Clean
By Alia Trabucco Zeran
Literary Fiction
October2024
Riverhead Books
A woman goes to work, temporarily, she believes, as a live-in maid in Santiago to send money home to her mother. She stays seven years in Clean, by Alia Trabucco Zeran. Estela the maid is certain of what she is telling unseen people on the other side of the door, in a locked room, after a tragedy.
But is she right?
The reader knows from the start that the tragedy is the death of the seven-year-old daughter of the couple who employ Estela. What happened isn't revealed until the end. How it happened, and who did it, can be open to interpretation. To get to the revelation the reader, like the people Estela is telling her story to, have to start at the beginning.
At the beginning, Estela is given the job without any credentials or much of an interview. The senora is close to giving birth and they need someone. Maybe she got the job because she fit into the maid's clothing in the little room where she has been given a bed. Even though she told them she has no experience with children.
Well, she's going to get that experience.
From the time Julia is born, until her death, the daily needs of "the girl" are Estela's duties. That's in addition to cleaning, ironing, dusting, cooking and anything else that they want done. The senor is a doctor who would rather be at his clinic. The senora works for a company overseeing the planting of pine trees. Both are far more invested in their careers than their child or each other.
But one thing they excel at is making sure Estela knows her place. Any time anything personal about either of her employers is revealed to her, they make sure they belittle her. Any time she is superficially included in something, such as singing Happy Birthday at the girl's party or receiving glass of champagne on New Year's Eve, it concludes with the tacit order for her to get back to work.
The daily indignities, the continual repetition of her duties, the lack of a life of her own wear on Estela. Long phone calls with her mother on her day off are about all she has. That, and a street dog that bonds with her. Yany, as Estela names the dog, spends afternoons napping in the laundry room while she works, before her employers come home. It's some time before the girl finds the animal.
The child is the most demanding part of Estela's job. Even as an infant, she refused food and baths. She threw tantrums. She screamed. She fought. She bit her nails. This character is one that was born angry at the world. She learns by watching how to command Estela to do things for her. She is the source of both worry and pride to her parents.
Although her father insists on teaching her to swim, and her mother promises her extravagant birthday parties and costumes, it's the maid who feeds her, bathes her, braids her hair into plaits, cleans her clothes and her room and her home. It's the maid who does everything for her.
It's the maid who both loves her and who would like to not acknowledge her existence.
As the story reaches its climax, the personal combines with the societal. The unrest that has been on the TV news throughout the novel affects the characters. That is fitting, because most of the conflict in Estela's life is because of her social status as it relates to the other characters. She is the servant of the family in whose house she works. A paycheck does not take away from the idea of ownership.
Estela begins to feel more and more stressed out as the novel progresses. There are times when she isn't sure if she is really where she is. There are times she feels removed from the scene, as if she was imagining it. There are times when she recognizes she is imagining something happening.
Between that and her conflicted feelings for the girl, there is more than one possible interpretation to the revelation of what happened. Just as there is more than one possible way to interpret what the ending shows about her situation.
The biggest determination for the reader, however, may be deciding whether Estela is a reliable narrator. Or just a narrator who doesn't know that she doesn't know.
What makes Clean an intriguing and rewarding read as the unanswered questions. Intriguing because the reader can decide what really happened. And rewarding because considering how people make each other feel matters. How people treat each other can make or break lives. And sometimes, if those treatments take place within the larger context of what is going on in the rest of society, they loom even larger.