A monument stands in the old Aztec marketplace of Tlatelolco, near the centre of modern-day Mexico City. It commemorates the 1521 battle where the Spanish overcame the army of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc. But it was “neither a triumph nor a defeat”, the engraving on the monument reads. “It was the painful birth of the Mestizo people which is Mexico today.” This origin story is where Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, You Dreamed of Empires, levels its gaze.
The Spanish killed Cuauhtémoc’s father-in-law, Moctezuma, in 1520, just under a year after Hernán Cortés and his small band of conquistadors entered the city of Tenochtitlan, nerve centre of the Aztec civilisation. That first contact between Cortés and Moctezuma, the impregnation that would result in Mexico’s painful birth, commands Enrigue’s interest. He takes events familiar from the conquistador Bernal Díaz’s eyewitness account, The Conquest of New Spain, and compresses them into one day. He also throws in a heap of magic mushrooms, magic tomatoes, and two “very fine slices of cactus, glazed with honey”, that have Moctezuma and Cortés tripping so hard they don’t even need translators.
