There are many gaps in the historical record surrounding the nearly two years between Cortés’s first entry into Tenochtitlan and the city’s fall to Spanish forces in August of 1521. Author Álvaro Enrigue, in his acknowledgments, cites “the standard sources” (222), including Cortés’s own 1520 letter to King Charles V and Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s A True History of the Conquest of New Spain, completed around 1568. These texts, both written by Spanish colonizers who participated in the imperial project, provide a first-hand account of the Spanish experience but are necessarily limited in their understanding of the city’s people. Enrigue also cites Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History (1590), also known as the Florentine Codex. This work is unique in that it was written in collaboration with the Nahua people of Mesoamerica, including some who had survived the fall of Tenochtitlan. In this way, the book functions as an oral history of the first encounters between Europe and Mesoamerica from an Indigenous perspective. None of these sources fully explains the enduring mystery of this historical period: How a small, heavily outnumbered contingent of Spanish soldiers managed to take the emperor of Tenochtitlan hostage, precipitating the eventual fall of the Mexica empire. The popular image of Moctezuma as an indecisive leader is rooted more in myth and supposition than in evidence, and Enrigue uses his hallucinatory, counterfactual history to explode this myth.

The empire was not a monolithic entity but a Triple Alliance of three city-states—Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan—that dominated central Mexico. At the time of Cortés’s arrival, this alliance was fraying, with key vassals like the Tlaxcalans having already allied with the Spanish against their traditional Aztec rivals. Enrigue uses this fraught political backdrop to explore the court’s paralysis. The novel depicts the tension between imperial factions and the rebellion in Texcoco, which leaves Moctezuma feeling increasingly isolated. His spiritual crisis is compounded by a complex religious cosmology in which omens and divine will were central to statecraft. The novel shows him retreating into a hallucinatory state, “ingesting more and more magic mushrooms” (13) and consulting shamans, unable to decide whether the Spaniards are envoys or invaders. Though Moctezuma’s own advisors worry that he is losing his ability to govern effectively, the novel’s ending reveals that he has known exactly what he was doing all along. The known historical record is relegated to a brief dream in the mind of Cortés, its gaps and logical inconsistencies not smoothed over but emphasized by the unreal quality of this hallucinatory montage. Meanwhile, what “really” happens in Enrigue’s fiction is presented as far more plausible: a straightforward act of violence that forecloses the possibility of Cortés’s dream coming true. History, Enrigue suggests, can be as elusive and dreamlike as any fiction.