Pete Warzel Reviews Álvaro Enrigue's "You Dreamed of Empires"

Review by Pete Warzel

Last year in August this blog published a review of a history of the conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Conquistadors and Aztecs, by Stefan Rinke. That was then, this is now. Welcome to the Electric Kool-Aid conquest of the Mexica/Nahua…an extraordinary reimagining of the machinations of colonialism. Tenochtitlan here is Tenoxtitlan and 1519 is cast in a modern literary trip, non-stop, cranked up a notch or two by the ingestion of magic mushrooms. Álvaro Enrigue manages a fantastical Cortés v. Moctezuma endgame, and it works as a novel for our times.

Mr. Enrigue is an award-winning Mexican author who has taught at Columbia and Princeton, working on his PhD in Latin American literature to while away the time. He has the literary chops for this epic story that sets in motion the history of the Western hemisphere, including the devolution to our convoluted corner of the Southwest. We all know the story of the Conquest of Mexico, but not from this angle. It is stunning.

You Dreamed of Empires

Written by Álvaro Enrigue
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books
Hardcover
240 Pages
$28.00.

He begins the novel with a note, instructions to his English translator, that explains his use of Nahua words and names, with pronunciations. Then he backs off, apologizes with the truest rationalization of a writer and his work. “…But I’m a writer and words matter to me. They may signify and signal, but I believe they also invoke.” 

Enrigue’s prose hints at Garcia Marquez – fluid, poetic always, but not timid. There are echoes of Borges. Dialogue is embedded in the narrative without quotation marks, much like Cormac McCarthy’s writing, but it is not difficult to follow. All flows smoothly in the story. He takes on the gore of Aztec social justice and the bone-crunching violence of battle with a wicked sense of humor. It is a chilling scene when we encounter Moctezuma with his sister/wife Atoxtli that runs counter to our historical conception of his indecisiveness regarding the Spanish invaders. “There’ll be no scandal in this house, and if I have to erase you, I will.” That is the cold voice of an emperor and a very icy brother. “These are days of blood and shit.” That is the voice of a pragmatic leader. 

All of the characters are historical, save one fictional invention. Enrigue himself appears in real time in a scene where the tripping Moctezuma sees him and certainly does not understand. The story proper is divided into four sections, and all action takes place in the course of one day – when the Spaniards enter Tenoxtitlan for the first time. It begins with “Before the Nap,” in the heart of the city at Moctezuma’s invitation. Most of the action is internal to the characters as they feast with the emperor’s sister/wife in the old palace. There is a wonderful episode where the captains of the Spanish search for their stable boy and the 27 horses in his charge. They begin to walk the palace rooms and hallways, lost in a maze, a labyrinth, and the narration is the stuff of nightmares. “Also, they had the sense that the corridors and cells they’d been wandering through were getting narrower and narrower.” They call and hear response from the rest of the Spanish soldiers in the palace. “They were on the other side of the long wall, but Caldera and his men couldn’t figure out how to get to them despite walking the length of it several times.” I have had a variation of that dream many times.

Section two is “Moctezuma’s Nap” – the center of the book. “The silence his nap demanded was imperial.” The story’s motion is on hiatus. Section three, “After the Nap” starts the forward march of history with long narration and quick cut scenes of the stress-induced palace intrigue within Moctezuma’s court. Parallel action by Cortés, Moctezuma, his sister, and the fictional character, Jazmín Caldera, moves rapidly, all leading to the same place at the same time – the end of the day for the temple sacrifices. The emperor is tripping on more and more mushrooms and Enrigue inserts modern drug slang into the story. “…Give me a slide, a whole one.” Time becomes surreal as Moctezuma and his high priest at the temple of  Huitzilopochtli hear music, and begin to dance to the music of Marc Bolan’s 1970’s rock band, T. Rex. The song is “Monolith” and you really must give it a listen to put the whole novel in context. Linked here.

Section Four, “Cortés’s Dream,” is a powerhouse of imagery at the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma, with all the novel’s players present. Cortés delivers a history of Christianity and the emperor bids the conquistador to “dream now.” The day ends, the action of the novel is over. But the dream…it is the dream of the entire history of Mexico from that day forward, condensed elegantly into three pages. “…But the new kingdom that he had called  New Spain grew so much that it stretched all the way to another enormous kingdom to the north, to be called New Mexico.” Magnificent.

With all the press on this novel, I expected a doorstop of a book. It is about the size of a paperback physically and runs to just 227 written pages. A surprisingly modest package, but also an epic undertaking. To put it all succinctly, “No one had any idea what was going on.” We can recount history, but most assuredly we still do not know what is really going on in our world.

Álvaro Enrigue’s novel is a marvel.