Numbers - Part I

R$69.06 a night? - With that price we'll be beating off tourists with canes

After a good healthy queue behind a woman holding a poodle, Juninho motioned me to the counter. Pleasantries were exchanged and I handed him the earphones. The barcode reader, like most electronic things here, was broken. I closed my eyes. Juninho made three ham-fisted attempts at data transfer before giving up. Eventually a shift manager trained to recognize all the numbers was summonsed. Up beeped the princely sum of R$6.78. I offered him a R$10 note. He shook his head and I knew he didn’t have any change. They never do. I wasn’t in the mood to receive my change in sweets so we were at an impasse.

Calling the shift manager over twice in one transaction would have been professional suicide. He thought. I waited. He thought some more and eventually a shape fell through a hole and Juninho smiled

-You can insure your headphones against theft and breakage for an extra R$4.20. Forever.

-Done.

Obviously management material, he added the cost of the insurance and presented me with a bill of R$10.98. I thanked him for his patience and turned to go. But there was a snag. He needed my CPF number (social security number) to complete the transaction and I didn’t know it. He looked worried until a nice woman at the next counter offered me the use of hers. This left poor Juninho in a moral quandary. As Thereza wasn’t buying the earphones I couldn’t use her CPF. What to do?

After much debate Juninho withdrew my R$11 from the till and gave it back to me while Thereza footed the bill. I waited with her while she bought four bottles of discounted hair conditioner before fixing her up away from the glare of the shift manager. She wrote down her number and email address and told me not to hesitate to contact her should my new earphones come to any sort of grief.

Do you understand numbers?

Numbers, like time and good manners, are a source of bewilderment in Recife. I have checked school mathematics books and they are all in there. But using them is like trying to play pitch & putt with two broken arms and dyslexia. As a result pricing makes little or no sense.

Phone credit can only be purchased in odd denominations- R$12, R$17, R$24 & R$37 while the Diplomata Hotel entices travellers in with its promotional rate of R$69.06 (the 6 cent being a deal breaker). And in the way that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic, the Diplomata is a hotspot of diplomatic intrigue and whiskey drinking on the porch. Well maybe the whiskey drinking, granted. The concept of pricing items at say R$4.99 has yet to take off. You know you have been given the gringo menu when all the prices are either rounded up or have a .99 in them.

I invented numbers my son, worry not.

All this is in spite of the Sudoku craze that has swept the city. It is unusual not to see someone with Sudoku on the bus at rush hour. It seems to be a status thing, rather like the lads who carry around bibles and Filofaxes to signal intelligence. I have come to the conclusion that that most Sudoku players, far from taxing over the correct sequence of numbers, are in fact remembering the nine numbers required to complete the square. Fill them all in and you win!

Numbers were dealt a further blow in recent weeks when the Polícia Militar cracked down on illegal bingo dens in Boa Viagem.* The local news had extensive coverage of the raids. Old timers were filmed shuffling out, hiding their faces with their hats while the grannies hid theirs with the poodles they had left tethered by the railings outside - a tell tale sign if you know what to look for.

That night the news had an exclusive interview with one of the bingo victims/winners. Her face was in shadow and her voice like Baron Gerry Adams in the 1980s.** She recalled when the heavily armed military police raided one of the countless bingo dens along Boa Viagem.

It was horrific. They physically stopped us from pulling levers and told us to get up. Some of them were nice boys and helped us. Others just unplugged our dreams. What will we do in the mornings now? Bet on lizards climbing trees?

This particular haunt prospered for two weeks before the owners got greedy. Unhappy with a two week pre-tax profit of R$92,387 they installed one-armed bandits. Word spilled around. Old-timer undercover cops infiltrated the joint, befriending their brethren, ultimately betraying them. No ties, no regrets. Better that way. The owners, disgraced in the eyes of the law but not the people, face an uncertain, windowless future. Which is some recompense, considering their crimes.

The bingo scene in Recife used to be above board. Hell, you could go to a joint so big you could boot an O’Neill’s ball hard as your foot would allow straight up in the air and still not hit a roof. Things became so sophisticated that they even got in computers that worked. All you needed to do was enter your numbers into the machine and it did the work. If it flashed you won. A man in a dickie-bow would come over and place a trophy atop your screen and give you a free rum and some toasted cheese sandwiches. How times have changed. It is the nearest to pre-Castro Cuba I’ve known.

* I have a particular fondness for bingo, having learnt my Portuguese numbers 1-69 inclusive while pitting my wits against the elderly and the night whores who frequented the joint waiting for dark.

** She sounded rather like this, though it was hard to tell about the beard due to the light.