I've been waiting to update my understanding of Cortes and Moctezuma ever since Neil Young mistold it to me at a concert in 1986 in his equally hallucinatory take on the meeting in his song Cortez the Killer. This book doesn't have that crazy horse guitar solo, or the weird insertion of a woman into the lyrics that Neil knows is somehow "living there, and she loves me to this day. I still can't remember when or how I lost my way.", but it does have wicked and funny court farces and lots of Spanish buffoonery. I was sober at the Neil Young concert because I was 15 and went with a friends father who dreamed of an accountant son. If I could do it all over again I'd have ingested plenty of psychoactive plants or mushrooms at both the concert and my reading of this good book to help complete my white guy understanding of this historic moment in the only way it can be understood after empires fall and colonialism erases - as an inherently selfish hallucination.