A housemaid is suspected of killing a child in 'Clean,' a novel about class and power

A woman named Estela García sits alone in an interrogation cell and begins talking to the police she assumes are listening in from another room. She’s 40 years old, born to a single mother in the Chilean countryside.

Seven years earlier, Estela traveled to the city of Santiago in search of work and was hired by a wealthy couple to be their "housemaid" and nanny to their soon-to-be born daughter, Julia. That daughter, now 7, has just been found dead in the family’s swimming pool. Whether the cause of her death will be deemed an accident, suicide, or foul play we don’t know; but, if it’s the latter, Estela is the chief suspect.

We readers learn almost all of this information in the first pages of Clean, a slim, extraordinary novel by Chilean author, Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated into English by Sophie Hughes. But, here’s something we never learn: what Estela looks like.

I’ve sat still in Estela’s company for hours, raptly reading her story and hearing her voice; yet, it wasn’t until I began describing the premise of this novel that I realized I have no idea of Estela’s appearance beyond the general categories of gender and age.

Through the brilliance of her writing, Zerán lulls readers into the same haughty blindness as Estela’s employers. To the señor, a doctor, and the señora, who works for some kind of corporation, invisible Estela simply is what she does for them: “making the bed, airing the rooms, scrubbing the vomit out of the rug,” cooking and serving their meals; bleaching the sweat and dirt out of their clothes; and attending to their surly child, who, even as a baby, had to be coaxed to eat.

In its narrative structure Clean may sound like a suspense story, but it’s really a memoir-in-miniature narrated by Estela — a sharp woman who’s had to funnel her life into the rooms of her employers’ house. “Claustrophobia” would have been a good alternative title for this novel, which is set almost exclusively in interior spaces.

Why stay inside with Estela, you may ask? The answer is her voice. Listen to this passage, where Estela in her cell answers the question she assumes is on the minds of her unseen inquisitors, as well as us readers:

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. ... My answer is the following: Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories and the shops on the other side of this wall?

I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals — open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth — each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

There are so many sentences in this closely-observed novel where an image or comment suddenly swerves matters from the mundane to the revelatory: For instance, when Estela, in answer to an ad, first shows up at her employers’ address, the señora, then pregnant, looks her “up and down,” while the señor doesn’t even make eye contact: “He was texting on his phone [Estela recalls] and, without even glancing up, pointed at the kitchen door.”

When Julia, as a 2-year-old, begins to bite her nails so compulsively her cuticles bleed, Estela comments:

I kept thinking about the girl, ... about her chubby, idle hands, always ready to pop those nails into her mouth, for them to be destroyed by her teeth. I never bit my nails. My mama didn’t either. I suppose for that you’d need to have your hands free.

Through the years, tensions within and beyond the house escalate as protests against income inequality rock the city. Even Estela’s own behavior becomes less tamped down. For instance, she illicitly cares for a street dog in the laundry room of the house — an assertion of autonomy that, in a roundabout way, leads to that prison cell.

Clean is an intense novel about class and power and the kind of deep down rot that lingers, despite the most vigorous scrubbing.