Álvaro Enrigue (Mexico, 1969) is one of the preeminent writers of contemporary Mexican literature. With his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (Joaquín Mortiz, 1996), he established himself as one of the most innovative voices of his generation. His novels and essays are clearly linked to his intellectual life and his passage between Mexico and the United States. His stories move between the universes created by literature and a self that comes up against concrete but almost indigestible realities, as in the case of Hypothermia (Anagrama, 2006; translated by Brendan Riley). Over the past decade, Enrigue has published a series of novels—Sudden Death (Anagrama, 2013; translated by Natasha Wimmer), Ahora me rindo y eso es todo (Anagrama, 2018), and You Dreamed of Empires (Anagrama, 2022; translated by Natasha Wimmer)—which have tangentially questioned the problems of identity and nationality but, above all, have entered into dialogue with the world literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Rodrigo Figueroa: You Dreamed of Empires is a novel that shows us an alternative history of a crucial moment in the foundation of Mexico. Why is it so important for fiction to engage in counter-histories like these?
Álvaro Enrigue: It’s a game. Fiction, literature—if my books can be said to attain the status of literature—is always a game. A game guided by political concerns and that draws on a tradition, but still a game at the end of the day. And a fundamental element of all games is wishing. Whoever plays agrees to temporarily replace the hierarchies and demands of productivity that govern our lives with another system of rules and hierarchies that allow us to imagine a different order of things. That’s what makes literature important. It’s a cliché, but it also happens to be true: there is nothing more serious than a game, even if we die of laughter playing it. The idea of shaking up history through fiction in order to attain a fresh perspective on the present is fundamentally based on wishing. Let’s say the coin toss between Moctezuma and Cortés had come up suns instead of eagles. Maybe then we’d be able to see a way through one or several of the problems that seem insurmountable to us in our present reality. Imagine what a joy it might have been, a world in which Europeans had stayed in Europe, colonizing only themselves and attacking each other and extracting resources to their hearts’ content from the Carpathians and the Pyrenees. There would of course still be insurmountable problems—Americans also colonized one another and attacked one another—but perhaps the world in which we live, and which is now disappearing from beneath our feet, would be a little better off. American societies had a concern for equality that European societies didn’t acquire until the eighteenth century and which they didn’t act upon until the twentieth, for example.
No doubt there would still be racism, but it would not be the sole criterion for deciding who has access to greater life chances and who does not. Likewise, the environmental concerns that began to arise in the 1970s were already a fundamental part of everyday political decision-making in America before the European invasion, and so on. You Dreamed of Empires is a political meditation—serious and serene—on the world that grew out of the first contact between Europe and America, but it is also a game. People can read it however they want, but I can tell you that I wrote it thinking of a slapstick opera about how ridiculous Western values appear when viewed out of context, as a comedy of errors, or as another chapter in the mythic battle between punks and rockers, which the punks will finally win.
R.F.: Gerónimo de Aguilar and Jazmín Caldera are two characters who straddle two worlds, showing they are not as different as we are led to believe. How do these characters function in the novel and how do they differ?
A.E.: I imagine talking to the novelist kills the novel. Caldera and Aguilar are characters, but they are also functions. Jazmín has a broad and cultivated sensibility; he is a renaissance-era victim, but with the ambiguities and nostalgias of the modern temperament. And within him lies the germ of another way of seeing the world with which a more or less enlightened, progressive person can identify. His disagreements with the project of Cortés and Alvarado could be interpreted as drawing on Las Casas, Mariátegui, and the Zapatistas, or whatever. He can see things that other Spaniards can’t and he doesn’t like the idea of the prodigious floating city of the Tenochcas going to shit to satisfy the confused ambitions of the brute Cortés. It’s all part of the internal logic of the novel: the historical Cortés was a war criminal, but he was no fool and, in fact, he always regretted the destruction of Tenochtitlan for which he was responsible. In his fourth letter to Charles I, he argues that if the extermination of natives and the destruction of indigenous communities continues, the project of constituting New Spain as a profitable territory will be doomed. His concern is only with exploitation, but it reveals the same underlying anxiety from which Las Casas’ thinking also derived. Aguilar is the translator; he translates words, but he also mediates between cultures—including our own, which sees things differently from how the Europeans and the Americans of 1519 saw things. He translates for the Spanish, but also for the readers. He, specifically, has an important aesthetic function for me: he is an infiltrator who lives in the abyss between the two worlds, a shaman, a punk among the rockers. Along with Cuauhtémoc, he is the character who owes the most to the thousands of comics I read as a child because of my terrible respiratory problems. I missed a lot of school and my parents went to work early each morning. My mother was a lab technician in a public hospital; she couldn’t stay at home to prepare herbal infusions for a kid with an earache. My father was also a public employee. I stayed in our apartment in Nápoles, supervised by a neighbor who kept an eye on me and in the unbeatable company of piles of comic books.
R.F.: Atotoxtli gives Malinalli or La Malinche the opportunity to change sides. Malinalli is a much-reviled figure in Mexican history, but she rejects the opportunity. What is the significance of these two women in the novel? They do become close friends, but it seems their destinies will be divided in the future.
