A slow-burning Chilean tale of power and class, Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán is an exceptional novel and one of our stand-out reads of the year to date. It tells the story of Estela, a housemaid implicated in the death of her employers’ young daughter. From inside a locked room or perhaps cell, Estela addresses us, her potential jailers, before we can interrogate her. She is, apparently, attempting to set the record straight, recounting her years of drudgery and isolation in the frigid bosom of a wealthy family in Santiago, and how a series of interconnecting events have led to the death of her charge, seven-year-old Julia. An unsettling and atmospheric mystery unfolds.
It begins, Estela tells us, with an advertisement: ‘Housemaid wanted, presentable, full-time’. Having moved to the capital city from rural Chile, with the aim of sending money home to her ageing mother, Estela is relieved to be offered the position immediately, although unusually, no references have been requested.
On the following Monday, she begins the first of what will become two thousand mornings of making her employers’ bed, and a mere week after taking the job, her housekeeper role morphs into something more challenging. The lady of the house gives birth and presents her new daughter to Estela to be looked after. Unqualified and resentful, Estela acquiesces. She trudges through the days, the girl’s first word, first solid food, first tantrum, first outward signs of a distinct oddness. Something is off-kilter in the family. As Estela tells it, it’s almost inevitable that something terrible will happen.
Zerán meticulously conveys the details of Estela’s confined life, her cell-like bedroom that opens off the kitchen, exhaustedly cleaning the house at 4am after a late house party, being asked to hand wash underwear. And the sense of playing a part in family life but feeling forever alone, her unhappiness quietly simmering.
Several times throughout the novel, Estela addresses us directly, she believes we’re waiting for her to deliver a confession. She will not. Instead she tells us about the family, whom she declines to call by name, they are instead the señor, señora, and child. The señor is a notably controlled and commanding figure (an episode of parental tyranny reveals much about himself and, conversely, his tiny daughter), his wife is uptight and pill-popping. As for the child, Julia, she emerges from babyhood as a brittle, strange child, aware of the power she holds over her parents’ employee.
In one of a series of disquieting episodes, the now school-age girl directs Estela in a lets-pretend scenario in the garden. Estela is to lie on the ground with eyes closed whilst the frail child sways and mutters some lines above her. Just like a funeral.
The scene concludes with a startling act. By this point, outside events have conspired against Estela, compelling her to stay in her miserable job. Omens appear, she tells us, and secrets lie in wait.
Amongst other accolades, Zerán is an International Booker Prize shortlisted author. In Clean she gives us an intense psychological thriller, brilliantly interwoven with themes of social inequality and injustice.
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán is translated from the original Spanish by Sophie Hughes and published by Fourth Estate, 264 pages.
