The Domestic Thriller That Indicts an Entire Society
8 min read
A little girl is dead, and the housekeeper has been brought in for questioning. Or, at least, we think she’s being questioned. All we know is that Estela García, a domestic worker for a well-to-do family in Santiago, Chile, is in a room where she has come to tell her story. Is it a confession? And to whom? That isn’t clear either. Estela has something to say, but on her own terms. “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking,” she declares, “you’re going to let me out of here.”
So begins Clean, the second novel by the Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán, which explores the collision of circumstances that led to the death of the little girl, Julia. It’s also a story about Chile’s social inequities, and how they play out in the gladiatorial arena of the home. Julia’s parents are comfortable professionals: Juan Cristóbal Jensen is a doctor; Mara López, his wife, works as a lawyer for a timber company. They have friends over for dinner parties and hope to buy a vacation home on the coast. Estela, their live-in housekeeper, is originally from a rural community on the island of Chiloé in the south. She joins the couple prior to the birth of Julia, who from her earliest moments on Earth is an obstinate, bedeviled child.
Estela and the Jensens occupy widely divergent social and economic strata; although racial difference isn’t explicitly articulated, it is implied. The paterfamilias has a Scandinavian surname, and his wife applies face creams that make her look “pale, like a porcelain doll.” Estela’s home region is an important center of Indigenous life in Chile. What goes unstated by adults, however, is cruelly voiced by little Julia. “Once, she asked her mother why she didn’t lend me some makeup,” the housekeeper recalls in one passage. “To make her look white, she said. Clean.”
Clean belongs to a wave of Chilean fiction that has probed the country’s convulsions in the decades that followed the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, coldly diagnosing the ailments that Chile’s 1990 transition to democracy failed to heal. First published in 2022 in Spanish as Limpia, the novel has so far been translated into seven languages—and Sophie Hughes, who translated the new English edition, honors the author’s precise, unadorned Spanish. Hughes also translated Trabucco Zerán’s debut, The Remainder, a dark, hallucinatory account of a Chilean exile’s daughter returning her mother’s body to the country for burial; it was published in English in 2019 and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Whereas The Remainder was preoccupied with the ghosts of a violent dictatorship, Clean exposes more contemporary cultural fault lines that are just as destabilizing and, in their immediacy, more urgent.
Lurking in the background of this riveting novel is Chile’s Estallido Social, a series of explosive protests beginning in 2019 that were sparked by an increase in metro fares but ultimately became a referendum on broader inequity. In 2017, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the top 10 percent of Chileans accounted for almost 57 percent of the country’s household wealth. Trabucco Zerán doesn’t specifically name the Estallido, but she sketches its contours, illuminating the conditions that might lead a young person to don a bandanna and pick up a rock.
Clean paints a grim picture of the isolating existence of a live-in domestic worker. There is the oppressively tiny room that Estela inhabits just off the kitchen; the six-day-a-week schedule (including New Year’s Eve) during which she tends to strangers rather than her ailing mother in Chiloé; and the dull, repetitive nature of the job. “That was my life: chicken, cartilage, checking the potatoes weren’t sticking to the baking dish,” she recounts, “checking the madness wasn’t sticking to the inside of my skull, checking my eyes weren’t popping out of their sockets.” All the while, the Jensens (young Julia included) treat her with a shifting mix of condescending paternalism and low-grade hostility. A lot of the time, they simply act as if she is invisible. At one point, Estela recalls her mother pleading with her not to take the job: “It’s not like working in a shop or out in the fields doing the potato harvest. It’s a job that’s kept out of sight.”
In another writer’s hands, Clean would be a good-enough parable about inequality and domestic work. But Trabucco Zerán is masterful at plunging the reader into the murky depths of her characters’ psyches and at rendering disquieting acts with sangfroid. Her housekeeper is a shrewd narrator. Estela addresses the reader in the second person, as if we are the authority on the other side of the two-way mirror who will decide her fate. She preys on our sympathies but also resists the submissiveness that Chilean society demands of women of her social class. “My voice bothers you, doesn’t it?” she asks. “You were expecting something else, isn’t that right? A meeker, more grateful sort of voice.” She fights despair with small gestures of resistance and the occasional act of sabotage. And, with each meandering anecdote, she lures her audience one reluctant step closer to the actual circumstances of Julia’s demise.
