Nana, not Mama

Told in two voices, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s International Booker-shortlisted debut The Remainder (2019; La Resta, 2015) featured a road trip across Chile undertaken by three young people haunted in their respective ways by the political crimes of the past. Felipe, Paloma and Iquela are on the trail of a missing body – that of Paloma’s mother, a former militant who represents one tiny fragment of the disappeared of the Augusto Pinochet regime. Zerán’s follow-up, Clean (Limpia, 2022), is more static, interiorized, claustrophobic. Its imprisoned narrator, Estela, is a middle-aged maid-cum-nanny to a wealthy Santiago family, and from the opening page she addresses compulsively those whom she assumes are listening beyond the walls of her cell. Her apparent crime is revealed with a touch of defiance at the outset: “The girl dies”.

Taken on when Señora Mara López is pregnant, Estela lives with the family for seven years, becoming a surrogate parent to the child, Julia. The father, Cristóbal, is a doctor and disciplinarian, while Mara, softer but neurotic, is a high-flying lawyer. Both are big on child-rearing in theory, but less so in practice. Whereas Julia’s positive traits are seen as a reflection on her parents, every slip is ascribed to the maid’s influence. Estela has moved from the impoverished countryside to Santiago to help her aged mother, to whom she sends regular remittances. Her room lies off the kitchen, its sliding door a signal that she can expect little in the way of privacy or rest. The family, she insists to her invisible jailors, was good to her, but hers is a tale of slowly dripping unease.

Sickly, picky and unhappy from babyhood, Julia is coddled and reassured by Estela in accordance with the brisk love she experienced growing up from a mother whose weary mantra, “That’s people for you”, does not encourage change or fightback. Estela remains in an odd position to the señor and señora. Invited to share Christmas lunch, she is nevertheless expected to wash up afterwards. The indulgent couple have everything that political powerlessness removes from Estela: emotional fulfilment, an erotic life, meaningful work, offspring. While the pair can have vigorous sex on the dining-room table within earshot of the help, Estela is resigned to chasteness. The petrol station worker with whom she occasionally exchanges glances when dispatched on one of the señora’s endless errands offers a rare glimpse of witness and recognition.

Less overtly political than The Remainder, Clean nevertheless gives voice to an entire class of servers, maids, waiters, the moppers-up of others’ taints and flaws. Estela is forever scraping up food, sweeping floors, delving into the clammy laundry bin to deal with the “brown stains in his pants, white stains in her knickers”. Baby Julia’s first word, “Na-na”, is a tribute swiftly snatched away by the señora, who hears “Ma-ma”. Julia is a small ally until the fateful day she learns to address her Nana in the same imperious tones as those used by her mother.

As the grip of the endless, robotic routine takes its toll, Estela begins to experience increasing periods of disassociation: “I had left that place. I was outside of reality, outside the kitchen”. A pet is rarely permitted to live out a natural life in a novel, and the arrival of humble Yany the street dog in the pristine household accelerates the sense of approaching doom. Yet Zerán constantly subverts our expectations. Yany is no mere metaphor but a scrupulously well-observed creature living her own unfathomable reality. The reader has been alerted in the opening pages that this will not end well, but the mechanisms remain thrillingly in play.

The death of the couple’s daughter has, Estela assumes, given her some importance, a perverse agency, as she outlines her growing ambivalence to the child and her part in a disastrous chain of events. Her breakout from false consciousness and the security of the home at last brings her into contact with the political dissent that she hopes will free her. Yet this may be another illusion. Clean has the same translator as The Remainder – Sophie Hughes – but where the earlier book was freewheeling, intense and energetic, with its competing voices and headlong momentum, here the register is slower, simpler, the confession of one small, stalled person who nevertheless longs for her voice to be heard.

Suzi Feay is the former literary editor of the Independent and hosts a YouTube channel of author interviews, Suzi’s Book Bag

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