You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue book review
Nobody knows exactly what happened in the days and months after Spanish soldiers crossed the flower-trimmed causeway into Tenochtitlan to meet the Aztec emperor in 1519. If you believe Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who logged his version of events in audaciously self-serving letters to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the Aztec leader, Moctezuma, capitulated immediately, believing the Spaniards’ arrival fulfilled a prophecy that in turn (conveniently for Cortés) legitimized the conversion of his people to Christianity. Recent studies have offered damning rebuttals of this “mythistorical” version of events (see Matthew Restall, Camilla Townsend), but significant gaps in the record remain, including details as fundamental as who killed Moctezuma.
What we do know is that in less than a century, 90 percent of the Indigenous population had been wiped out by European diseases and slavery, and Tenochtitlan had become Mexico City. Given the state of the record, the contemporary hunger for recentering the perspectives of colonized peoples and the transgressive thrill of overturning received narratives, “the Meeting,” as Restall calls it, makes for a compelling subject for historical fiction.
Enter Álvaro Enrigue. Hitherto best known for the novel “Sudden Death,” about a Renaissance tennis match played with balls made from Anne Boleyn’s hair, Enrigue is a prolific writer in his native Spanish (he hails from Mexico) but scandalously undertranslated. Perhaps the deliciously gonzo “You Dreamed of Empires” will bring him to a wider readership and hasten English translation of his earlier work.
Enrigue’s fascination with the Spanish-Aztec War isn’t new. Cortés features prominently in “Sudden Death,” where he’s depicted as “an uncredentialed man in his forties from the backwater of Extremadura,” “the patron saint of malcontents” and worse — but also, as many historians would agree, “the protagonist in the greatest and most revolutionary epic of his century and possibly of all history.” This isn’t just rhetoric in service of fiction; in a review of Restall’s “When Montezuma Met Cortés,” Enrigue is just as bold in his conclusions: “It was the fall of Tenochtitlan that unleashed the angels and demons of globalization.”
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Rendered in earthy, demotic, wryly unhistorical English by translator Natasha Wimmer, “You Dreamed of Empires” focuses on the hours leading up to the meeting between Moctezuma and Cortés on Nov. 8, 1519. Aztec priests wear human skins as capes. Conquistador captains get lost in Moctezuma’s palace. We witness rape, diplomatic haggling and drug-taking; we’re shown the workings of a court not dissimilar, in its dysfunction and intrigue, to recent presidential administrations. Everything hinges on the emperor’s nap.
Less a theory of what really happened than a fantasia blossoming in history’s blind spots, the novel intersects with current academic thought but also contains numerous authorial innovations. Enrigue blends fact and fiction, real historical figures and invented ones, straight narrative with postmodern digression. While the Aztecs may well have offered exciting new narcotics and cuisine, for instance, it’s unclear whether everyone was quite as blitzed on magic mushrooms and cactus-of-tongues as he suggests.
Enrigue’s antic style is high-minded, richly detailed, vulgar and sophisticated all at once — reminiscent of the films of Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman. His Moctezuma is a paranoid Colonel Kurtz-like figure wandering the palace in his nightshirt eating grasshopper tacos, in thrall to “a caste of lunatic priests,” obsessed with the “deer without antlers” (horses) that the Spaniards brought with them. Cortés, meanwhile, is a brute leading a “pack of clowns.”
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Cortés mentioned his interpreters only briefly to Charles V, but their role is now widely considered pivotal, a position Enrigue reflects. The Mayan princess-refugee Malintzin, captured by the Spaniards on their way to Tenochtitlan, translated the Aztec language Nahuatl into a Mayan dialect; for the comprehension of the conquistadors, the Spanish friar Gerónimo de Aguilar, rescued after being shipwrecked during a previous expedition, then translated her Mayan into Spanish. Enrigue recognizes the significance not only of this “double filter” but of other interpersonal and political factors that ensured rampant miscommunication between the two sides. How much of it was down to the interpreters’ own maneuvering isn’t clear — Malintzin certainly spends a good chunk of the novel with Moctezuma’s sister-wife-empress Atotoxtli — but it does undermine Cortés’s implication that he communicated directly with the Aztec leadership. And in placing a woman close to the heart of his story, Enrigue goes some way toward rebalancing a record that long ignored the role of women.
According to the acknowledgments, the architecture of “You Dreamed of Empires” was written to be “in conversation with” Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Secret Miracle.” In this 1943 story, a writer condemned to death by a Nazi firing squad makes a deal with God for a reprieve to finish writing a play. Haunted by the prospect of his demise, he imagines a range of outcomes, hoping that thinking them first might prevent them from happening. The power of the imagination, even against the insuperability of history, seems to be what Enrigue is thinking of in his novel’s closing pages. In a delirious climax, Cortés’s dream of the future is cut off in a blood-soaked finale that turns everything we think we knew on its head. While we can be sure this definitely isn’t what happened, it’s a twist worthy of Quentin Tarantino — a sleight of thought in which a moment of real genocidal culture shock is, fleetingly, redirected.
Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.
You Dreamed of Empires
By Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead. 240 pp. $28
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