# Read the first page of Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán

Read the opening of Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán free, no signup. A housekeeper confesses her story to an unseen interrogator.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/clean-alia-trabucco-zeran
- Genre: Literary fiction
- Year: 2024
- ISBN: 9780593850527
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780593850527&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780593850527
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780593850527

## The opening

My name is Estela. Can you hear me? I said: Es-te-la Garci-a. I don't know if you're recording this or taking notes or if there's anyone even over there. But if you can hear me, if you are there, then I want to propose a deal: I'm going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you're going to let me out of here. Hello? Nothing? I'll take your silence as a yes. This story has several beginnings. I'd go as far as to say it's made up of beginnings. 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? Are you with me? Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. The same goes for causes, they're just as unclear as beginnings. The cause of my thirst or hunger, for example. The cause of my current confinement. One cause sets off another, one card brings down the next. The only given is the ending: nothing's left standing. And the end of this story—are you sure you want to know?—is this: The girl dies. Hello? No reaction at all? Let me say it again in case a fly buzzed in your ear. Or perhaps you were put off by a sharper, shriller thought than my voice: The girl dies. Did you hear this time? The girl dies and she's still dead, no matter where I begin. But death isn't so simple either, that much I'm sure we can agree on. 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. Take rabbits, for example ... stay with me, it's important. Have you ever held a rabbit in your hands? It's like cradling a grenade, a velvety time bomb. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Rabbits are the only creatures on earth that are reg- ularly scared to death. If a rabbit picks up a fox's scent or senses CLEAN a snake nearby, its heart starts racing and its pupils dilate. The adrenaline is like a hammer to the heart and the rabbit dies before the predator can sink its fangs into its neck. It's fear that kills it, you see? Sheer anticipation. All within a fraction of a second the rabbit realizes it's going to die, glimpses how and when. And this conviction, this foretelling of its immi- nent end, is its death sentence. It doesn't happen like that for house sparrows or cats, lizards or bees. And what to say about plants: the death of a willow or hydrangea, an ulmo or winter's bark. Or the end of a fig tree, with its cement-like solid gray trunk. It would take a very powerful cause to kill a hardy fig. A deadly fungus slowly spreading through its branches until eventually, after decades, the tree's roots rot away. Or a handsaw hacking it down and chopping its trunk into firewood. Every species, every living creature on the planet, must find its proper cause of death.

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