Fistful of Dirt

‘The defining feature of a tragedy is that we know how it will end,’ a character tells us towards the end of Clean, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s latest novel. ‘And yet, for some reason, we carry on reading.’ The book begins with a sense of brutal inevitability. An unknown voice speaks flatly in a silent room: ‘The end of this story – are you sure you want to know? – is this: the girl dies.’ A beat passes. ‘Hello? No reaction at all?’ What follows is a circuitous jailhouse confession from a domestic worker who has been charged with the murder of her employers’ seven-year-old daughter. ‘If you can hear me, if you are there,’ she begins, ‘I want to propose a deal: I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let me out of here.’ This woman, Estela, is alone in an interrogation room, speaking to a two-way mirror. Throughout the novel – almost like a nervous tic – she solicits her unseen audience, telling them she’s getting to the good bit, or dominating them as an actress does her crowd: ‘Now stop what you’re doing and listen to me.’

If the novel is a tragedy, there’s also a fairy-tale quality to its opening: an oracular woman trapped before a hostile audience, ready to command and seduce her way to safety. The suspense established in Estela’s opening monologue is compelling but crudely drawn – she’s constructing her story in a hurry. Who is the girl? How did she die? The more interesting question is whether the narrative itself can be a space in which Estela engineers her own freedom.

Estela’s story begins with her answering an ad: ‘Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time’. (Julia, the dead girl, is yet to be born.) The setting is Santiago; Estela has travelled to the city from southern Chile to earn money to send back to her mother, whose unexpected medical bills delay her return. The Jensens, the couple who have placed the ad, are professionals, rich in the manner of lawyers (her) and doctors (him) – not patrician, but the sort of people who have ‘help’ and for whom the line between themselves and their employees requires constant reinforcement. Estela is instructed never to wash her clothes with theirs. The señora shows her to a small room off the kitchen where she will sleep. It’s sparsely decorated, a bit like a cell.

This novel is full of enclosures: the holding cell, the tiny bedroom in another family’s home. Estela is constrained in multiple ways: six identical uniforms hang in her wardrobe; the Jensens phrase their commands as requests and use diminutive pet names for her, gestures of intimacy that underline their power. Intimacy is itself a form of captivity. She knows what the Jensens eat, where they sweat through their clothes, what their sheets look like once slept in, the way they speak to each other in private. In their eyes, however, she is less a human than a high-functioning utility. ‘She asked me as if it were in my power to say no,’ she says of the señora. ‘To say: Señora, do you know what? I won’t be going, I don’t feel like it, I didn’t sleep last night after seeing you and your husband fucking in the dining room.’

This is Zerán’s true subject: the psychological effect of being treated as an implement rather than a person. When Estela first enters her room off the kitchen, she sits on the narrow bed and experiences a sense of disembodiment: ‘It occurred to me that my life – that is, the life of the woman sitting on the bed – was somehow temporary. That’s what I thought. As if I were in a film that sooner or later would end, and then there in front of me, immense and luminous, would be true reality.’ Depersonalisation becomes a disorder of the working class. The dissociation Estela feels when she arrives at the Jensens’ is compounded over years. Her real self is back in the south with her mother. The life she is leading now – holding another woman’s baby, washing the underwear of someone else’s husband – grows more trance-like as time passes.

In the Jensens’ home, Estela thinks ‘very clearly: this is a real house, with nails hammered into the walls and picture frames hanging from those nails. And that thought, I don’t know why, brought on a pain between my eyes.’ Her own existence feels ghostlike by comparison: she does not have a house, a husband, a child, a sense of agency. She does not wear her own clothes. Her life consists only of the labour that makes someone else’s more fulfilling life possible. And, like all domestic labour, Estela’s work requires constant repetition. Real connection – with herself or with other people – is impossible. ‘He smiled at me and I smiled back at him,’ Estela says of a petrol station worker. ‘I remember it well because it felt like a gesture being performed by someone else’s face.’

