It wasn’t a number. It was a dream that repeated itself every December and took the form of a lottery ticket: 9810. Or as they said at home: nine thousand / eight / ten. So divided into three parts. Dad and Uncle Morocho bought half of it and the whole family prayed that it would finally happen this year. Winning the Christmas jackpot meant a golden ticket to a life of fantasy.
Although we lacked nothing, we had a house, work, food and holidays on the coast, it wasn’t about getting out of poverty, it was about getting out of poverty Secure the future forever and dare to fulfill the most brilliant and unlikely desires. A small chalet in Mar del Plata. A plane trip. The Torino Comahue. Maybe move, but I’m not sure. Even with the infantry guards, they couldn’t get my mother and aunt out of Pompeii.
In the 1960s, Gordo de Navidad was an institution. The winning figures with their Zero Battalion on the right raised the hopes of the Argentines. The media announced the draw as if it were the final of a championship and then went in search of the agents who sold the winning ticket and, most importantly, the person who bought it. These were rather naive times, so it was not surprising that the lucky ones posed smiling for the cameras and said that they wanted to enjoy the silver that had fallen from the sky.
In one of the film’s four vignettes The cord1970’s Norman Briski played an older child singer who was desperate to sing El Gordo de Navidad because it was tradition for the winner to leave a good tip to the person who announced their number. That means, The dream of winning ticket could also be fruitful for the secondary participants.
So nine thousand / eight / ten. You had to find out which agency sold the ticket, reserve it, buy it (it cost a lot), and manage your fears. The day of the raffle was a day full of passion and heart pounding because you wanted to spend what you hadn’t yet earned. The ceremony always ended without the Nine Thousand/Eight/Ten even appearing at the rearguard awards. Every now and then a consolation (“we’re getting over”) and nothing more. But The following year we renewed the purchase of the same ticket, hoping that through sheer persistence we would get lucky.
I don’t know when or why Dad and Uncle Morocho stopped buying the nine thousand/eight/ten. Perhaps the annual rite was suddenly revealed to them as something useless. Have you lost faith in the number? Or in the Gordo de Navidad? The truth is that these National Lottery draws have become increasingly popular and they were finally eclipsed by new games like Quini 6 (1986) or Loto (1990).
Memory is fickle. Tomorrow I have to forget the name of the movie I saw last weekend and I really liked it, but Nine Thousand/Eight/Ten will continue to cross my mind every December the echo of a dream that never came true but that made us happy as long as we could imagine it.
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