt in exaltation.
    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