The tension of the plot reflects the anxieties of the nation’s recent history. Over the past four decades, Chile has made a disorienting journey from state of terror to hopeful democracy to queasy malaise. Trabucco Zerán, 41, belongs to a generation of writers who were children during the Pinochet era but largely came of age after the democratic transition. Even as they have tasted political freedom, the legacy of the dictatorship has followed them into adulthood: the missing who never returned, as well as an economic system and a constitution molded by the military regime that is still used to govern the country. The work of this cohort of novelists is loosely described as la literatura de los hijos, or “literature of the children.” The phrase, drawn from a chapter heading in Alejandro Zambra’s 2011 novel, Ways of Going Home, encompasses a number of authors who examine memory and violence in intimate, personal ways.
Clean pushes beyond the boundaries of that category without completely disavowing it. Having begun at the end of the story, the novel returns to the past to dissect every decision taken, along with some that were not. This echoes the structure of other recent Chilean novels, including Zambra’s Bonsai, published in 2006, and Nayareth Pino Luna’s Mientras dormías, cantabas (While you slept, you sang), from 2021, both of which open with the looming presence of someone who has died before backtracking to fill out the story. This is not a coincidence but almost a historical inevitability; it’s as if the country’s novelists are conducting an ongoing forensic examination on the Chilean body.
But Clean is in the end more about the present than the past. The Estallido Social addressed a host of grievances: low wages, the rising cost of living, underfunded public schools, a poor public-health system. Mapuche Indigenous people turned out to demand autonomy; feminist organizers spoke out against sexual violence. The protests—the biggest and most violent since the end of the dictatorship—uncapped a well of simmering rage (and were brutally repressed by the Chilean national police). At the root was a frustration with a political and economic system designed during the Pinochet regime, along with social conditions that preceded it, such as Chile’s entrenched hierarchies of race and class. In Clean, Estela is the voice of the Estallido, using her stage—a room where she presumably faces some form of authority—to enumerate the indignities and dead-end options available to someone of her station. “This is a long story, my friends, as you’ll have worked out for yourselves,” she tells us. “It predates me and you; it predates even my mama or yours.” The point of Clean, however, is that this past is just prelude to the here and now.
Trabucco Zerán’s two novels are deeply compelling stand-alone fiction, but they can be read as pieces of a larger project. The author, who studied law at the University of Chile, has also written the genre-bending book When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold, which examines the cases of four Chilean women who became notorious for their roles in scandalous murders in the 20th century. The book consists of four nonfiction essays punctuated by occasional diaristic entries from the author, as well as a dash of fiction. One essay—about the novelist María Carolina Geel, who shot her lover in Santiago’s Hotel Crillón in 1955—has inspired a feature film by the Oscar-nominated Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi. In Her Place, as the film is titled in English, debuted on Netflix earlier this month.
Like Trabucco Zerán’s fiction, When Women Kill addresses violence but is never lurid or sensational. Instead, the author coolly examines how these cases were judged by the legal system, as well as by the public. The final essay, interestingly, is about María Teresa Alfaro, a live-in housekeeper in ’60s-era Chile, who poisoned various members of a family she worked for, including three small children. In her testimony, Alfaro described feeling enraged over the ways her employers controlled her life: scolding her for her choice of boyfriend and forcing her to get abortions as a condition of retaining her job. Alfaro’s true story bears little resemblance to Estela’s fictional arc in Clean, but themes recur throughout both narratives: two poor women whose hopelessness—over whether their lives might ever truly belong to them—fuels anger and frustration. Estela is determined not to let her life go unacknowledged. “From now on you can no longer say that you didn’t know,” Estela says in the novel’s haunting denouement. “That you didn’t hear or see. That you were oblivious to the truth, to reality.” In her story, the Estallido is heard, seen, and understood.
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