Where the Bird Sings Best (10 page)

When Cristina was fifteen, the French governess, imported as a birthday present, was raped the night she arrived. Ivan, poisoned by alcohol, his buttocks filthy with excrement, howling like a dog, smashed the door down with an ax, threw himself on top of the young woman, squeezed her breasts until they burst, and, at the moment he achieved his orgasm, bit off her nose. The piece of flesh choked him to death. The governess’ heart stopped, and Ivan suffocated. Cristina was left alone, surrounded by myriad attendants, servants, and serfs.

Her father was buried in the family mausoleum and the governess next to some boulders in the forest. That year, the winter was harsher than ever. On three occasions, the wolves dug up the victim’s body. In the long corridors of the manor house, Cristina saw the noseless woman move along, floating like a silent ship. She was beginning to bite her nails to the point of ripping off bits of flesh when the message inviting her to the coronation of Alexander I arrived.

She wasn’t even aware of the assassination of the previous emperor. In the governess’ trunk, she found a nightgown whose stylish European cut excused the modest quality of the fabric. Her grandmothers’ jewels more than made up for whatever was lacking in her costume. During the entire voyage, dressed up like a lady, in that Spartan coach built to carry military men, she — accustomed to letting the days pass without bathing, clad in the trousers and boots of her brother, killed in the Swiss Alps fighting the French — felt strange.

As the strong horses carried her toward Moscow, she had the feeling that those bracelets, necklaces, and earrings, that light cloth, those silk undergarments were awakening her body. She began the journey flat-chested, and now her breasts were growing, hard, big, with nipples so sensitive that the rubbing of her brassiere with each lurch of the carriage gave her a pleasure she had to admit, though she was distracted with shame. The pores of her pubis opened to make way for an exuberant triangle of hair, and for the first time she felt the heat from her labia. She slowly spread her legs, and with her face red and her eyes tight, she understood that she was going to the Czar’s coronation in search of a man.

Cristina’s virginal beauty dazzled the court. That petite, delicate princess whose eyes radiated a savage power attracted a flock of nobles prepared to love her unto death. She remained unmoved. None made her flutter. There were young men as handsome as battle stallions, intelligent and possessive forty-year-olds, august old men willing to offer the intoxication of power. They seemed paltry. Her newborn femininity wanted a total lover, perfection incarnate.

When the bells rang, when the trumpets blared, when the coronation began, Cristina saw the object of her desire enter in the person of Alexander I. He was an impossible ideal, but her heart would hear no objections. She pledged her hymen to the emperor—or to no one. Standing before that adolescent Christ, delicate and tense, much more shadow than body, unfettered like all peaceful hearts but also an implacable warrior capable of transforming his soul into a sabre of ice, all other men became mere cadavers.

As soon as they approached, the stench that arose from their mouths turned her deaf to their advances. She saw them eaten by invisible worms. The Russian nobility was a charnel house sustained by a living fountain. She knew that loving the Czar was like loving the Sun: a consuming dream. She didn’t care. She stretched her soul until it became a thread wrapped around Alexander’s ring finger, like a wedding band. She left the court knowing she was forever married to the emperor. She forced her driver to wear out several horses because she wanted to reach her estates as quickly as possible. There she would begin to share, isolated from the world, the life of her beloved.

She had the portraits of her ancestors taken down and burned along with their uniforms, diplomas, medals, letters, and any other document that might preserve the slightest particle of their existence in her memory. “When you know the ocean, you’re not interested in the rivers flowing into it.” Every night, without exception, for years, she dreamed the Czar came and took her from her bedroom, carried her through the air to the top of a century-old oak tree and there, in a nightingale nest, possessed her, depositing in the depth of her vagina a gold coin bearing his bearded likeness.

Following the axiom of a Chinese sage, taught to her by one of her many governesses, “The well-ordered desk of a good notary is worth as much as the well-ordered country of a good Emperor,” she began to follow, on her estates, the policies of the Czar. When Alexander I saw the ignorance of the Russian people he put education at the forefront of government programs, she transformed the right wing of her mansion into a school and forced her servants to learn Greek and Latin. She struggled, not sparing the whip, but the brutes were incapable of learning more than three words. Then, when the Czar’s councilors thought of creating a new constitution, she spent whole months dictating laws. She wanted the servants to learn self-government. To give them a taste for freedom, she decreed two days of independence per week, when her employees could make decisions as they thought proper. As a result, they all got drunk, fornicated, fought, and burned down a few cottages. Cristina felt lost. She lacked her idol’s wisdom in solving social problems.

Where her property ended began the vast hunting grounds of the imperial family. To reach that borderland, she had to gallop nine miles, which is what she did every morning, hoping to see the Czar in person. Her desire was never satisfied. Occasionally she would hear the barking of a distant pack of dogs, but nothing more. She had to accept the nocturnal lover who filled her womb with gold coins.

Napoleon’s invasion created a better opportunity to commingle with the Emperor. The night of the battle of Borodino, Alexander I visited her, accompanied by 42,000 dead Russians. Her bedroom had to expand a few miles in length and breadth to accommodate them all. On their knees, the dead observed their habitual coitus, whining like pathetic dogs. The Czar tossed his gold coin into her weakly, and within her his image looked blurry. Cristina begged him not to lose faith, to never give in to the enemy. She arose from the bed and used her whip to cast out the tearful ghosts. Her beloved swore to carry on the struggle. Then Cristina spread her legs and let fall into those noble hands a stream of coins, all she’d accumulated on those conjugal nights. That was her contribution to the Emperor’s war effort.

When Napoleon sacked the Kremlin and the Russian army retreated, she decided to fight the invading troops on her own. She ordered three barrels of vodka loaded onto her carriage and told the driver to go to Moscow. She proceeded through devastated fields, saw skeletal children wearing army overcoats and cutting chunks of meat off dead horses, passed right by drunken French soldiers busy raping peasant women. No one tried to stop her.

She made her way through the great capital city, looking for a neighborhood where the wind was blowing in the right direction. The carriage stopped at a solitary corner. Cristina breathed in the smell of all the wooden houses, she shed many tears, and ordered the coachman to soak as many walls as possible. All she had to do was touch them with a torch. In seconds the entire neighborhood was on fire. The wind made the flames gallop toward the opposite end of the city. No Russian tried to fight the fire. Moscow turned into a rose of flames.

After Napoleon’s defeat, Cristina lost all sense of time. She sewed a military uniform exactly like the one her idol wore and began to speak in a man’s voice. One night, the smiling 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 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.