I made the most of those outings to walk around the bookstores and ask vainly if there was new French literature. Saturdays I went to the city center to buy wool, Irene had faith in my taste, she was pleased with the colors and I never had to return skeins.

Sometimes she knit a vest and then undid it in a moment because something did not please her it was funny to see a pile of curled wool in the basket, refusing to lose its shape for some hours.

Irene was not this way, she always knit necessary things, sweaters for the winter, socks for me, bed jackets and vests for herself. I do not know why she knit so much, I believe that women knit when they have found in that work the great pretext of doing nothing. Apart from her morning routine she passed the rest of the day knitting in the sofa of her room. Irene was born a girl who bothered no one. We would die there some day, lazy and disdainful cousins would be left with the house and they would throw it to the ground to become rich by the land and the bricks, or better, we ourselves would justly demolish it before it was too late. We entered our 40s with the unspoken idea that our simple and silent sibling marriage was a necessary closure of the genealogy, started by our great grandparents in our house. Irene had turned down two suitors for no particular reason, María Esther died on me before we became engaged. At times we came to believe that it was the one who would not let us get married. It was a pleasant lunch for us, thinking about the profound and silent house and how the two of us were sufficient to keep it clean. We would eat lunch at noon, always punctual then there was nothing left to do outside of a few dirty dishes. We cleaned in the morning, getting up at 7, and at 11 I would leave Irene the last bedrooms to go over and I would go the kitchen. Irene and I became used to persisting alone in it, which was a fortune as in that house eight people could live there without getting in each other’s way.

We liked the house because apart from its spaciousness and antiquity (today old houses succumbed to the more advantageous sale of their materials) it kept the memories of our great grandparents, our paternal grandfather, our parents and our childhood. The following is an English translation of Casa tomada.

Casa tomada julio cortazar english