I finished Natasha Wimmer’s translation of “Tu Sueño Imperios Han Sido” by the Mexican author Alvaro Enrigue. He reimagines the first encounter of the Spanish military force led by the famous explorer Hernán Cortés and the Aztec leader Montezuma. The entire novel takes place in one day, November 8, 1519. My big takeaway from the book was thinking about the size and sophistication of the indigenous societies of ancient Mexico. The city of Tenochtitlan was bigger than most European cities at the time. Contact with European explorers was inevitable but I wonder what was lost and what it would look like today if the indigenous cultures had survived and thrived.
Enrigue does what all fiction writers do and takes liberties with the historical record. Moctezuma is a psychedelic-addicted, depressed, self-obsessed emperor. His sister, the queen, is running the government, and the Spaniards are dirty, country bumpkins compared to the locals. Hernando Cortés was a skilled military leader and used the enemies of the empire to ally with and eventually bring down the great city. Of course, smallpox was probably his biggest weapon, but he used firearms and horses, two things the Mexica had never seen before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. He did imagine what it would be like for the Spaniards to experience a city larger than any in Spain, with potable water, elaborate botanical gardens, a sewage system, and a level of urban organization they never seen. The military might, and immunity to disease, is what won the day for the Spanish.
My only complaint about the book was the names of the Aztecs. Enrigue uses the original indigenous languages. The Aztecs are known at the Mexica or Tenochca. Atotoxtli, Cuauhtémoc, Tenochtitlan, Cuitlahuac, Tlilpotonqui, Cihuacoatl, etc. I should have made a key card.
In the forward, Enrigue writes to Natasha, the translator, “With age comes insecurity, and I spend more time revising than writing.” I thought that one one gets older, because of experience, a person would be more confident. That is true in some realms, but Enrique’s quote rings true with me.
- labret – a shell, bone, or object stuck into the lip, culturally decorative
- Saturnalian (adj) – wild, boundary-free revelry, origins in the Roman celebration of the god Saturn.
- consort – spouse or companion of a monarch
- The word vainilla comes from the Spanish conquistadors because the seeds of the plant rattle in long pods, scabbard-like “vainas”. Vaina today is also used as a slang word in Colombia and Venezuela to mean a “thing” or “stuff” or “whatchamacalit”.
- “in Mexico no one had conceived of the hinge” In the book, there were no doors in the Mexica’s great palace, they only used curtains.
- tautology -is saying the same thing twice in different words, so that the second part adds no new information. The classic examples are phrases like “free gift,” “past history,” “end result”.
On the flights from Tashkent to Prague, I also watched the movie Nuremberg, starring Rami Malek and Russell Crowe. Malek plays a US military psychiatrist who is tasked with getting into the mind of Hitler’s number two, Hermann Göring. Crowe is brilliant; he is such a good actor. My big takeaway was that the US military was quite innovative in setting up a war crimes trial. This had never been done as in most cases, the victorious military either executes or imprisons the losing military leadership without a trial. This was the first time an international justice court was constructed. The Nuremberg Trials went on from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946 for 24 major Nazi war criminals. It tried lesser military officials for years, ending in April 1949. The court established the principle that individuals, including heads of state, can be held criminally responsible under international law. Before that, international law dealt almost exclusively with states as actors. It established the principles of “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity”, and “crimes of aggression”. In 1948, the Geneva Convention added a fourth category, “genocide”. It also established that “following orders” is not a valid defense. I thought a lot of about the International Criminal Court (ICC) that was formed through the principles of the Nuremberg Trials when I lived in Belgrade (2008 – 2014) as the ex-military officers were being tried in the Hague in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia.
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