You Dreamed of Empires

by Álvaro Enrigue

The chairs were an invention of the Colhua and were designed precisely so that no one could sit armed at table, which was considered inexcusably rude.

you’re sending me to be executed and you don’t even know my name; I will rise like fog and no one will remember my passage through this world.

The emperor governed under the blazing sun of Huitzilopochtli, patron warrior god of the Triple Alliance—a young, restless god, hasty, hot-tempered, and bloodthirsty. The cihuacoatl ruled under light-giving Metztli, the moon, guardian of waters and of the fertility of valleys—an old goddess, comfortable with herself. Moctezuma was the guiding force of the kingdom, and Tlilpotonqui was the source of his strength, controlling the perfect wealth- and fear-producing machine that was Tenoxtitlan.

had been wandering the building ever since. They continued to traipse through cells and hallways until one of the carpenters noticed that a certain stretch of wall was warmer than the others. It must be the east wall, with the sun shining on it all morning, he said. At this point, the corridors were so narrow they could walk only single file, so they passed the news from one man to the next until it reached the three captains, who corroborated the information by touching one wall and then the other.

They died younger than they should have, from illness or killed in ridiculous accidents, seized by sadness and imperial rancor—some strange malady, some paralysis, maybe caused by having known no limits until their own bodies were beset by them.

Moctezuma shrugged in exasperation. To have them to keep, he said, how many times do I have to explain it? He clasped his hands behind his neck, to stretch but also to cradle his head. They’re rosy-skinned, he said, their eyes are pale, and they have hair around their mouths instead of on their heads; if we don’t take them for ourselves someone else will.

Nothing moved in the palace between the moment he entered his room and the instant he opened his eyes again and rang the royal bell to ask for something from the latest Little Cousin. The request didn’t matter. What mattered was the peal of the bell. Brief, elegant, muted: it woke up a whole world. It woke the palace and its courtyards, its kitchens and infinite offices. The sound woke the priests in the temple and their sentinels, who set to beating the drums that woke the birds and the dogs. It woke the grand houses of the pipiltin that surrounded the emperor’s palace and it woke the chinampas that nourished them. It woke the children in the floating neighborhoods, who made an impossible ruckus that woke their mothers and fathers, their grandparents, the herons and the fish. It woke the cookfires and with them the traffic on the causeways; it woke the watchers at the gates of the city and the guards on the series of fortifications that climbed up the mountains and all the way down to the sea. It woke the enemy: in kingdoms subjugated and free, and in those that Moctezuma had ordered to keep at a simmer for the hunting of sacrificial warriors when the season for war came again. It woke everything, even if almost every day for many months now, after waking and ringing the bell, the huey tlatoani had gone right back to sleep.

the disdain in those strikingly blue eyes that God had wasted on a stunted and resentful soul.

the translator said the beds were like those of the Maya priests and it seemed only logical to him that a culture that had invented the goosedown quilt would have no conception of the hinge: doors were created for restless sleepers.

That entrance, that first sight, kept coming back to Caldera like the best page in the best book. Now that he had lived to see it, nothing that came after would matter. The lakes, the rivers, the pine forests, the valleys scorched by the first autumn frosts, the unimaginable cities splashed everywhere.

It seemed as if he had stopped breathing—or, as the elders said, as if he was breathing from his eyes.

He was the type of person who is only feared.

If

This is the best chapter in the book.

The almost subterranean quality of the spring—a mirror to which you descended; the origin of everything, since without it there would have been no Tenoxtitlan—was

It would have been amazing if while Caldera stared at the huey tzompantli, lost in the malign daze produced by this display of the banality of life, a breeze had sprung up: the gentle clatter of the skulls and vertebrae would have become a clacking buzz, a roar, a clamor of flutes and rattles; the depraved music of a priestly caste and a political class anointed by fear, maybe, but also a grandly formal reflection on the foundations of any system of religious thought: We don’t last.

The entire discussion of the huey tzompantli is very interesting

Alone and dressed as a Colhua, he would have seen the huey tzompantli as intensely Christian—dust we be—and illuminating, as perhaps we would too if we could shed the moral superiority of societies that do their killing out of sight. He would have seen it for what it was: a triumph of design.

Upon mingling with the multitudes of macehualtin returning laden with purchases from the Tlatelolco market, he would have felt the sadness, the thrill, and the relief of those who had gotten too close to God and lived to tell about it.

Metztli was bursting with pride: he was walking with the most famous and valiant of his great-uncles—though the general was only twenty-four, five years older than he was.

Moctezuma

This is the second best chapter in the book.

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.”

now he was moving across his own rooftop as if the combined ages of all the mayors preceding him had come to rest on his shoulders, head, and spine.

Reference to death and the skulls earlier