Oak-Lined Park ("Continuity of Parks")
Cortázar describes the estate owner's reading experience in terms of "the tranquillity of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks" (63), and later in the story, the "hero"'s journey "in the yellowish fog of dusk" in "the avenue of trees which led up to the house" (65). The oak-lined green space serves as a calm, interstitial space in which we see the collision of predetermined narrative with "spontaneous reality"—the latter of which is relative, given that the reality of the estate owner is, ironically, also a pre-determined narrative, only different from the "hero" in the sense that it is the first-order narrative as opposed to the second-order narrative.
Dust in the Air ("House Taken Over")
The narrator of "House Taken Over" says, "There's too much dust in the air, the slightest breeze and it's back on the marble console tops and in the diamond patterns of the tooled-leather desk set. It's a lot of work to get it off with a feather duster; the motes rise and hang in the air, and settle again a minute later on the pianos and the furniture" (13). The closed system of dust and old furniture contribute to the overwhelming sense of isolation and stagnancy in the family home of the narrator and his sister, Irene. The fact that dusting is a Sisyphean task that never actually relieves their air of dust just reinforces this notion that nothing really ever changes in the house (until, of course, it is taken over).
The Kingdom by the Tracks ("End of the Game")
The narrator of "End of the Game" recalls, "Our kingdom was this: a long curve of the tracks ended its bend just opposite the back section of the house. There was just the gravel incline, the crossties, and the double line of the track; some dumb sparse grass among the rubble where mica, quartz and feldspar—the components of granite—sparkled like real diamonds in the two o'clock afternoon sun" (137). The narrator describes this sparse, industrial landscape as a kingdom, likens granite to sparkling diamonds, and thereby seduces the reader into viewing this desert expanse adjacent to train tracks with the same fondness and awe with which the narrator viewed it as a child.
The War of the Blossom ("The Night Face Up")
The narrator describes the Moteca trails: "It was unusual as a dream because it was full of smells, and he never dreamt smells. First a marshy smell, there to the left of the trail the swamps began already, the quaking bogs from which no one ever returned. But the reek lifted, and instead there came a dark, fresh composite fragrance, like the night under which he moved, in flight from the Aztecs" (69). Cortázar's detailed descriptions of the Moteca lands, down to the olfactory descriptions which he explicitly separates from the usual landscape of the man's dreams, help convince the reader when the time comes that the Aztec chase is just as eligible to be the "real space" as the more familiar space of the hospital ward.
