Collection Connections: 'You Dreamed of Empires'

You Dreamed of Empires is set in the days leading to November 8^th, 1519—the beginning of the fall of Tenochtitlan to the forces of Hernán Cortés. Yet it would be inaccurate to call it historical fiction—it’s more like fiction tripping on history. Regarding his preference for Nahuatl terminology, author Álvaro Enrigue explains that he is “not driven by ideology” (xv).¹ The novelist is drawn to “the warmth of the language of the ancient Mexicans” (xiii). Still, he prefers the Hispanized “Moctezuma” over the Nahuatl “Moteucsoma” because in novels, “even the spelling must obey the story. The c and t together are a contained explosion, like the character who bears the name” (xiv).

This novel is itself a contained explosion—the cataclysm of 1519 is prevented by Moctezuma, and the only heads that roll are those of the rogue Spaniards. In spite of the author’s claims to artistic license, such counterfactuals can feel polemical. Enrigue is clearly conversant with—and critical of—the chronicle tradition that sanitized and defended the conquest of México. Among his sources is The History of the Indies by the Nahuatl-speaking Dominican friar Diego Durán. Durán was one of those chroniclers of the Indies who in Enrigue’s words, “turned mystical, believing that the inhabitants of the land belonged to the lost tribe of Israel” (67-68). As the friar argued:

The curious reader can find many proofs in the Scriptures […] which tell of the rigorous punishment that God predicted would befall these ten tribes because of their wickedness and evil doings and infamous idolatries […] God tired of tolerating their abominations and evil doings and idolatries, so He brought alien people. Like an eagle that comes from the end of the earth […] without mercy He destroyed them.²

Although Durán often expresses sympathy for the Mexica people, he regards their pagan religion with disdain. His account frames the conquistadors’ brutality in the razing of Tenochtitlan as divine retribution—God’s punishment of idolaters through His Christian soldiers, necessary for the fulfilment of messianic prophecy.

Durán also speculates on the Spaniards’ role in Moctezuma’s death—an event shrouded in mystery. Diverging from other Spanish chroniclers, including Cortés—who claimed that Moctezuma was stoned to death by the Mexica—Durán proposes instead that the Spaniards beat and murdered the emperor before fleeing the city. Our novel reconciles these competing accounts: “During an argument, Alvarado, drunk, stabbed the tlatoani. Cortés was sorry because he had liked Moctezuma, but he agreed to impale him on a stick and take him out on the balcony, shaking him like a puppet until some of his subjects, already enraged, threw a stone at the emperor. The Spaniards pretended it had been the Mexica who killed him” (215). The conquistador Pedro de Alvarado orchestrated the massacre in the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan of May 22nd, 1520, which ultimately led to Moctezuma’s death, but the details Enrigue gives are clearly speculative—part of the fiction. Yet the novel also exposes history as fiction, full of half-remembered, half-invented stories.

Stories permeate the novel, especially through Cortés, who “spends hours reading his books” (Enrigue, 174). Like his historical analogue, Hernando imagines himself as the hero of Amadís de Gaula, a doughty tale of knighthood and favorite book among the conquistadors. At one point, captain Jazmín Caldera is admiring his Mexican sandals, adorned with what resembles a dragon, and he tells translator Gerónimo de Aguilar, “Amadís de Gaula would have loved these” (91). Aguilar smiles and replies, “Amadís never existed.” “Of course he did,” Caldera insists, whispering, “I read it in a book” (91). (These are also the very same views of mad Don Quixote of La Mancha, who proclaims himself a knight in Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 satirical novel by the same name.) Laughing, Aguilar retorts, “When somebody puts what’s happening to us now in a book, […] they’ll think it’s more chivalric romance bullshit” (91). Aguilar’s prescient pronouncement brings to mind another of Enrigue’s sources, the True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who also makes a brief appearance in our novel. Díaz famously invokes the adventures of Amadís while recalling the Spaniards’ entry into Tenochtitlán on November 8^th, 1519. His language ties México to the Biblical Promised Land.

In You Dreamed of Empires, however, Cortés is denied his Promised Land and the Spaniards are deprived of their spoils. Hernando’s magic-cactus-induced dream of empire merely distracts him from a massacre in the Great Temple that reverses the course of history. In his hallucinations, Cortés glimpses himself as a character within a fiction that gives rise to all of modern history:

Where Tonoxtitlan had been there was now a Spanish city: palaces, churches, convents. […] Books, wars, universities, cities with many more people than anyone could ever have imagined; […] another republic that rose the best it could; and another hundred years and this book and you reading it and it was then that Hernando woke up.  (217)

When Cortés awakens from his dream, he feels “insecure, exposed, lying there on his stomach propped up on his elbows like a boy reading a novel of chivalry” (218). The conqueror is no longer in command of his empire in books.

For a fleeting moment, a triumphant and tripping Moctezuma also recognizes himself as a character in this novel written centuries later by an author listening to glam rock band T. Rex on Shelter Island in Suffolk County, New York, “in the plague years of 2020-2022” (Enrigue, 222). The crooning of lead vocalist Marc Bolan forms a cosmic link to this Moctezuma, untethered from history. One imagines, with an optimism that is both futile and electrifying, a Mexica people who were never ravaged by plague, or cast down by “firestick”-wielding strangers mounted on their strange horses (cabuayos), and where all of history since 1519 folds and you and I and this electrifying book with it.³