Violence done by and to Chilean women is a consistent theme in Zerán’s work. In Las Homicidas (2019, translated by Sophie Hughes as When Women Kill in 2022), she excavated the lives of four 20th-century Chilean women convicted of murder, interrogating the way gender and class bias may have provoked their crimes and later shaped their public images. Her first novel, La Resta (2015, translated as The Remainder in 2018), involved a quest for the missing body of a dead mother through a Santiago in the throes of dictatorship and overflowing with corpses. Zerán’s writing explores the ways in which dehumanising social and material conditions lead to self-estrangement, interpersonal violence and horror. In the new novel, the Jensens’ house is a confined setting in which these dynamics can unravel, at first subtly and then in spiralling chaos.

But while the plot of Clean accelerates towards disaster, the novel holds few surprises. Part of the problem is that the characters play exactly to type. The man of the house is rigid and domineering. He keeps track of ‘every minute, every peso, every conquest. A man who wakes up before sunrise to squeeze in a jog, who brushes his teeth while sorting his things, who checks his diary while jogging, who reads the paper while eating.’ To teach his fearful daughter to swim, he shoves her roughly into the swimming pool and stands watching as she chokes and flails. The woman of the house is thin and anxious. For dinner, she eats ‘rocket with seeds, chicory with seeds, spinach with seeds, cabbage with seeds. Afterwards, in secret, she would eat a cheese roll polished off with a glass of wine and a handful of pills.’ She keeps a smile on her face in front of guests even when enraged. The dental guard she wears at night is stained with blood.

Julia serves as a cipher for her parents’ repressed anxiety and rage. She refuses to eat, replicating the behaviour she has learned from her mother. Like her parents, she is cruel, but more bluntly so. She doesn’t shy away from making the implicit explicit. She makes Estela lie down on the ground and play-acts a funeral. Open your mouth, she commands, and when Estela does she shoves a fistful of dirt inside. Frightened and angry, she seems to haunt the novel even when she is alive.

The family is a caricature of itself: ‘an unhappy little girl, a woman keeping up appearances, and a man keeping count’. Even Estela, for the most part, fails to think or act against type. She is angry. She is homesick. She is alienated. She pities her employers and loathes them. She is obedient and reliable (‘trustworthy, presentable,’ she repeats grimly). Occasionally she rebels in small ways – loading rocks into a blender, causing it to explode, or zipping herself into the señora’s new dress.

This predictability can seem like a flaw in the novel: real people don’t adhere so perfectly to their prescribed roles. From the outset, however, Clean is framed as a morality play told by a condemned woman. It’s not the sort of book that embraces life’s messiness and contradictions, but one in which people are doomed to enact the roles they have been assigned. The end point may be set (‘the girl dies’) but as the plot unfolds it becomes clear that this isn’t the real calamity or even the most devastating loss.

Estela explains that as her rage and alienation grew, she eventually stopped speaking altogether. ‘My silence had already embedded itself in my throat,’ she says. But passivity doesn’t shield her from the events unfolding around her. At one point, the señor, drunk on whisky, forces her to sit through a long, detailed description of an encounter he had with a sex worker years before. She suddenly understands that she’s been mistaken all along: this is her real life, the only one she gets. Her silence hasn’t turned her into a spectre – only a spectator: ‘I realised that I couldn’t stop him. Him or the story. I wouldn’t be able to unhear what that man was about to tell me. And I, or rather my silence, was only encouraging him. As if each unuttered word of mine opened the way for another of his.’

Estela’s monologue constitutes her subsequent outpouring, her desire to speak in her own voice – self-conscious, sometimes clumsy, but also defiant. Whether what she reveals to her interrogators will persuade them to free her from her cell so she can go back to the south remains unclear. What she achieves is less an act of self-emancipation than one of testimony: ‘From now on you can no longer say that you didn’t know. That you didn’t hear or see. That you were oblivious to the truth, to reality. I’m in here. The door’s still locked.’