Summary
"House Taken Over" is narrated from the first-person perspective of an unnamed man who lives in his ancestral home in Argentina with his sister, Irene. Both of the siblings are "easing into" their forties and are unmarried and resigned to the idea that they will both grow old, unmarried, in this house together. The narrator begins by describing his and Irene's daily routine, which is synchronized and quite boring and unchanging—their days are occupied by chores to keep up the enormous house that they live in, which has much more space than is needed for two people. They take lunch at exactly noon every day, and afterwards, Irene knits. The narrator reads his beloved books (he favors French literature).
The narrator emphasizes Irene's predilection for knitting. He sees it as an excuse to do nothing at all. At the same time, he appreciates Irene's skill and her commitment to knitting all the time. She's a perfectionist, always searching for new patterns to master. When a garment she's knitting contains an imperfection, she will unravel it and start again. Once, the narrator finds a dresser full of garments gathering dust, enough to fill a shop with. The narrator doesn't have the heart to ask Irene what she expects to do with all the clothes. The fact that it's wasteful to buy more yarn and knit more clothes that no one will ever wear doesn't matter, because the siblings live off of income from their family farms. They take in more money than they can spend, and in this way they enjoy total financial freedom.
One day, as the narrator puts on a pot of water for tea, he hears a rustling on the other side of the house, which is connected to the kitchen by a large, mahogany door. The narrator recognizes the sound—"muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over into the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation" (13)—and rushes to slam and bolt locked the mahogany door. When he brings the tray of mate to his sister, he tells her, "I had to shut the door to the passage. They've taken over the back part" (13). Irene seems to know what he means by "they," and momentarily drops her knitting. They both tacitly accept that that side of the house is lost to them. Everything they left on that side—the narrator's books, Irene's slippers and stationary—is lost to them.
In a long parenthetical, the narrator describes the quietness of the house at night and how easily he awakes when Irene talks in her sleep. The house grows more tense after the mysterious squatters conquer its other half. After growing accustomed to living on "their" side of the house, one night, as the narrator is filling a glass of water before bed, he halts after hearing a commotion on their side of the house. Without hesitation, the narrator grabs his sister and they flee from the house. He locks the front door and throws the key into the sewer, concluding that "it wouldn't do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and with the house taken over" (16).
Analysis
In "House Taken Over," Cortázar explores what it means to inhabit a space. The narrator and his sister, Irene, live in their ancestral home in Argentina and neither of them work. The house, according to the narrator, could comfortably fit a family of eight, but instead, it's just him and his sister. Neither of them is married, neither is in the process of expanding the family, and so their inhabitance of the space marks a certain end to the family line. As the narrator points out, they are living "in a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials" (10). When they die, the narrator predicts that "obscure and distant cousins would inherit the place, have it torn down, sell the bricks and get rich on the building plot," and he suggests that the more just solution would be for him and his sister to "topple it" themselves (11). By all the narrator's calculations, before the takeover, the house would be dying with him and his sister, Irene.
The narrator emphasizes both his and his sister's lack of production (or in Irene's case, the redundant production of knitted garments) and the fact that neither of them ever really leave the house, so it is an unfortunate irony, given the fact that they could be characterized as hermits or shut-ins, that they are the target of some unidentified force driving them outside. The narrator says, "I think women knit when they discover that it's a fat excuse to do nothing at all," but he defends his sister's knitting, saying, "Irene was not like that, she always knitted necessities" (11). As for the narrator himself, he ventures outside more than Irene does, but only to pick up more yarn for her and to check with local bookstores to "uselessly [ask] if they had anything new in French literature" (11). The narrator's description of their circumstances emphasizes his and his sister's lack of use value; the only thing they actually do manage to affect is the state of the house's interior, which due to its size is constantly moving toward disorder. But even in their chores and upkeep, the narrator admits to ineffectuality. When talking about dusting, he says, "the motes rise and hang in the air, and settle again a minute later on the pianos and the furniture" (13).
When the house is breached the first time and the intruders take over half the house on the other side of the mahogany door, there is no discussion of recourse between the narrator and Irene. They don't consider retaliation or calling authorities or anything like that. They simply consider that side of the house and everything in it totally lost to them. The ambiguity of the intruders and their identity leaves a vacuum of meaning in "House Taken Over." In other words, by not explicitly identifying the intruders one way or another, Cortázar leaves the story widely open to interpretation by the reader. The reader can map any number of forces onto the narrator and his sister losing their family home. It could be seen as a political force, a class uprising, or a foray into magical realism.
The takeover of the house certainly is not logical or realistic in itself, given that the bathroom is accessible from both sides of the house. The intruders do not seem to be aggressively trying to breach the other side of the house; it's just that one day, they simply are there. If these were aggressive conquerors, they would likely knock down doors and walls until they had control of the entire house. The slow progression of the takeover seems to suggest something less familiar to our world. On the other hand, the narrator and Irene seem to fear the takers-over as if they were some kind of violent force that could not be safely confronted or reasoned with. And when the narrator, upon finally vacating the house for good, locks the front door and throws the keys in the sewer, he suggests that he wouldn't wish an encounter with the new inhabitants on burglars. So, there is clearly an element of danger attached to the takers-over, but the danger remains undefined. The danger could possibly serve as an analogy for the fascist regimes active and sweeping across Europe and South America throughout the twentieth century, but there is scant textual proof that maps any particular threat to the intrusion.
One thing is clear about the intruders: they define the narrator and his sister Irene's existence in the house. Their inhabitance means nothing until the encroaching invasion provides it some textural relief. The entire story of their inhabitance of the house comes down to their eventual forced eviction from it, which seems to be a commentary on class and inheritance. With no need to earn and no connection to the sources of their income—the farms that no doubt operate on the backs of laborers who need to work in order to survive—Irene and the narrator struggle to occupy themselves. Irene occupies herself with knitting, which the narrator exposes as redundant and quite wasteful when he finds most of her garments gathering dust in an old dresser, and the narrator occupies himself with books and cooking lunches. Their ineffectual occupation of themselves and their house gives way to new occupants, who emit a "buzzing of conversation" (13) through its rooms.
