Sol, the protagonist of ‘Casas limpias’ (Clean Houses), published by Temas de Hoy, is a young, progressive woman who would like to live as much as possible in accordance with current feminist ideas. However, when she’s fired from her job as an artist’s assistant and discovers that she is pregnant, she hires two Latin American women to help around the house to do what her boyfriend, who works 12 hours a day, cannot.
This decision makes Sol feel ashamed and she starts to worry about what people will say, to the point of hiding so that her neighbour, from whose window hangs a flag with a purple fist, doesn’t find out.
This is how María Agúndez begins her second novel, a portrait elaborated with sharpness and a dose of humour in which the reader is uncomfortable to see herself reflected because, as the author told Euronews: “Hiring someone to clean the house sometimes means becoming a kind of little boss, but without giving the other person any kind of condition and, above all, we start from the assumption that we are hiring someone for not wanting to dedicate your free time to cleaning your own filth”.
It is impossible not to remember the film ‘The Help’, with its portrayal of these two parallel worlds that are so unjustly different from each other; or ‘Manual for Cleaning Women’, the stories by Lucia Berlin, published ten years after the author’s death, which reflect the everyday life of these women who are pushed into precarious jobs to support their families, or themselves.
Racism, inequality and prejudice
Although ‘The Help’ is set in the 1960s and Berlin also drew on her experiences during the 1940s and 1950s, María Agúndez takes the legacy of all this and puts it in a modern perspective in which the root problems – racism, inequality and prejudice – are still there, but in a different guise.
Caring for others, cleaning; these are still chiefly viewed as women’s domains, and although breaking with this destiny would be the ideal way to comply with the much repeated term of empowerment, this is still not a possibility to be contemplated for all of them.
“We criticise a lot the ways we each have of executing our private lives and our feminism and I don’t think everyone can afford it in the same way”, explains María Agúndez regarding the social pressures that come from various ideological spheres. “It is as if only professional success can be a value nowadays, and even if a woman also aspires to look after her baby, it seems that it is frowned upon and that she has fallen into the care trap”, she adds.
Lack of social recognition
The problem, on the other hand, lies in the precariousness of the world of work and “the incorporation of women into the workplace is perfect, but it becomes very complicated when there is a family nucleus because, who is going to give up? The grandparents, they also have the right to have their life”, declares Agúndez.
And when it comes to job success, not all jobs are valid, and this is very cleverly reflected in ‘Clean Houses’ when the protagonist discovers that she is obsessed with cleaning and wants to work as a maid, but is criticised by her boyfriend and her parents because she can “aspire to something more”. “Is it cooler for your mother, for example, to be a cultural worker, even if she has terrible conditions, rather than a cleaner? It’s a question of social recognition, that’s clear”, confesses the author.
Also very present in the narrative is the gaze of a wealthy, conservative social sector, for whom hiring a domestic worker not only does not raise any self doubt, or humility but instead brings with it condescending phrases like “she’s like one of the family, or if we even take her on holiday”.
The kind of person who is afraid that the cleaner will steal, or who purposely leaves a giant ball of lint in a specific place in the house to check if it is thoroughly cleaned, as the novel shows, “are the ones who perpetuate this system the most because they don’t believe there is a problem or have a critical eye”, says Agúndez.
The contradictions of being a woman
Despite the profound reflections in the background and the serious tone of this article, no one should be fooled: ‘Casas limpias’, published in five languages other than Spanish, is neither a political novel nor an academic essay.
Rather, it is a look constructed from “what I can see in my surroundings, the conversations I have with other mothers in the park”, in the words of the author, who maintains the witty style of Agúndez’s literary debut, ‘Piscinas que no cubren’ (Uncovered Swimming Pools).
This work is like a sociological study in a literary key; a lens that focuses on the contradictions of being a woman because, as María Agúndez says: “It is as if men today have not yet reached the level of masculinity that give them permission to talk about everything and because they do not experience fatherhood in the same way, I wouldn’t dare to say why.”