In 1946 an old man editing a magazine in Buenos Aires received a manuscript from a young man he had never met. The story was about a brother and sister who lived in a house that was slowly being taken over by something they could not see. They did not fight it. They cleaned one room and then another room became not theirs. They cooked dinner and then the kitchen became not theirs. They never saw what was taking the house. They only knew it by the rooms they could no longer enter. The old man read it once and published it immediately. He recognized the thing in the story because he had spent his whole life writing about the same thing from the other side. He wrote about labyrinths. The young man wrote about houses. They were both writing about architecture that contains more than the architect intended. The young man was Cortázar. He did not know the old man would publish him. The old man did not know the young man would become the other half of a literature that neither of them could have built alone. The house was already being taken over before either of them arrived. They just wrote down what they found inside it.