Zig Zag by José Carlos Somoza

thought
she'd probably already told him enough for one night.
    "Good,"
she said. "He's an excellent teacher."
    "Still
want to do your dissertation with him?"
    She
hesitated before answering. An enthusiastic yes would just be a lie,
but a curt no wouldn't be honest, either. Emotions were like quantum
uncertainty, she thought.
    "Of
course," she said coolly, leaving her true feelings hanging in
the air.
    They'd
walked across the plaza to Madrid's famous statue of the bear and the
strawberry tree— "el
oso y el madrono"— the
symbols of the city. Maldonado asked her if they could stop at one of
the ice cream parlors there to indulge one of his few "weaknesses,"
a chocolate-dipped cone. She laughed at his childlike tone when he
ordered it, and even more at his obvious delight in devouring it. As
they stood there in the plaza, Maldonado savoring his treat, he
suggested they have dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Elisa accepted
immediately, glad that the evening was not yet over.
    She
spotted the man just then, purely by chance.
    He
was standing by the entrance to the ice cream parlor. Gray hair, big
gray mustache. He was holding an ice cream cone, nibbling at it every
little while. This guy didn't look as much like the second man as he
did the first one. In fact, he looked like he could be the brother of
the man from the party. Or maybe—she couldn't be sure—it
was actually the same guy, just dressed differently.
    No,
it couldn't be. Now she saw that his hair was curly, and he was
thinner, too. It wasn't the same man.
    For
a second she thought, This
is not unusual; there's nothing wrong with this picture. It's just a
guy looking at me who looks like some other guys who were looking at
me. But
suddenly it was as if the floodgates had opened and a whole slew of
irrational thoughts rushed into her mind, making a racket and causing
a scene, like coked-up party crashers. Three
different men who all look the same. Three men watching me.
    "What's
wrong?" Maldonado asked. She couldn't lie. She had to say
something. "That man."
    "What
man?"
    When
Maldonado turned around, he wiped his hands on a napkin and no longer
looked at Elisa.
    "The
guy standing by the ice cream parlor. He was giving me a weird look."
She really didn't want Maldonado to think she was seeing things, but
now she couldn't stop herself. "He looks a lot like another guy
I saw at the party at Alighieri, who was also watching me. It could
be the same guy."
    "Really?"
    Just
then, the man turned and strode off toward Alcala Street.
    "I
don't know, I just got the feeling he was spying on me..." She
tried to laugh it off but couldn't. Maldonado wasn't laughing,
either. "Maybe I'm wrong."
    He
suggested they go to some quiet bar and talk it over. But there were
no quiet bars around there, and Elisa was too jittery to walk far. So
instead they decided to go to the Chinese place and have dinner. It
was still early, and there weren't that many people in the restaurant
yet.
    "Now.
Tell me exactly what happened the other day. Every detail," he
said once they'd sat down at a quiet, out-of-the-way table. He
listened carefully, and then asked her for a detailed description of
the man she'd seen at Alighieri. But before she could finish giving
it, he interrupted her. "Hang on ... Gray hair, mustache. I know
that guy. It sounds like Espalza; he's a statistics professor. He
gave some guest lectures in my sociological stats class, but I know
him more because he's in the teachers' association and I'm in the
students' association..." He paused and then adopted that
mischievous look that she loved. "He's also divorced and has a
reputation as a perv. He's always ogling gorgeous students. He must
have really been slobbering over you..."
    She
suddenly wanted to laugh.
    "You
know what else happened, that same night? When you dropped me off at
home, this other guy with a mustache was staring at me..."
Maldonado widened his eyes comically. "And that guy today had a
mustache, too."
    "Why,
it's a... a