The story concerns a lawyers clerk. The background to the story is a messy separation case Nolan vs Nolan, which makes his firms reputation for vindicating women's rights in such cases.

The key event sparking off the story is that an unknown woman greets him as John Doyle when he is on the eleventh stripe of a zebra crossing. He becomes obsessed with this John Doyle, considering him a mystical superhero. He goes through various phases of this obsession, including becoming a street artist in his spare time, drawing pictures of how he imagines John Doyle will look in the hopes of attracting his attention. He also thinks he sees him all over the place, including looking at the monkeys in the zoo (I think that is what threw you)

Eventually the obsession is punctured when the unknown woman comes into the practice to take out a breach of promise case against John Doyle.

It is, as I said, a somewhat surreal story.

The portán/portándia referred to several times in the story is the Law personified (once it gets you, it doesn't let go, just like a crab)

Thank you so much!

I didn't see this post until now.

Anyhow the thing that intrigues me is if you understood that in the zoo scene, the hero saw John Doyle watching the monkeys or he saw a monkey who he decided was John Doyle?

I understood that he thought he saw John Doyle among the crowd watching the monkeys, but that he had gone when he was able to go through the crowd.

Great. So what he did was to monitor the monkeys .

(Message edited by seabhac on August 11, 2009)

No, I think it was just one occasion when the clerk was in the zoo, and imagined that among the crowd watching the monkeys he saw John Doyle.

It is one of a number of such scenes.

Ok, so it's an obsession he has with an imaginary person who has the name of John Doyle.h

It turns out that it is a real person - but only at the end of the story, and the real person bears no relationship to this obsessed about character.