On the second page of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s novel Clean, we learn that “the girl dies.” That startling disclosure propels readers into an extended, engrossing monologue that blends a taut mystery with a vivid account of the hardships of a servant’s life in the home of the family for whom she works.
Addressing unidentified interrogators located on the other side of a one-way mirror, Estela Garcia asserts early on that her account “has several beginnings” and that “nothing is ever as simple as it seems.” From that it’s clear that the story of the circumstances leading to the tragic death of 7-year-old Julia, the daughter of lawyer Mara Lopez, and her husband, physician Juan Cristobal Jensen, of Santiago, Chile, will be a digressive one.
For Estela, hot, dry Santiago provides a dramatic contrast to her home on an island off Chile’s southern coast. Mara is pregnant when 33-year-old Estela joins the household, and the maid quickly must adapt herself to the demands of her employers, which become even more challenging after Julia’s birth. She’s a difficult child, especially when it comes to her resistance, as she grows, to eating.
In Sophie Hughes’ spare, quietly eloquent translation, Zerán portrays a life of incessant toil, interrupted by the Sunday of leisure Estela often spends without leaving her room. Her employers make little effort to relate to her on a human level, and she’s haunted by her separation from her mother, who had urged her not to work as a domestic servant.
Estela’s melancholy, which at one point drives her into a protracted silence as she goes about her duties, is interrupted only briefly when a mutt she names Yany follows her home from a nearby gas station, later returning for periodic visits that must be concealed from Mara and Juan. The “charmless dog” is involved in the cascading series of events that culminate in Julia’s death, and by the time Estela’s narrative comes to a close, the ultimate responsibility for that tragedy is anything but clear. Clean is a well-drawn character study whose sadness lingers in the mind.