You Dreamed of Empires

by Álvaro Enrigue

Malinalli spoke Nahuatl and Maya, but not Spanish. And Aguilar spoke Maya and Castilian, but not Nahuatl. The conversations between the Colhua and the people she and everybody else called the Caxtilteca still had to pass through a double filter.

He Who Watches Over the Pathways of Precious Stones and the Silver Ribbons That Wreathe the Corn When It Is But the Smallest Gem had demanded a translation from Aguilar and Malinalli, and when he heard it his eyes had grown as wide as saucers, which was no mean feat: he must have been one hundred and ten years old. Another aged councillor, He Who Opens and Closes the Floodgates of Light When the Drum Is Played in the Temple of the Hummingbird Who Feeds on Our Blood and Flies Across Obsidian Mirrors, had said, according to Aguilar’s and Malinalli’s translation: Perhaps it’s best if we proceed to the incense ceremony.

If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon, it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.

Tlilpotonqui understood that this New Sun thing was a superstition and the sun didn’t give a damn whether the Colhua sacrificed quail and warriors in the Great Temple of Tenoxtitlan, but he also understood that the reason his office had invested so much in these rituals was that the Tenochca believed in them—or pretended to believe, because they brought wealth to Tenoxtitlan, gave the world solidity, and permitted the flow of magic mushrooms and vision-inducing cacti that made life tolerable in a city where everyone worked without cease.

Aguilar smiled. He said: Amadís de Gaula never existed. Of course he did, replied Caldera, and he whispered as if telling a secret: I read it in a book.

When somebody puts what’s happening to us now in a book, he said, they’ll think it’s more chivalric romance bullshit.

He Who Looses the Rain of Words and Governs the Songs Lest We Be Like the Flowers and Bees That Last But a Few Days

He of the Sun That Falls Like an Eagle So That Jaguars, Moths, and Scorpions Live Only a Scarce Few Hours a Day

The Council and the cihuacoatl had said yes, but they were politicians; they said yes to everything.

He stamped the heel of his sandal and everyone stopped talking and turned to look at him. In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.

Jazmín Caldera, who has to be a learned conquistador—like Hernán Cortés or, to a lesser extent, the surgeon Bernal Díaz—for this novel to work, would have admired the geometric design of the citadel.

Sound—like smell and taste—was a form of prayer for the Mexica.

It wasn’t an edifying display of the suffering to which errors in conduct would lead, but a representation of things as they are: inside each of us is a skull, and that’s all that will be left of us when we’re gone; thanks for your participation.

It was a tall double temple; on top were the houses of the two gods to whom the Mexica owed everything: Tlaloc, god of water, and Huitzilopochtli, god of war.

The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex’s “Monolith.”

It took Moctezuma a while to bring it into focus because it came from very far away. When it was finally sharp and clear, it made no sense to him: It was me writing this novel in a yard on Shelter Island.

He says there are many possible futures, said the priest, and you should follow your instincts; he says our calendars are shit but they’re the best we’ve got, and we should think about revising them because we’ve gotten seriously behind; the year is 365.256 days long, not 365, like we thought. What does that mean, point two hundred and fifty-six? asked the tlatoani, and they both giggled maniacally.

There was something terrifyingly beautiful about a whole country agreeing to make its capital punctual above all things; choosing to live a geometric and foreshortened life in a canyon of straight lines where everyone followed a common choreography seemingly taught by some artist rather than resulting from chance, luck, or the trauma of history.

he got up from the ground and, barefoot, approached a random horse, put a hand on its muzzle and spoke into its ear in a way that no one in the Colhua world—where everything had its use and its place and tended to be on its way to an early death—spoke to an animal.

The captain general and Alvarado were the last to emerge, unscathed. Both of them were immune to reality, so even when everything was against them, they had the advantage.

It was a huge country: ravines, mountains, deserts, jungles. But it was a country of purest suffering too.

The fucking gringos; a Zapotec tlatoani who won a war with France. Books, wars, universities, cities with many more people than anyone could ever have imagined; another tlatoani, a Mixtec—everybody was Oaxacan—and Eufemio Zapata walking through Moctezuma’s palace dressed like a Spaniard; 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.

The original title of You Dream of Empires is Tu sueño imperios han sido, a line from the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón’s Life Is a Dream.