House Taken Over

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 our childhood…Irene and I got used to staying in the house by ourselves, which was crazy, eight people could have lived in that space and not gotten in each other’s way.

We rose at seven in the morning and got the cleaning done and about eleven I left Irene to finish off whatever rooms and went to the kitchen. We lunched at noon precisely; then there was nothing left to do but a few dirty plates. It was pleasant to take lunch and commune with the great hollow, silent house, and it was enough for us just to keep it clean. We ended up thinking, at times that that was what had kept us from marrying.

We were easing into our forties with the unvoiced concept that the quiet, simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable end to a line established in this house by our grandparents. We would die here someday, obscure and distant cousins would inherit the place, have it torn down, sell the bricks and get rich on the building plot; or…we would topple it ourselves before it was too late.

Irene never bothered anyone. Once the morning housework was finished, she spent the rest of the day on the sofa in her room, knitting. I couldn’t tell you why she knit so much…Saturdays I went downtown to buy wool…I took advantage for these trips to make the rounds of the bookstores, uselessly asking if they had anything new in French literature. Nothing worthwhile had arrived in Argentina since 1939.

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… I hurled myself against the door before it was too late and shut it, leaned on it with the weight of my body… I ran the great bolt into place, just to be safe.

“I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.”

She let her knitting fall and looked at me with her tired, serious eyes…

“In that case,” she said, picking up her needles again, “we’ll just have to live on this side.”

The first few days were painful, since we’d both left so many things in the part that had been taken over. My collection of French literature, for example, was still in the library…But there were advantages, too. The cleaning was so much simplified that, even when we got up late…by eleven we were sitting around with our arms folded…

We were fine, and little by little, we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.

I took Irene’s arm and forced her to run with me to the wrought-iron door, not waiting to look back. You could hear the noises, still muffled but louder, just behind us. I slammed the grating and we stopped in the vestibule. Now there was nothing to be heard.

“They’ve taken our section,” Irene said.

“Did you have time to bring anything?” I asked hopelessly.

“No, nothing.”

We had what we had on. I remembered fifteen thousand pesos in the wardrobe in my bedroom. Too late now.

I still had my wrist watch on and saw that it was 11 P.M. I took Irene around the waist (I think she was crying) and that was how we went into the street. Before we left, I felt terrible; I looked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer. 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.