A.E.: My kids always outsmart me. I do my best, but at the end of the day I am a fifty-something criollo educated during the foulest period of Mexican revolutionary nationalism. They are progressive by nature and I listen to them attentively. When I was writing, one of them set me a test. Are there strong female characters? I replied that although Cortés and Moctezuma feature in the novel, Malinalli and Atotoxtli are much more important than either. Ah, he said, but they are wives. That’s the way it was, I replied. So he goes Mm-hmm and says: that’s the way it was? And after a pause that was as probing as it was humiliating, he goes: And do they even talk to each other? Without meaning to, he provided the key piece to how the story was going to be resolved. I worked my way backwards through the manuscript and set up the conditions for Mallinali and Atotoxtli to become true agents, beyond the will of their partners, and in that way I was able to work out how the story would be resolved. That said, we could go on talking about the subject of Malinalli’s vilification for hours. But it’s worth noting that, to my mind, we interpret her differently nowadays. At the time, there was no “them” and “us.” She didn’t work for the European colonizers because it was not even conceivable—regardless of whether you were Tyrian or Trojan—that the whole of America would become a colony, that the children of the arrogant Tenochca macehuals would die as de facto slaves. The Spanish were initially thinking of annexing a territory—which is very different from exploiting a colony—and the Mexica wanted to avoid being subject to Tlaxcala, which headed the huge multinational army of which the Spanish were a well-armed but minority part. Malinalli was Nahua—she spoke Maya because she had been a slave in the court of a king to the south. She was neither Mexica nor Tlaxcalteca. The welfare of her descendants was the only thing at stake in that war. She did her job and helped to secure victory for the side that she needed to win, which was the Tlaxcaltecs. She didn’t betray the indigenous people: there wasn’t even a word for “indigenous” in Nahua. After the fall of Tenochtitlan, when it became apparent that the European model of development was completely different and much more cruel to the continent’s inhabitants than the Mexica or the Mayan rulers had ever been, the Nahua term “we-who-are-from-here” was coined to define Americans, but at that time, for her, the Spanish were simply warriors from another altépetl—one located across the sea—who valued her knowledge as a multilingual person.
R.F.: In the letter to the publisher that you include at the beginning of the novel, you mention that for someone born and raised in Mexico City, Nahua cultures can seem as exotic as they are for someone who is from further afield. While the novel posits an alternative history, it’s still possible to see an attempt throughout the text to paint a picture for readers of a highly complex Tenochca society filled with tangled political intrigues. Can the process of fictionalization demystify this society, or does it just add another layer of myth?
A.E.: The intimidating sophistication of Mexica culture was already made clear in the Decades of the New World by Pedro Martir de Anglería, who was the first European to write about Mexico in Europe—which, at the time, was in the thrall of the captives and the treasures sent there by Cortés in 1519. My effort to naturalize the characters and intrigues in the novel is more of a response to the tendency to romanticize pre-Hispanic cultures, which was just as pernicious and ridiculous as the more common and identifiable tendency to condemn the Mexica for failing to share European values. For the novel to work, I had to take Tenochtitlan out of Diego Rivera’s Stalinist mural and Alfonso Reyes’ Greco-Latin idiom—picking a fight with both Left and Right, although of course neither faction is even aware of my courageous declaration of war. But it’s not like I’m making anything up either: the only book I’ve found really convincing on the poignancy of the 1810 Independence movement is Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Los pasos de López, a brilliant comedy about the misunderstandings that led a group of rather wealthy but small-town criollos to declare war on Napoleon on September 15, 1810. This really happened, by the way. The movement that followed was something else entirely and has a lot of merit, but at the outset the uprising was not against Spain, but against Pepe Botella, Napoleo’s older brother.
R.F.: The idea of the dream is central to the novel, both as a physiological phenomenon and as something induced by consuming magic tomatoes. With the latter, Cortés and Moctezuma manage to elucidate the meeting points between their two cultures, which can be taken as yet another possible alternative history. Do you think that the story of the conquest of Tenochtitlan can still serve as an abundant well of inspiration for writers of fiction?
A.E.: It’s very interesting that you draw a connection between the narrative possibilities of the conquest and the psychedelic dimension to the novel. The story’s tempo is indeed carried by the considerable quantity of hallucinogens that Montezuma administers to himself during the five hours that the action lasts. I have had friends like that, and some of them are still with us. I was reading for the first time one of those classics that one keeps putting off, The Aztec Image in Western Thought by Benjamin Keen, a monumental history of European perceptions of the Mexica. Keen highlights the persistence of the tropes introduced by Francisco López de Gómara—the first historian of the Spanish-Mexica war—who depicted the people of the pre-Hispanic world as cannibals, sodomites, and drunkards. Cannibals they were—but only during rituals, the same as all of the other cultures that have practiced cannibalism. There is still no better argument for the purpose of defending this practice than the one put forward by Montaigne in the sixteenth century: symbolically eating a representative of one’s enemies is more civilized than exterminating them. Sodomites, I don’t know, but I think it’s great if they were less repressed than the Europeans. Keen does not know either, but he repeatedly laments the fact that a culture that had rules that were almost as strict as those followed by Muslims in relation to the consumption of alcohol could be accused of drunkenness. It does not even occur to him that the drunkenness of which the conquerors and chroniclers spoke was the product of a regulated but widespread culture of hallucinogen consumption. You cannot understand anything of the pre-Hispanic world if you do not understand that the art, cuisine, architecture, everything, is designed with the idea that different rituals—from the reading of codices at school to the sacrifice of a Tlaxcalteca in the temple—implied a short journey to different zones of consciousness.
