Clean: A Novel

by Alia Trabucco Zerán

Deaths are a little like shadows: they differ in length and breadth from person to person, creature to creature, tree to tree. No two shadows on the earth’s surface are the same, and no two deaths are either. Every lamb, every spider, every chincol dies in its own way.

Rabbits are the only creatures on earth that are regularly scared to death.

i must be a rabbit

It’s fear that kills it, you see? Sheer anticipation.

A lethal idea, born in a moment of weakness.

suicide?

What sort of instinct is that: to come out into the world and claw at your own face.

I don’t know how much time went by. How long I spent guarding that little girl’s sleep: ten minutes, seven years, the rest of my life.

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

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.

I would ask myself whether she’d remember me when I was no longer there.

You want only the relevant action, do you? The stuff that drives the story onward? Well I’m not here to entertain you. I’m not trying to be smart.

distraught, neutral. Edges turned up, edges turned down. Mouths are always hiding something, even if most people don’t pay much attention to them. Words leave their mark, sketch deep lines that can’t be erased. Look at your own mouths if you don’t believe me. At the marks left by judgmental words, by the cruel and unnecessary things you’ve said.

It’s a funny thing, the body: a machine designed for routine.

Two hands resting on a body that was dying, slowly but surely, from so much reality.

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.

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.

Things that had come before me. Things that would outlive me.

I don’t know why it hurt so much to hear my name come out of her mouth. What did I expect? It was my name, after all.

They’re curious things, scars.

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.

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

What’s the difference between dying at forty, sixty, or seven? Life, without fail, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sooner or later, death comes knocking.

that in the world there are two types of animals: those that beg and those that don’t.

by my hands, these very hands.

Because hunger is a weakness, the worst possible kind.

I hit her with all of my might. With all of my might I hit that brick wall of a skull.

i don't like you anymore

I don’t know what I was thinking when I hit her.

they always say that

I’ve always imagined the deaths of the people I love.

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

Happiness is always served in small doses. Write that down in your margins somewhere.

I’ve mentioned before that this story has several beginnings.

we're about halfway and still getting nowhere

What a word, presentiment. But what is the feeling that comes before pain?

It’s always annoyed me that other people think they know more than I do, especially about me.

What did he know about my pain?

right there, the tips of her fingers grazing my own. Have you ever noticed how hands get passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter? Look at yours if you don’t believe me. Look at your nails, your cuticles, the shape of your knuckles. It might not be obvious at first. Young hands never look like those of the mother. But as the years pass, the resemblance becomes undeniable. The fingers expand. The tips grow bent. Age spots appear identical to the ones that were once on the grandmother’s hands, and then on the mother’s adored hands.

the mother dies and leaves her hands in the hands of the daughter.

didn’t have a mother I could call, and that opened up a silence in me so profound that anything anyone said was mere noise.

I doubt a woman like her would ever recognize a silence like mine.

I also learned that there aren’t words for everything in this world. And I’m not talking about matters of life and death. I’m not talking about lines like “there are no words for some pain.” My pain did have words, but as I scoured the bottom of the toilet bowl, as I scrubbed the mold from the bathtub, as I sliced an onion, I no longer thought with words. The thread connecting words to objects had snapped, and all that was left was the world itself. A world stripped of words.

The defining feature of a tragedy, she said then, is that we already know how it will end. We know from the outset that Oedipus has killed his father, slept with his mother, and that eventually he’ll go blind. And yet, for some reason, we carry on reading. Just like we carry on with our lives as if we don’t already know the ending.

It’s no good loving your masters. They only love their own.

There are two types of people in this world: those who have a name, and those who don’t. And only those without names can disappear.

It’s a curious thing that we are all going to die, don’t you think? All of us, even you. There’s no point wondering if we will, because the answer is always the same. Be it your mother, your father, your dog, your cat, your daughter, your son, the chincol, the thrush, your husband, or your wife—the answer is always the same: yes, yes, yes. There are only two unanswered questions: how and when. And that gun answered them with absolute certainty.

My mama had warned me: It’s a trap, Lita. But my mama was dead. My mama was still dead. And that’s a trap no one escapes from.

Death, I thought, meant becoming pure past. It meant never again falling ill. It was simple, quick. Death wasn’t horrible, do you understand? It never had been. What was horrible, truly horrifying, was the act of dying.

that my silence had made not only my voice disappear but my skin too, and that he wouldn’t be able to see or feel me.

There are people who go through life not knowing, with the corners of their mouths intact.

She would never wake again, and her memories would disappear with her, as would I, because I was just one of those memories.

I looked around at these peeled walls, at the door locked from the outside, at the mirror you’re all hiding behind, and I had this thought: no one can withstand confinement like I can.