Free Zig Zag by José Carlos Somoza Page B

you."
    "And
what am I like?" She didn't want to ask that question, but she
no longer cared if she was being cruel.
    "Well,
there's no reason it's incompatible, really...," Lopera
blathered on, without addressing her question, as if he were talking
to himself. "Though genetically it is unusual
... Beauty and brains, I mean ... They don't often go together. Of
course there are exceptions, Richard Feynman is very good-looking,
right? That's what they say, anyway. And Ric is, too, in a way, don't
you think? A little?"
    "Ric?"
    "Ric
Valente, my friend. I've called him Ric ever since we were kids. I
pointed him out at the party yesterday, remember? Ric Valente."
    Just
hearing his name was enough to make her gnash her teeth. Valente
Sharpe, Valente Sharpe ... The
name took on a mechanical sound in her brain, like an electric saw
shredding her pride. Valente
Sharpe, Valente Sharpe...
    "He's
good-looking and very smart, too, like you," Lopera went on,
oblivious, it seemed, to her feelings. "But he also knows how to
wrap people around his finger, you know? He's a real snake charmer
with his professors ... Well, with everyone, really." His throat
gurgled in what was seemed a bizarre laugh (Elisa would hear that
laugh for many years to come, and would come to find it charming, but
right then she found it repulsive). "Girls, too. Yep, girls,
too, yessiree."
    "You
act like you're not friends."
    "Like
we're not...?" She could almost hear Lopera's hard drive
whirring into action as he processed the banal comment. "Of
course we are ... Or, at least, we were ... We met in grade school,
and we were going to go to college together. But Ric ended up getting
one of those killer scholarships and went off to Oxford, lucky duck,
to Roger Penrose's department, and we sort of fell out of touch ...
He wants to go back to England when Blanes's course is over... if
Blanes doesn't take him back to Zurich, that is."
    Lopera
gave a fleshy smile with that last sentence, and Elisa disliked it
intensely. Her darkest thoughts crept back and she felt totally and
utterly dejected, almost comatose. Blanes
will choose Valente Sharpe, obviously.
    "We
haven't really seen each other the last four years..." Lopera
went on. "I don't know, maybe I feel like he's changed. He's
more ... more sure of himself. I mean, he's a genius, there's no
doubt about that, a genius to the third degree, since his father and
grandfather are geniuses, too. His father's a cryp ... a
cryptographer who works in Washington at some national security
organization or something ... His mother's American, she's a math
teacher in Baltimore. She was nominated for the Fields Medal last
year." Elisa was impressed, against her will. The Fields Medal
was awarded in the United States every four years in recognition of
outstanding mathematical achievement in the best and most promising
mathematicians in the world; it was almost like a Nobel. She wondered
how she'd feel if her mother
had been nominated for the Fields Medal. But right then, all she felt
was rage. "They're divorced. And his mother's brother..."
    "Wait,
let me guess ... Won the Nobel Prize in chemistry?" Elisa
quipped, feeling petty. "Or maybe Niels Bohr is his uncle?"
    Lopera
emitted that weird sound again; it had to be a laugh.
    "No.
He's a programmer for Microsoft in California... What I meant is that
Ric's learned a lot from all of them. He's like a sponge. When you
think he's not paying attention, he's actually analyzing everything
you do and say ... He's a machine. How far up Claudio Coello do you
want me to drop you off?"
    Elisa
told him not to take her all the way home, but he insisted. Stuck in
a lunchtime traffic jam in Madrid, they had plenty of time to stop
arguing and stew in silence. She spied a couple of books on top of
the glove compartment, half hidden under some dog-eared folders. She
read the title of one: Mathematical
Games and Puzzles. The
other one was weightier: Physics
and Faith: Scientific and Religious Truth.
    As
they