R.F.: At the end of the novel you provide a list of sources to make explicit the novel’s points of historical and literary reference. Besides the sources you mention, are there any writers of speculative fiction who were important to the writing of You Dreamed of Empires?
A.E.: No. I was never a big reader of speculative fiction. Right now, I’m really interested in it and I’m starting to discover a wonderful continent there, but I’m playing catch-up.
R.F.: In the twenty-first century, there’s an idea of the “failure of the mestizo,” a figure who was once the cornerstone of post-Revolutionary Mexican identity. To what extent does You Dreamed of Empires enter into dialogue with this idea?
A.E.: I don’t know of that idea or its context, so I’d better shut my mouth so as not to talk nonsense.
R.F.: In the passages that can be interpreted as autofiction in your previous works Hypothermia or Ahora me rindo y eso es todo, the narrator appears to adopt a specific posture with respect to the Mexican diaspora, and a very personal one at that. In You Dreamed of Empires this autofictional vein is less apparent, although it is still there, in the manner of “The Aleph.” How does this Borgesian “I” of your latest novel relate to that of your earlier work?
A.E.: That Alephian “I” is more anecdotal and perhaps theoretical than autofictional, isn’t it? It tries to inscribe the book in a tradition: it’s not a historical novel, it’s a fantastic novel. But books, like the land, belong to those who work them and anyone can say whatever they like about mine if they have granted me the inestimable honor of reading one of them. You Dreamed of Empires has about as much to do with my boring and conventional real life as Hypothermia or Ahora me rindo: nothing. The family travelling to the Southwest in Ahora me rindo serves a narrative function. There are episodes that bear some resemblance to funny or intense things that happened during research trips to Arizona and New Mexico, but they serve only to underpin the extraordinary story of Chiricahua Apache resistance. The characters that bear our names aren’t like us, they just have things happen to them that move the plot along or plant an idea. And Hypothermia has nothing to do with my life at the time I wrote it—when I was a married graduate student, and not a divorced professor. The divorce story functioned as a metaphor for the brokenness of living as an immigrant in the United States by choice. The book ends with a descent into hell and hell does not exist—although if it did, it would be in Mexico, as is suggested there. Later I had terrible romantic failures, but at that time I had never experienced that heartbreaking thing that is the breakup of a family. You learn to live with it, but it doesn’t heal. More than autofictional, Hypothermia was prophetic, and I would have preferred if it hadn’t been. What I do hold to be true in relation to this topic is that if the time in which we live inevitably marks what we write, there is no reason to hold onto the nineteenth-century nonsense about suspension of disbelief. The fourth wall is a convention as unnecessary as the scripts that precede lines of dialogue between characters. It’s all rubbish. The family in Ahora me rindo has that function: they are the ones who speak for the present. The same happens with the equally celebrated and condemned “I don’t really know what this book is about” that opens the section on Vasco de Quiroga in Sudden Death; or the chapter in You Dreamed of Empires narrated in the pluperfect, in which Jazmín Caldera walks through the citadel of the temples of Tenochtitlan. These are fissures or openings for the reader: what I am writing is of course fiction, but what we know of that context is this, and what I sincerely think about it all is this other thing. Having said all that, if someone wants to read my novels as historical or as autofiction, they have the right to do so, and I am equally grateful.
R.F.: The narrator of the novel is located in the reader’s present and in Mexico City. The novel’s temporal and spatial games are of central importance in order for characters like Jazmín Caldera to function. On the other hand, the characters who share the world of the Tenochcas range from Jesus to Diego Rivera and López Velarde. Although the idea of an Aleph appears in the novel, how is it that this same idea appears in the context of Tenochtitlan?
A.E.: That’s a beautiful question. The great Sergio Pitol has the perfect answer to it: “Everything is in everything,” isn’t it? I guess in the end it’s easier to believe in the sacredness of the world after a mushroom trip than after the celebration of the Eucharist, in which you have to have a lot of faith to believe something really happened. You Dreamed of Empires is a comedy. We can be certain that Moctezuma never listened to “Monolith” by T. Rex, not even in his wildest peyote trips. But there remains something enviable in the Mesoamerican religions, which are still alive, but with five hundred years of mestizaje: our world and that of the gods have become superimposed onto one another, and you just have to change the channel for a while to see the divine foundation of things. It gives a comfort that Judeo-Christian abstractions instead take away. “Turn the other cheek.” What kind of bullshit is that?
