“The afternoon of the eighth of November 1519, Moctezuma did exactly what he always did after eating, even if the whole world might change forever from the moment he woke up. He lapped the paste of magic mushrooms and honey from the Oaxacan black-clay spoon handed to him by the serving girl, and sat in the sun until he felt his eyes closing. Amid a now absolute silence he walked to his room and his bed. He took off his cape, his mantle and his breechcloth, and got under the goosefeather coverlet. He pulled it up to his eyebrows and fell asleep. 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. It woke the palace and its courtyards, its kitchens and infinite offices. The sound woke the priests in the temple and their sentinels, who set to beating the drums that woke the birds and the dogs. It woke the grand houses of the pipiltin that surrounded the emperor's palace and it woke the chinampas that nourished them. It woke the children in the floating neighbourhoods, who made an impossible ruckus that woke their mothers and fathers, their grandparents, the herons and the fish.
It woke the cookfires and with them the traffic on the causeways; it woke the watchers at the gates of the city and the guards on the series of fortifications that climbed up the mountains and all the way down to the sea. It woke the enemy: in kingdoms subjugated and free, and in those that Moctezuma had ordered to keep at a simmer for the hunting of sacrificial warriors when the season for war came again.
It woke everything, even if almost every day for many months now, after waking and ringing the bell, the huey tlatoani had gone right back to sleep.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires, S. 71
