Evaporation

By Sylvia Torti

Clouds above the Great Salt Lake.

This piece originally appeared in Utah Reflections: Stories From the Wasatch Front (2014).

José was in his car on the street when I pulled into my driveway. I think it was summer, though I can't remember for sure. If it was summer, then I know it was hot. My windows would have been rolled up, the air conditioning on just enough to keep my mood in the tempered zone. If it was summer, the Utah sun would have been brilliant and constant, the air dry and brittle, and getting out of my car, I'd feel the familiar absence of trees. I'd look around, squint through my sunglasses and wonder how I ever came to live in an American desert.

I shut the car door, raised my hand toward the street. Though I'd spoken with him on the phone to give him directions, José hadn't yet gotten out of his car, and so I didn't know what he looked like. I also didn't know that his real name wasn’t José.

Basins collect things. Water, soil, rocks, bones, anything that follows the laws of gravity. Salt Lake Valley is part of the Great Basin—that "huge heart-shaped" stretch of western landscape formed from slips in the earth's crust, faults along areas of implausible earthly weakness. It's an endorheic basin, which just means water flows in and gets stuck in the low spots. There is no river or stream going downhill. There is no way out. Except, that is, to change form.

My younger sister, who was living in Salt Lake at the time, had called from work. A young Mexican man, who didn't speak English, had shown up at the furniture store looking for a job. She knew I had a bathroom project going on and the sanding was going to take a long while. She thought I might hire him. My arms were tired, and I was anxious to get back to writing my novel, based on the Zapatista Rebellion of 1994 in Chiapas, México, and so I agreed.

José got out of the car. He wasn't much taller than I but more muscular. His hair was straight and black, his cheekbones broad, his skin dark. We shook hands and introduced ourselves in Spanish, and I remember thinking that his hands were small for a man's. We went into the house. I showed him the work, and he agreed to the job. I gave him an electric sander and a mask and left him in the bathroom, and then I went back down to my basement to write.

Of course, it's only called "the" Great Basin. It's really a multitude of basins, each one collecting its own bit of precipitation, the melted snow that falls each winter and accumulates for a while in the spring. But when the dry heat arrives on the first day of summer, as it does-relentlessly and constantly--evaporation quickly exceeds precipitation. The van der Waal's forces between water molecules are broken, and each molecule is pulled up into the dry air and held in its new form as vapor. We're left with the salts. White salts that form a reflective film over the dry, gray soil.

I'd started writing fiction about Chiapas in 1998, the year before I met José, as a way to process my experience there. I had arrived in Ocosingo, Chiapas, on New Year's Eve 1993, and after a walk-through town with some Mexican, Venezuelan, and American biologists to buy an old and very tough chicken to grill, I'd gone to bed (a sleeping bag on the tile floor) thinking about bird surveys, coffee plantations, and the shady rainforest. We woke before dawn the next morning and prepared to go out and in the foggy morning air; we found not birds but young men with bandanas over their faces, rifles in their hands. During those first days of the Zapatista Rebellion, I'd clung close to what I knew: Latin American history (though sketchy when it came to México), the lilt of the Spanish language, and tropical plant identification (Lantana, Ceiba, Simaruba). There was the new and unsettling sense to my twenty-four-year-old self that the world could shift at any moment.

Ocosingo is also a basin, just not an endorheic one. Over one hundred inches of rainfall per year. The soil and air are wet because here precipitation exceeds evaporation; rivers flow out and down toward the forest and then the sea. Ocosingo is a lush, green, and highly productive valley, which is why cattle farmers took over the land and why Indigenous groups were pushed up into the marginal lands on the hills or, worse yet, into the wet rainforest where they didn't know how to make a living. It's a basin that over the millennia has collected species, temples, and stories all hidden below reddish-brown soil and broad green leaves.

Novelists collect things too. We collect and then filter consciously and unconsciously before we process and produce on the page. So far in my novel, I'd written a story from the perspective of an American biologist, a woman who understood neither the Spanish language nor Latin culture and who had, prior to arriving in Chiapas, never been out of the United States. I'd written another story from the perspective of an Indigenous woman fighting with the Zapatistas. (She came out of glimpses of Zapatistas on the hillside and my own love of trees and the rainforest.) Those two stories read to fellow writers, grew to four stories as I rounded out the character to include a male biologist from a prominent Mexican City family (loosely fashioned after an American biologist friend) and a soldier in the Mexican army who was sent to fight the Zapatistas (based on no one I could muster).

