House Taken Over

Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” was a really great story, but one I don’t entirely understand. Perhaps I’m not supposed to. But regardless, I cannot help but feel dissatisfied with the ending. Who has taken over the house? It’s never answered, or maybe I didn’t read closely enough. Cortazar has a knack for great descriptions and imagery. The brother and sister of the story are described in such a fashion that I could picture them immediately, cooped up in their house. They appear to very dull people, always with the same routine, day in and day out. They both clean the house, eat lunch at precisely noon, and then go off to separate activities. Irene does her knitting, while the narrator reads his books (he mentions bookstores and his books a lot). The narrator seems to take a sweet satisfaction in watching Irene knit – he loves to see the tangled wool lying on the floor. One night, the narrator hears a noise on the other side of the oak doors. He bolts the doors immediately and  tells Irene that “they’ve taken over the back part.” Irene seems to know exactly who or what her brother is talking about, but the reader is left in the dark.  The narrator talks about how everything, aside from the noises they make in their sleep, is quiet in the house. The people or things on the other side of the oak door apparently make no noise. By the end of the story, “they” have taken over the entire house. Irene and her brother leave, but not before the brother locks the door of the house and throws the key down a sewer because, as he puts it, “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.” So clearly from this last line, robbers are not who took over the house in the first place. In fact, the narrator’s sympathy for any possible robber who might come across the house implies that those who have taken over the house are a whole lot worse than a few petty criminals. But what has taken over the house? They seemed to be expected by Irene and her brother. Could they be spirits? Demons? Cortazar never defines it, which I suppose lends itself to the magical realism of the story, but it’s quite frustrating not to know what has consumed this house and frightened the narrator and Irene so much that they leave the house that they were supposed to die in someday. “They” seem to be described like humans (‘having muted conversations”), but for all I know they could be giant bugs or flying carpets. Cortazar leaves this up to the imagination, and to me, it seems that it would be demons or the spirits of those who have lived in the house that have taken it over. But I guess we’ll never really know.