An outstanding collection of stories by the incomparable Julio Cortázar along with essays about Julio. My copy of this book is from my local library. If you can't locate this volume, please check out the more available collection entitled Blow-Up and Other Stories. As a way of sharing some Julio magic, I will focus on one of his frequently anthologized stories, a story I've read and reread over the years - House Taken Over. This story is available on-line following the following link: https://www.google.com/#q=house+taken...
HOUSE TAKEN OVER
Eerie Recall: “We liked the house because, apart from its being old and spacious (in a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials), it kept the memories of great-grandparents, our paternal grandfather, our parents and the whole of childhood.” This very short story’s opening line packs so much punch: memories of great-grandparents, a grandfather and parents add the heavy weight of generations; the mention of memories echo the author’s own memories of a childhood spent ill in bed where he recounts a vivid dream of an unseen presence entering his boyhood home and taking over - all told, memories of childhood and older generations as ominous foreshadowing of events that will eventually unfold.
Elvio’s Story: Right at the outset, Elvio (the name I’ve given to our unnamed first-person narrator) provides the backstory: he and his sister Irene are pushing forty and have declined getting married so they can settle in together with “the unvoiced concept that the quiet, simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable end to the line established in the house by our grandparents.” Whoa, Elvio, hold on there! Are you sure your grandparents would have approved of you and your sister living as husband and wife? With this statement and others, along with his obsessive-compulsive need to clean house according to clockwork, I think we might be dealing with a less than reliable narrator, not to mention a less than mentally stable one.
Unnerved Narrator: Oddly, Elvio only wants to talk about the house and Irene since he tells us, self-effacingly, that he himself is not very important. Also, he alludes to how he and Irene need not work to earn a living since they are made rich through ownership of a farm.
So what do Irene and Elvio do all day after they spend their mornings cleaning house? Answer: he and his sister engage in those two sedentary pastimes of the idle rich: Irene knits and Elvio reads, usually books of French literature. They do this so as to, as Elvio puts it, 'kill time' (the story takes place prior to television and other in-home entertainment technologies).
And after Elvio explains the layout of the house in detail and how he and Irene usually do not go beyond a certain oak door, he makes a most peculiar observation: there is too much dust in the air in Buenos Aires. Really? Sounds like Elvio is obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness to the point of paranoia, a nasty combination as anyone knows who has ever had the misfortune to be around such a person. Sorry, Elvio, but all this reclusiveness, obsessive-compulsion and paranoia is beginning to sound just a bit creepy.
Turning Point: Halfway through the story there is a dramatic event shifting the entire tone, an event occurring one evening when Elvio decides to fix some mate. Here is how Julio Cortázar describes it: “I went down the corridor as far as the oak door, which was ajar, then turned into the hall toward the kitchen, when I heard something in the library or the dining room. The sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation. At the same time, or a second later, I heard it as the end of the passage which led from those two rooms toward the door. I hurled myself against the door before it was too late and shut it, leaning on it with the weight of my body; luckily, the key was on our side; moreover, I ran the great bolt into place, just to be safe.”
Aftermath: Elvio informs Irene he had to shut the door to the back part of the house since they have taken over. Irene's reaction is telling: as a sister (and wife) she has joined her brother in his paranoia and fear. Their next days are painful, their daily routines are completely disrupted and brother and sister modify their life to accommodate the unseen presence that now inhabits half of their home.
You will have to read the story yourself to see how events unfold now that they are both living in the grip of fear. Again, Julio has written about the inspiration for his story, one of his earliest, as a fictionalization of one of his childhood nightmares. Julio also spoke about how presences from other dimensions, things like visions, hallucinations, dreams and apparitions would pop up at unexpected times, for example, he was sitting in the balcony of a theater prior to a concert when he saw fantastic creatures, small green globes, floating before his eyes. He subsequently took this specific hallucination and created his cronopios.
Coda: I mentioned I have reread this story many times. There is a good reason. Similar to Julio I have also had dreams of unseen presences. And similarly, in my own boyhood I had a number of creatures, both large and small, appear as hallucinations. As I’ve come to recognize, what is critical about such experiences is to deal with them creatively rather than giving into fear as brother and sister give into fear in House Taken Over.
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