I checked in on José an hour later, offered him a glass of water and engaged in a bit of chitchat. His Spanish was hard to understand because his accent was unfamiliar to me and he used words I'd never heard. And perhaps, as I now guess, Spanish was not his first language because in late conversations I learned that he'd grown up in Guerrero, where many people don't speak Spanish.

In an effort to connect, I told him I'd been in Chiapas in 1994 and that I'd been there during the Zapatista Rebellion. To my surprise, he said he’d spent time in Chiapas too. We discussed timelines, and it turned out that he’d arrived just after I'd left. It also turned out that he'd been in the Mexican army and sent to Chiapas to fight the Zapatistas.  

So here, in my home, by a strange coincidence, was a man who embodied the rough outline of Mario, the soldier character in my story. What did I do? I did what any writer would do. I started to collect. I asked him questions, lots of questions. What was it like? What did you eat? What did you think then? What did you feel? What do you think now?

When José left my house that first day, he hesitated at the front door, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He held two cards in front of me. ''José is not my real name," he said. "It's the name on this card but I want you to know my real name. I don't like to lie to people." I leaned in and took note of the second identity card and his real name.

If you were to ask me now, I could not tell you what name I read. l've forgotten, perhaps never recorded it, but as I said, novelists collect stories. know that José, the man in my house, whose real name wasn’t José, became, Mario, born in Guerrero, and Mario spoke in my book.

My cousin, Domingo, told me all about it. He's been going for years now, working odd jobs. There's even some rich woman who gives him easy work whenever he wants it. He just shows up at her house, and she asks him to weed the garden or wash the car, and she pays him double what he makes doing anything else.

During the months that followed, José came over a number of times. Sometimes I'd have a job for him, sometimes he'd simply stop by, usually around dinnertime, and we'd set an extra plate on the table and eat together. And then, suddenly, he didn't come anymore. I continued writing, taking what he'd told me about the awful army food, the tough horsemeat, the cold mornings, the utter misery he felt in Chiapas, and worked them into the novel.

A few months later, when there was a ring at the door, José was back at my house. He'd been to Kansas, he said. Working in a chicken factory. He wanted to know if I had a job for him. It was fall, I think, because I remember raking leaves in the front yard together. We chatted in the cool air, and he told me about the chicken farm, the dust, the smell, the midwestern summer heat. He said that after he bought better papers, he could get a better job. He wanted to buy a car with new hubcaps. Something that would shine in the sunlight.

Mario spoke: Last year he worked on a chicken farm.''The gringos have huge farms just for chickens," he told me. We laughed hard at that. Everyone knows that the guys who travel across the border are called pollos, chickens. ''Los pollos killing los pollos," we said. "I hated wringing and plucking and cutting up chickens from morning to night", he told me. "You couldn't breathe with the heat and all the feathers flying around. We were supposed to wear white masks over our noses and mouths, but it was so hot we couldn't bear them.We breathed feathers and chicken shit all day long, but I made out good, good enough to buy real papers, good enough to get a real job."

It is entirely possible to live in Salt Lake City and only speak Spanish. There are Josés in every restaurant, grocery store, and hotel. Josés are roofing our houses, weeding our gardens, cleaning our kitchens. They move in for a while. They work. They send money home. They play soccer and volleyball in the parks on Sunday. In the bright light, we barely see them, never know them. And then they are gone.

The Great Basin is being inextricably pulled apart by tectonic forces. The distance between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles grows every year. Every time I think about this, I envision the earth silently ripping, a small tear forming along parched skin, while those of us standing on the edge slip down and under.

Winter arrived with its dry cold, and the sun still shone—harsh and blinding—as it often does in Utah. José didn't come anymore. I finished my novel, and it was published. And still I think of him. Did he finally buy that car he wanted, the one with shiny hubcaps? Or did I make that up? Did we ever speak of cars, or did I put those thoughts into Mario and then transfer them back onto José? I believe we spoke of horsemeat in Chiapas and the cold one would feel twenty kilometers outside Ocosingo. But did we? Today, I am unsure. Why can't I remember his real name, and where did he go?

José is present in the way that certain people come to inhabit our lives. Catchments. Mirrors. Mirages. Spaces we seek out, visit and return to in our continuous need to collect stories. Spaces that last for as long as they do, and then, with the shift in the season, they suddenly change form, like water vapor pulled into the shimmering Utah sky. Stories, absorbed into our minds, that become companions to our often-lonely lives.