Álvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires
Public Service Announcement: Don't do drugs when you're at the crossroads of history.
In 1943 the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges published a story called “The Secret Miracle” in which a playwright, sentenced to death by the Nazis, is granted a grace period of one year to complete his unfinished play, The Enemies. Frozen in time and space by some deity, only his mind remains:
He had no document but his memory; the training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who set down and forget temporary, incomplete paragraphs. He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth.
The story ends when the condemned playwright, Jaromir Hladik, completes his labors, time resumes, and he is killed.
The Enemies, the play within the story, is described by Borges as representation of Hladik’s theory that “the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite, and that a single ‘repetition’ suffices to prove that time is a fallacy.” Its plot is the cyclical delusions of a madman; it closes as it begins: “the clock strikes seven, the high windows reverberate in the western sun, the air carries an impassioned Hungarian melody.”
You Dreamed of Empires is the second of Álvaro Enrigue’s novels to be translated from Spanish to English by Natasha Wimmer (who has written outstanding translations of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666, among others). It’s my favorite novel of the year, and I suspect that it will remain so, despite the seven months left until we turn the calendar to 2025.
The novel begins in medias res, as the conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés sit down for an unsettling dinner in the palace of Moctezuma. The world of 1519 comes instantly alive, hitting all of our senses at once:
Captain Jazmín Caldera, native of Zarzales, Extremadura, couldn’t eat the turkey broth with flowers, though it looked exquisite and he was starving. He had been assigned a place between the priests of Xipe and Texcatlipoca. Draped like a cape around the shoulders of the former was the decaying, blackened skin of a warrior sacrificed who knows when, while the latter’s matted locks, neither cut nor washed since he’d taken orders at the temple, were crusted with many moons of sacrificial blood: quail daily, sometimes turtle or wolf, but on major festival days—of which there was one each month—warrior blood, preferably Tlaxcalteca.
That’s the kind of opening paragraph that’s not messing around. Enrigue plays his cards and lets you decide right away if this is the sort of thing you’re going to enjoy or if you should send it straight back to the library.
You Dreamed of Empires unfolds mostly backwards, as we learn how the Spanish (the Caxtilteca to their hosts) arrived at Tenoxtitlan, through good luck and some bloodshed and many awkward moments that put them on the brink of disaster. Like all historical fiction, we know how the story ends (although what happened in Mexico in 1519 is pretty murky by historical standards, not nearly as well-documented as Pizarro’s encounter with Atahualpa at Cajamarca thirteen years later). Enrigue’s solution to this problem is to slow down the forward progress of the novel by drugging the players, Caxtilteca and Colhua alike, with hallucinogens and letting them wander through the palace and take long afternoon naps. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Enrigue notes that “the overall architecture of the novel is Borgesian, in conversation with ‘The Secret Miracle.’” Moctezuma’s nap, around which all the other events take place, brings to mind the miraculous stoppage of time in Borges’ story:
The silence his nap demanded was imperial. 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.
At moments like this the novel feels like the literary equivalent of an asymptotic function. We’re approaching the climatic moment (the firing squad in “The Secret Miracle” or the Spanish conquering the Triple Alliance in You Dreamed of Empires), but we may never reach it. Cortés is content to wait. He’s trying to figure out his next move; after all, “A city like this wasn’t built by being nice to foreigners, and we don’t know yet whether we’re visitors or prisoners.” Moctezuma seems content to get high, nap, and visit the temple as his empire falls apart around him. To Tlilpotonqui, the mayor of Tenoxtitlan and de facto ruler of the empire in Moctezuma’s absence, the situation is intolerable. In one of the funniest scenes of the novel, he is called to a council meeting that no one seems to have asked for and is forced to listen to a recitation of “the song of the Legend of Suns, which was extremely long,” delaying his attempts to find the lost heir to the throne or the missing enemy chieftains who arrived with the Spanish.
As we’re stuck in this beautifully crafted liminal space between two cultures and two eras in the history of the Americas, it’s easy to forget that Enrigue is hard at work. Returning to Borges seems appropriate: “Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth.” Just as you are fully immersed in the vivid reality of this historical moment, Enrigue reminds you that what you’re reading is fiction, something created, abruptly switching to the conditional as Jazmín Caldera (“If [he] had existed”) dons Mexica clothing, wanders the city, and approaches the skeletons of the the temple:
It would have been amazing if while Caldera stared at the huey tzompantil, 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.
Nothing lasts. Hladik finishes his play. Moctezuma wakes from his nap. He is kidnapped and killed. The Spanish, brutally victorious, build an empire upon the backs of enslaved Americans and Africans. Many years later, the empire falls. There’s no way to explain how Enrigue deals with this historical, temporal reality without ruining everything that’s fun about the ending of the novel, but I think that it’s quite a remarkable feat of storytelling, one that does justice to two labyrinths simultaneously: those of literature and those of history.