She’s on the kitchen floor, on all fours, knees in trousers so they don’t get in the way. She’s gathered up her hair, barely held in place by a clip, revealing the nape of her neck that’s now beginning to glisten with sweat. If you look carefully you can count her heartbeats by the pace at which her blood courses through the veins of her tensed neck, interrupted now and then when she suddenly swallows down saliva. Her mouth’s half-open and she hasn’t noticed how her breathing has quickened into a gentle pant. A trickle of shiny saliva threatens to slip through the gap shaped by her lower lip and teeth and fall on the floor tiles, but, ever on the alert, she eagerly sucks it back in and swallows it down, biting the inside of her cheek in the process. A lock of hair separates out and drops on her moist shoulders. Very soon, another falls over her collarbone. Her whole body pushes forward from the back, each wipe brings an imperceptible increase in pressure on the ground, her knuckles blanching whenever her fists close tight. Her posture underlines the curve of her back, her prominent buttocks, creating a sudden descent to the depths of her waist until, further up, her back emerges, sinewy muscle rippling under skin padded by a thin layer of fat. Her knees push hard against the floor, begin to hurt, threaten to go dead for a while. She moves one, then the next, so they hold up until she is finished. She wouldn’t normally have worked like that, but she’d decided she ought to put in a bigger effort on what was her first day. The underwire of her bra cuts into her, the softest part of her breasts rubbing against it with each wipe she makes, but she hasn’t time to take it off, it’s too late. She yanks it down now and then, is horrified by the thought of the marks it leaves, the dark brown circles where her armpit starts. But her real unease stems from the threat they might escape altogether: her breasts appear to have a mind of their own when she is in this position, as if they no longer belong to her anatomy. She has gradually accelerated her actions to finish the job quickly, and her cheeks have turned a dark red, small beads of sweat now drip on the ground. She is also breathing faster and heavier.
Forward and back, forward and back, putting her whole body into it until she’s finished and rocks on her heels. Brush in one hand, she tries to wipe her forehead on the stretch of arm not covered by the plastic glove that is spraying fine dust over her skin.
You see, here I can assure you that I felt satisfied. At that exact moment, after unleashing all my strength on the tiles, through my hands, my arms, my whole back, after feeling that every muscle in my body had joined in the task of making that corner of the world a little cleaner, I felt I had rid myself of a useless burden.
The writer got up from his chair, his curiosity aroused by the sounds coming out of the kitchen. He is upset in a way he can’t fathom by the less than noisy manner the new cleaning lady goes about her work, and he is a man who had never wanted one because he was worried about losing his privacy. Nonetheless, in recent times, driven by an apathy that seemed to dominate his writing as well as the rest of his existence, he’d decided to take notice of his friends who also belong to the world of books and had asked the lady who cleaned for them all. However, she was fully booked and recommended a friend, an ex-colleague in another job, who could be trusted one hundred per cent. Some time ago he’d opened his door to a girl who seemed far too young for this kind of work. Perhaps she was a foreigner? No, when he spoke to her, he’d seen she wasn’t from abroad. Perhaps she was a student paying her fees with a few hours’ work, though they usually worked as shop assistants or on supermarket checkouts. What if she were a spy? A journalist in disguise writing a report on the way he writes? The writer soon halts that train of thought and sadly reminds himself that his reputation doesn’t stretch that far. His relationship with her had begun with the mysteries surrounding her age and provenance. What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? As it was the first time they’d met he’d not dared to ask how come she spent her time cleaning other people’s houses when she could have done almost anything else with her life, the girl would have taken fright and mistaken him for a dirty old man who wants to save her from poverty in pure Pretty Woman manner, and probably better not to risk that if you don’t have the good looks of a Richard Gere. He thinks that all in good time, things must be said at the right time if you don’t want to trigger the wrong reaction in the person listening to you. The writer has this special ability that makes it easier for him to pursue his trade: knowing how to wait for exactly the right moment to say what has to be said, neither too late, nor too soon. Rather than making a comment, he arched his eyebrows and ushered her in. When she said his name she thought it was a nice name for a pair of such sooty eyes, but she too refrained from making any comment. And a pleasant hand to touch given they were his work tools, but she kept quiet. He told her that nobody had ever cleaned his flat before, that she only need do four essential things to keep on top of it, dust, sweep, wash the floors and clean the lavatories, and clean the windows and kitchen every once in a while. There was no need to iron or see to his clothes, because he liked to do that. Four hours once a week.
