Odalys Ferrer

Odalys Ferrer is 38 and the vugraphvugraph Live broadcast of a bridge match, card by card, on a big screen or online so spectators can follow the play. operator at the main table. Dark-skinned, with dark curly hair in a high ponytail, red-framed glasses and a tired face with dark circles, she is quick and exact and speaks in numbers and times. For ten years she has typed into the broadcast every card played at the main table, and says she makes no mistakes.

She lives in a three-room apartment in Humboldt Park, with a living room full of plants in clay pots, a Puerto Rican flag hung behind the sofa, a narrow desk where the keyboard she practices on every morning sits and a window onto the treetops of a park. On Sundays, she cooks rice with pigeon peas for the whole week.

She wears a black polo shirt with the tournament logo, a staff badge around her neck and a closed laptop clutched to her chest, like a shield. She speaks with a fixed stare, without blinking, and prefers precision to tact. Ten years typing faster than anyone, she repeats, and at the main table you cannot miss a card, because people all over the world are watching.

About the work, she says she types the main table and transmits for those watching, without taking sides, and that she is paid by the hour, with no team or sponsor. She is not there to cheer, she is there to record. If there is an error in a card, it is hers, but there has not yet been one. It is her trademark, and she keeps it the way others keep a diploma.

When the question suggests she passed hands to the outside, Odalys answers that she is paid by the hour to type, has no team or sponsor, and that she will be accused when there is something more than a box of tissues. She presses the laptop to her chest, unblinking: the offended exactness of someone who never missed a card or the coldness of someone who counts every word?