The book opens with the revelation that at the end of the story a little girl will die. From that moment on we follow Estela’s first-person account of the facts from the day she arrives to work as a housemaid in a rich household in Santiago to the present where she is locked up somewhere, trying to state her case. Estela used to live with her mother in a little village but moved to the capital with the intention of making money and coming back to give her mum a better life. From the moment she starts working for Mara, a pregnant woman, and Cristobal, a doctor, she starts suffering daily indignities but also developing some kind of affection towards her employers. After the first Christmas dinner and little Julia’s birth, Estela is about to return to her village but a phone call from Sonia, her cousin, asking for money for Estela’s mother medical bills, prevents her from doing so and she slowly gets trapped in a life she despises but can’t seem to abandon.
Estela witnesses Julia’s first steps and words as well as her parents’ neglect, disguised in luxuries and all kind of extracurricular activities from a really early age. The only friend Estela has in her repetitive existence is Yany, a stray dog who wanders around the neighborhood and who visits her when she is alone. Yany also visits Carlos, the petrol station clerk, with whom Estela exchanges a few words every now and then. At the same time, social unease amongst the working class is slowly escalating and some street protests start to take place on the streets of Santiago. Estela knows about it because on her days off she is so exhausted she can only watch TV on her tiny bedroom or talk to her mom on the phone. Julia, on the other hand, is becoming a spoilt child who is developing an eating disorder due to her parent’s lack of attention. Estela and Julia clash occasionally even though Estela tends to protect her and keep their little fights between them. Julia keeps her part of the secret by not talking about Yany, who she meets one morning that she’s been sent home from school. The tension in the house is slowly building up as Julia is getting rebellious – Mara and Cristobal don’t know what to do to keep her daughter at bay and Estela seems to be more miserable day by day. There is a particularly messy episode in which Yany bites Julia after being startled by a rat but even then, the odd couple keep their quarrels private. One day Sonia appears at the door to deliver the worst news: Estela’s mother has died from a stroke. It’s been seven years since Estela left her hometown.
Estela stops talking and confines herself to performing her duties robotically. Julia is every day more out of control just like the protests on the streets. Actually, after Cristobal confesses (when arriving drunk at dawn) to Estela that he has been robbed by a prostitute he spent the night with, two armed and masked men break in the house, steal what they find and scare the family to death. Cristobal buys a gun and sets up a security system around the house that ends up electrocuting Yany after she is discovered by Mara. That turns out to be the last straw: Estela picks Cristobal’s gun to put Yany out of her misery, Julia confesses everything that has been going on at the house to her mother and Mara fires Estela, letting her stay one last night. That night, Estela stays awake, visits Carlos with whom she has sex and, on her return, discovers Julia floating on the swimming pool, dead. She tries to save her but it’s too late. Estela wakes Mara and Cristobal to let them know and walks away, amidst the violent protests going on in the streets. Her intention is to finally return to her village, but the police arrest her first. She is now having a lonely monologue trying to tell her side of the story while nobody seems to be listening.
Limpia is definitely a gripping, somehow unsettling and emotional read. Overall, one could say it basically is a really sad story. Personally, it touched me quite a bit and left me with the feeling of having gone through a tour de force. It is not an optimistic tale, but it is precisely its crudeness and realism that makes it special. I found the parallelism established between what goes on inside the household and what is happening outside with the street protests really interesting, as well as this kind of Stockholm syndrome Estela suffers from in relation to her employers. In addition to that, the specific relationship the protagonist has with every other secondary character is one of the most appealing elements of the book. Julia and her are sometimes foes but always allies against the authority figures who pretend to treat them well but end up being the cause of their demise; Mara is sometimes able to arise some kind of sympathy from the reader as she is a victim herself and finally Cristobal is revealed to be a sad and weak despicable man beyond his image of success and integrity. It all contributes to paint a vivid picture of Estela’s miserable existence, always homesick but somehow unable to go back. All in all, it seems difficult to find a better example of the dirty realism genre, as such term is a perfect definition of the mood of the novel. There are a couple of scenes or sequences that reminded me of the Latin American tradition of magical realism which are written beautifully and work quite well: Cristobal’s encounter with the prostitute when he kind of falls under her spell, or the portrayal of Estela’s childhood and hometown, which, although feeling real, also has the dreamy touch of idealized childhood memories.