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.
Ivan had all the furniture in the manor house piled up in the garden and set it all on fire. Then he ordered his eunuchs to paint the walls, ceilings, and floors white. White was the only color he could stand now; all others made him sick. Felicidad’s spotless skin made even snow seem filthy. He locked himself up in that dazzling space with his tamer. She resolved never to go out again. Her mission, in this profound solitude, was to fabricate the stone that would transform base metals into gold: a prophetic son.
Ivan and Felicidad prepared for months, perhaps years, without speaking, staring into each other’s eyes, stock still for entire nights. He only ate fruit; she, raw meat. When she felt the spiritual union had been consummated, Felicidad stretched out on the white floor and ordered Ivan to give himself over to the only sexual act both would have during their entire lives.
Slowly, delicately, tenderly, the man entered the woman, who in turn opened wider and wider until she lost all boundaries and fused with the entire Earth. The semen descended to the core of the planet, fell into a dark abyss where the galaxies dance. The Universe absorbed the rain of fire. Felicidad was pregnant. Now Ivan could disappear.
“I want you to cut me into pieces and eat me,” he said to his lover and softly expired in her arms. She buried his body in the snow, and for the nine months of her pregnancy nourished herself on it.
The child arrived in a breech birth. The midwife brought him, feet first, into the world in a single great pull. “His feet will be more important than his head,” she declared. Felicidad understood: Alejandro Prullansky would be a great dancer, not a prophet. For humanity, art was more important than an unreachable God — art that transformed matter into soul. His family tree told of the struggles of sensitive souls in search of the beauty, the glow of the hidden Truth. Thanks to the sacrifice of the murderous instinct, violence could metamorphose into poetry. And there was no poem greater than a dancing body. When the boy was five years old, Felicidad sent him to the Imperial Ballet School in Moscow.
That morning, Felicidad opened the windows and let in the frozen, fragrant air from the snow-covered park. All the hair on her body had turned white. “You will never see me again,” she said to Alejandro. “I’m not going to die, but I am going to dissolve into the whiteness. Always remember me.” The boy saw his mother, so pale she looked like a plaster figurine, remove all her clothing, press against the wall and blend into the white stucco. When she closed her eyes (the only dark spots on her body), he could no longer see her at all. He ran to the wall, groping it desperately. All he felt was a smooth surface.
The giant dancer began to weep in Jashe’s arms — for the lost maternal kisses, for the tortures of apprenticeship in classical dance, for the boys who had their sexes kissed in the dressing rooms, for that old choreographer who raped him behind the piano when he was eleven. Whenever he was given a room with white walls, he would hurl himself against them until his forehead bled. He could have died of sadness had it not been for Abravanel’s red shoes. Those century-old, impervious boots that changed size, adapting to the child’s feet and stretching as they grew, proved to him that he was the bearer of a collective soul that would allow him to reach the end of Time, beyond all space, where only Truth exists.
Jashe placed the red shoes on top of the violet bag containing the Tarot, and with those sacred objects next to her, coupled with her husband to give my mother, Sara Felicidad, the chance to incarnate herself in a place of love.