Clean

The girl, over those days, ate without a fuss. Maybe she was afraid I would tell on her for staining my apron, for getting flour all over the floor. If I served her chicken, she ate the chicken. If I gave her salmon, she ate the salmon. She still took an hour to eat, and chewed each mouthful a hundred times, but her plate would be left sparkling.

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I also stopped eating for a while when I was a girl. Did I tell you this story? Just for a couple of weeks, which is precisely how long I lasted at the girls’ boarding school in Ancud. My mama’s employers at the big villa had asked her to move in and work as a live‑in maid, and so she’d come to me and—never one to mince her words—said:

There’s no one to look after you or cook for you. The boarding school’s close to my work.

She dropped me at the entrance to the school one Sunday evening, and that same night I found I could no longer eat. There was nothing wrong with the food—lentils, beans, stews, chickpeas—but a lump in my throat prevented me from swallowing it.

The nuns didn’t know what to do with me. I would take one bite of my morning hallulla bread and butter, and nothing for the rest of the day. They refused to call my mama, to involve her in the histrionics of a lazy, disobedient little madam, as the dining monitor put it when she saw my untouched plate. The Mother Superior tried to convince me that I’d soon get used to life there. The other girls weren’t mean, and besides, my mama had to work, put food on the table, earn her living. She couldn’t leave me alone out there on the land.

I don’t remember if the girls were mean or not. I haven’t held on to a single face, to a single name. You can forget what you don’t name, we’ve been through that. I do remember a long, long hall and how, looking down from one end of it to the other, the dining monitor seemed very short, like one of us girls. I also remember the high ceilings in the communal dorm, the creak of the dusty stairs, the empty waste ground on the other side of the windows. I wanted to be gone from that place, to go back to the land with my mama.

I didn’t plan it, I promise. It was a rainy lunchtime. I remember it well because on rainy days the huge windows in the dining hall would mist up and more than ever I’d feel I was going to be trapped in that place forever; there was nothing beyond it, no streets, no nature. It had all been swallowed up by the fog and the only thing left was the boarding school floating in a misty hellscape. I joined the line in front of the kitchen, was served a plate of charquicán stew and then looked around for the dining monitor. She was eating with the nuns up on a small wooden platform on the other side of the dining hall. I didn’t even think about it. I walked over there, stopped directly in front of her, and threw my food in her face. And with all my might, a strength I didn’t know I had, I threw the empty plate at the back of the Mother Superior’s head.

Don’t work yourselves up, please. I told you: we all have a limit.

The Mother Superior fell to the floor, smashing her two front teeth. The dining monitor, meanwhile, still covered in potato and squash, grabbed me by the wrist and with her other hand slapped both of my cheeks. For some reason the canings that followed didn’t hurt. It was as if I were no longer inside my own body, as if I’d already left that place.

That afternoon my mama came to collect me, and from the school she led me straight back to the land. There doesn’t seem much point in telling you about the silent journey from An‑cud back to our house. She didn’t look at me the whole time, nor once we arrived. That night she cooked potatoes and pork chops, which I demolished.

You silly ass, she said, while I sucked the bones.

When my plate was clean, she looked at me and dissolved into laughter. At first it was more of a snicker, as if she couldn’t hold it in, as if her mouth had been taken over by that laugh, but it grew louder and louder until she was doubled over.

A whole plate of charquicán in her face! she cried, with her head thrown back and her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. I sat there, frozen to the spot. My mama was really in hysterics now: open‑mouthed, her eyes creased, tears running down the sides of her face. The laughter was catching and soon the pair of us could hardly breathe, two belly laughs in the infinite blackness of the open countryside. Eventually she grew tired and we both stopped laughing. Her face went back to normal; the edges of her mouth turned down. She said, very seriously:

Everything has consequences, Lita. You must understand that.

The next day, she woke me at daybreak and told me she was going back to her job as a live‑in maid. I was thirteen years old, soon to be fourteen, and I stayed there, out on the land, on my own. Or not exactly on my own. I had the pigs, the kodkods, and the neighbor’s blind horse for company. And every morning there I’d be, battling against the wind to get to the bus stop in time for the bus that would take me to school, and with no mother around to tell me: Put your hat on, Lita. What did I knit you that wool hat for?

Little rascal, my mama said just before leaving the house. And then, like a premonition:

You’re going to have to learn to look after yourself.

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From Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2024 by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translation copyright © 2024 by Sophie Hughes .