A young girl has died and the family’s maid is being interrogated.  She must tell the whole story before arriving the girl’s death. Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid:”smart appearance, full time”, their  ad said. She wanted to make enough money to suppor her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaner their laundry, wipe their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, Witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the Señor gave the señora, she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion as she grew up, the mother’s coldness the father’s distance. She saw it all.  

Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zeran investigated real-life murders committed by four women in her home country. She was interested in examining not only the violence perpetrated by them, and the society’s reaction to it. By delving deeply into each case and considering its social context and impact, she was also rescuing the voices of women too easily dismissed as evil or hysterical. When Julia asks whether her mother might lend Estela some of her make-up: “To make her look white, she said Clean”.

Vignettes such as this offering readers a glimpse of one family’s privilege but also hinting at deeper social disparities. As Estela’s meandering narrative circles towards its tragic foretold conclusion, her personal discontent begins to echo the wider social and political unrest experienced by Chile in the past few years.

Amplifying voices of overlooked women remains a concern in Trabucco Zeran’s Clean , he second novel – her debut, The remainder, was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize,.

Clean’s protagonist, Estela, is a live-in maid employed by a wealthy family in Santiago sometime in the very recent past.  A young woman moves from the countryside to the capital, hoping to make money to help her mother. But the plot takes much darker turns, and Estela finds herself bound to the family in more damaging ways than she was expecting. Estela explains how she came to work for Mara and Cristobal, and to care for her newborn daughter, Julia seven years ago. “ This story has several beginnings. I’d go as far as to say it’s made up of beginnings” says Estela.  She makes it clear that her story will end in tragedy the girl has just died.

“ The Señora had like my white blouse, y long, near plait, my clean straight teeth, and the fact that at no point I dared to hold her gaze”. For the first week they don’t know what to call her “ They kept going to say the name of the woman who’d worked in the house before”.

Estrela’s digressive monologue lays open the imbalance and insincerity in the relationship. She is embedded in the family’s life and knows them intimately – she washes their laundry, see them in bed, hears their daily gripes – but is still made to feel peripheral, her work as indispensable as it is invisible.

 Her employers are  delighted that she can read shopping lists when they send her out for groceries. But her education is also inconvenient. “ The disadvantage of having a literate maid. She reads documents that don’t concern her, written secrets how much they earn, how much they spend, how much they will inherit”?

Estela is aware of their emotional difficulties,  “Her maid, prime witness to to Mara’s unhappiness. And no one likes their happiness to be called into doubt”.

Estela is a keen observer with an eye for delicious detail. About Mara she notes, “ one of her eyelids,  the left one, would visibly twitch, as if a little piece of her own face wanted to break free.” The señor had eyes that looked as though they’d started to decompose, I thought . As if the rot had already set in”.

Describing Carlos, a petrol station attendant who will play a role in her eventual deliverance, she says: “ I remember he seemed both young and old to me. His face young, his hand old, his voice young, his words old, that is what I thought”.

Trabucco Zeran capture vividly the drudgery of Estelle’s domestic tasks.  Estela is profound lonely,  and may have taken the job to support her ageing mother, but when her mother dies thousands of miles away she cannot even attend the funeral , As resentment of her employers mounts, so too does the feeling of being trapped.

Underpinning the sour relationship between the family and their put-upon maid is the social abysss built on class, and further complicated by racial difference. Clean is about a woman’s struggle to find meaning of a society’s over reliance on  the unacknowledged exploitation of its domestic workers.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran, Translated by Sophie Hughes, 4th Estate £16.99, 272 pages.