Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán — seeking meaning in the menial

In her critically acclaimed non-fiction work When Women Kill (2022) Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán investigated real-life murders committed by four women in her home country. She was interested in examining not only the violence visited upon women, but the violence perpetrated by them, and in society’s reaction to it. By delving deeply into each case and considering its social context and impact, she was also rescuing the voices of women too easily dismissed as evil or hysterical.

Amplifying the voices of overlooked women remains a concern in Trabucco Zerán’s Clean, her second novel — her debut, The Remainder, was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize. Clean’s protagonist, Estela, is a live-in maid employed by a wealthy family in Santiago sometime in the very recent past. In some ways the story is a familiar one: a young woman moves from the countryside to the capital, hoping to make money to help her mother. Soon, however, the plot takes much darker turns and Estela finds herself bound to the family in more damaging ways than she was expecting.

Speaking to unidentified listeners in a police station, Estela explains how she came to work for Mara and Cristóbal, and to care for their newborn daughter, Julia, seven years ago. “This story has several beginnings,” says Estela. “I’d go as far as to say it’s made up of beginnings.” She makes it clear, however, that her story will end in tragedy: the girl has just died.

The start is conventional enough: “The advertisement read like this: Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time.” The family take the inexperienced Estela in. “The señora had liked my white blouse, my long, neat plait, my clean, straight teeth, and the fact that at no point had I dared to hold her gaze.” For the first week, they don’t know what to call her: “They kept going to say the name of the woman who’d worked in the house before.”

Estela’s digressive monologue lays open the imbalance and insincerity in the relationship. She is embedded in the family’s life and knows them intimately — she washes their laundry, sees them in bed, hears their daily gripes — but is still made to feel peripheral, her work as indispensable as it is invisible.

Her employers are delighted that she can read shopping lists when they send her out for groceries. But her education is also inconvenient: “The disadvantage of having a literate maid. She reads documents that don’t concern her, written secrets: how much they earn, how much they spend, how much they’ll inherit.” Even worse than Estela knowing about the couple’s financial affairs is her being aware of their emotional difficulties: “Her maid, prime witness to [Mara’s] unhappiness. And no one likes their happiness to be called into doubt.”

Estela is a keen observer with an eye for delicious detail. About Mara she notes: “One of her eyelids, the left one, would visibly twitch, as if a little piece of her own face wanted to break free.” The señor had eyes “that looked as though they’d started to decompose, I thought. As if the rot had already set in.” Describing Carlos, a petrol-station attendant who will play a role in her eventual deliverance, she says: “I remember he seemed both young and old to me. His face young, his hands old; his voice young, his words old, that’s what I thought.”

Trabucco Zerán captures vividly the drudgery of Estela’s domestic tasks. What comes across most powerfully is her profound loneliness. She may have taken the job to support her ageing mother, but when her mother dies thousands of miles away she cannot even attend the funeral. As resentment of her employers mounts, so too does the feeling of being trapped.

Underpinning the increasingly sour relationship between the family and their put-upon maid is the social abyss built on class, and further complicated by racial difference. This is illustrated shockingly when Julia asks whether her mother might lend Estela some of her make-up: “To make her look white, she said. Clean.”

Vignettes such as this one, offering readers a glimpse of one family’s privilege but also hinting at deeper social disparities, make Clean — expertly translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes — a rich and compelling read. As Estela’s meandering narrative circles towards its tragic foretold conclusion, her personal discontent begins to echo the wider social and political unrest experienced by Chile in the past few years.

Uncomfortable and provocative, Clean is a chilling account of one woman’s struggle to find meaning in the menial, but also an indictment of a society’s overreliance on the unacknowledged exploitation of its domestic workers.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes 4th Estate £16.99, 272 pages

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