Clean: A Novel

by Alia Trabucco Zerán

But tell me: what defines a beginning? Explain to me, for example, whether night comes before day or day before night. Whether we wake because we went to sleep or sleep because we woke up. Or better, to keep things simple, just tell me where a tree begins: in the seed or the fruit around it? Or perhaps it’s in the branch that grew the flower that turned into the fruit? Or in the flower itself?

The same goes for causes, they’re just as unclear as beginnings.

Deaths are a little like shadows: they differ in length and breadth from person to person, creature to creature, tree to tree.

And life, as you know, clings to some bodies. It fights back, thriving and dogged, and won’t be easily prized away.

You’ll never beat time at its own game, she’d warn me. That race is fixed from the day we’re born.

I felt like I hadn’t really entered that room, but rather was standing outside of it watching the woman I was to become from that moment: her fingers interlaced on her lap, her eyes sore, her lips parched, and her breathing heavy.

Wondering all the while, as I did, who on earth has a name like Mara. It’s like calling yourself Jula or Veronca. Like living with a part missing.

One of her eyelids, the left one, would visibly twitch, as if a little piece of her own face wanted to break free and never return.

That’s how I spent my days: poised between calamities and commercials.

I’d heard that babies often scratch their faces after birth. What sort of instinct is that: to come out into the world and claw at your own face.

They were gray in color, lost, incapable of seeing the edges of things. In that moment I thought: that must be true silence, when everything around you becomes blurred.

I stood there, frozen, leaning over the edge of her crib, unable to take my eyes off that chest as it rose and fell, incapable of telling affection from despair.

So I study my eyes, my mouth, the first wrinkles on my forehead, and I ask myself if tiredness is a phase and if one day, in the future, I’ll get my old face back.

I’ve told you before: you have to skirt around the edge before getting to the heart of the story.

It came to me in a flash, an explosion of sound, an idea so deafening that I’m almost telling you just to be rid of it.

She looked at me with that easy, infectious laugh of hers, that laugh which no longer exists.

My shoes sank into the mud, the wind whistled in my ears, the branches of the trees above me were bowing right down to the ground.

I never bit my nails. My mama didn’t either. I suppose for that you’d need to have your hands free.

Only winter tells the truth, that’s what my mama used to say as the rain pelted down on the other side of the window.

What doesn’t move blends in, my mama used to say, looking at the brown-spotted owl camouflaging itself against the cinnamon tree.

Buttoned lips, dependable, I left for the supermarket.

I know it doesn’t matter anymore, but sometimes, after I’d bathed her, dried her hair, and got her into her pajamas, after I’d tidied up her toys and kissed her good night, I would ask myself whether she’d remember me when I was no longer there.

My mama was next to me, holding my hand, but my fear somehow erased her.

She taught me that trick, my mama. Hold out a gentle hand to demonstrate submissiveness.

It’s a story born of a centuries-old tiredness and questions that presume too much.

Mouths are always hiding something, even if most people don’t pay much attention to them.

All of this is important: whether the corners of a mouth turn up or down, sad mouths or smug mouths, the letters that form a word. The word “rage,” for example, has just four. Four little letters. And yet, my chest was burning.

This is just the way life goes: a drop, a drop, a drop, a drop, and then we ask ourselves, bewildered, how we’ve ended up soaked to the bone.

But each of these beginnings necessarily leads to the same end. Like the silk threads of a spider’s web, they all lead back to the center.

My mama walked out of there with a prescription for tranquilizers and the well inside her only grew deeper and wider.

She would come home tired and say: I’m shattered, Estela. As if tiredness were the surest proof of her success.

She adored her as you might adore a beautiful, fragile object. One that might break.

That was a joke, relax. One of those jokes that helps you get to the truth.

That girl who would never age because her face, her infant face, already contained all of her future faces.

I didn’t want to have to admit that it was better in the south. With its leaky roofs. With its frosts. With its gossipy neighbors sniffing around outside your windows.

I smiled because that’s what people are like. We smile and we yawn when the people around us smile and yawn.

It occurred to me that my life—that is, the life of the woman sitting on the bed—was somehow temporary.

Small hands mapping a rigorous course over my entire face.

Nature’s indifference has always been a comfort to me: the way that, come nighttime, we would cease to exist; the way the night went on without us.

Impatience, once again, was giving her itchy

Maybe that’s what we come out as when we’re born, I hadn’t thought of it before: an enormous scar anticipating all the scars to come.

What I’m going to tell you is as natural as water turning to steam, as the force of gravity, as natural as causes and their inevitable consequences.

I didn’t know the rain could be so comforting.

The number was never the same, but what did it matter? What’s the difference between dying at forty, sixty, or seven? Life, without fail, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

At his tender age, that child now understood suffering.

And as I raked the orange leaves, gathering them into piles and hoping the wind wouldn’t force me to start all over again, I thought, that is how memories are made.

The girl had understood her parents’ instructions only too well: if you want to come first, you have to keep the others back.

That’s how I prepare myself, you see? By anticipating the pain.

His face young, his hands old; his voice young, his words old, that’s what I thought.

What did you think? That the maid didn’t dream about leaving?