The day I started in his house I didn’t know exactly what I was doing there. Yes, of course, a little overtime to earn a pittance, but in retrospect I think it really brought me something else. If I told him that, he would laugh, if I told him that the moment I entered his flat, I felt I was entering a different place to anywhere I’d been before. I find it hard to remember that time in my life, but I do remember the feeling of peace I experienced there. Maybe because you, sir, live in that remote alley and very rarely hear anything except for the sound of a neighbour’s high heels. I couldn’t say. It’s only now, when I think back, and think of myself standing there on your doorstep that I feel sadly nostalgic for the woman I was then. Isn’t it foolish to shed tears over oneself? You will say it isn’t, that feelings are never foolish. I don’t know why I find that woman on your doorstep so upsetting. Maybe she was more dead than alive. Look at me now, crying like some simple soul.
He’s now standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at her. Not spying, observing, which is what a good novelist does, and silently. What are you doing cleaning the floor on your knees like women in the old days? You’ve got a new sweeping broom that I bought only yesterday, and all those other cleaning products. The green, yellow and blue ones. Rather than interrupt her, he prefers to follow her movements for a while. She puts all her body into it, brings the brush down on the tiles with all her might, her fingers keeping a tight hold on the small piece of wood with bristles. Are the tiles that dirty? He could act as if to clear his throat, so she knows he’s there, say something or other to alert her to her new situation as a woman under observation. Right, under observation because he’s a writer with a recognised track record who is continuously scrutinising the reality around him so he can reflect it in novels that will become documents that are highly prized by future generations who want to know about times past. He laughs silently imagining himself coming out loud with such a grandiloquent statement. The writer isn’t looking at her just for the sake of it, on a whim, or even out of curiosity provoked by the sight of a woman, whose flesh is still firm, on all fours on a kitchen floor where no woman has been for some time. His interest is purely professional, really, no irony intended.
Listen, perhaps you don’t need to clean the floor like that, you could use this. With the soles of her fleet flattened by her whole body weight and her tendons stretched to the limit, she looks round in dismay at the writer standing there, whom she hadn’t noticed until then. She knocks a wisp of hair from her forehead with the inside of her elbow and shakes her head. A broom will never shift that dirt, it will only go like this, with a good stiff brush. But I’m really sorry you have to do it on your knees… Don’t worry, I’ll only do it this once. People think the black stuff between the tiles is natural, that tilers leave it like that because it is pretty, but just take a look. The cracks are white, when they’ve laid the tiles, they apply a white paste, a white wash, that we women in the cleaning gang then have to polish. And if they don’t use that paste, the lines are grey. Grey or white, but never black, never like yours, extending from one corner of a tile to the next. I never noticed. No, no one notices these things, but can’t you see how the floor looks newer now? The writer surveys his floor rather shamefaced, unable to believe there could have been so much dirt in what he’d thought was just one more feature in the rectangular patterning of his kitchen. Do you clean any other houses apart from mine? he asked, diverting the conversation away from an excessive focus on him and his dirt. No, yours is the first, sir; I have always worked for a company, a factory and sometimes a cleaning gang, you know, new buildings, offices, shops, stores and other premises. I prefer the factory, because I earn more money on the night shift and the work is always in the same place, and whatever the production line, the machines are all the same. You mean you work nights? Almost always. The writer goes quiet, absentmindedly scratches his head and turns to his desk. He types away while he listens to her still busying herself in his kitchen, emerging with a bucket full of tools and liquids on her way to the bathroom. He’s typing but not writing anything, he is roaming the web as usual when he loses concentration. Writing requires isolation that doesn’t embrace a young woman walking round the house, he doesn’t want to hear her coming and going and making noise in his flat, it’s a process too private to carry out in the presence of strangers. He again wonders whether she might be a journalist disguised as a cleaner. Nobody has ever seen him write, nobody has ever watched him while he concentrated on finishing a chapter or turned over an initial idea – though, to be sure, nothing could be more tedious than the sight of a writer writing, however fascinating some readers might find it. It’s hardly like a surgeon operating or a chef creating his signature dish. A writer is simply a man in front of a computer. He’s now completely lost the thread of what he was narrating and goes for a stroll.