The Regular

The sticker came free with a card reader. I put it on the door in 2022 mostly because I thought it looked cool and partly because Lisbon was filling up with those laptop people and I thought, why not, let them pay me in whatever they like as long as they buy the pastel de nata. For about a year nobody used it. Then Teodoro. He came in on a Tuesday in March, older than the laptop crowd, maybe sixty, grey beard, a bag that had been repaired more than once. He ordered a bica and a tosta mista, and when I told him the price he pointed at the door. "You take it?" "Sure," I said, and then had to remember how. There was an app. It generated a code. He scanned it with his phone and about ten seconds later the reader beeped and my ledger went up by three euros and forty cents, in euros, because the app converted it, which I think he found faintly disappointing. "Good," he said. "I'll be back." He was. Every day. Same order, same time, quarter past eight, the same ten seconds of phone-scanning. The staff started calling him O Senhor Bitcoin, though never to his face. He'd sit at the small table by the window with a paperback and a notebook, and he'd write in the notebook, and then he'd go. I asked him about it eventually. Not the notebook. The paying. "Why not just use a card?" He put down his pen. "Because I want to know it works. Not on a screen. Here. A man, a coffee, a transaction. If it can't do this, what is it for?" "And does it?" "Three hundred and eleven times so far. Yes." He'd counted. Of course he had. I learned things about him slowly, the way you do with regulars. He'd been an engineer at the port. He'd retired early, not entirely by choice. He'd bought some coins in 2013 because a colleague talked about it and he'd been curious and he'd never sold, not through any of the crashes, not because he was clever but because, he said, he'd forgotten the password for two years and by the time he found it he'd got used to not having the money.

"So you're rich," I said. "I'm comfortable. I'm not showing off. I'm buying a coffee." There was a stretch in 2024 when the price went through the floor and the laptop people got quieter and a few of them stopped coming in altogether. Teodoro didn't change. Quarter past eight, bica, tosta, phone, beep. I said something about it once, something like, doesn't it hurt to spend it when it's down, and he looked at me like I'd asked whether it hurt to spend a euro. "It's money," he said. "Money is for coffee." He missed a week in January. Then two. I didn't have a number for him. I'd never needed one. On the third week a woman came in, forties, his eyes, and asked if this was the place with the sticker. He'd had a stroke. He was going to be okay, mostly, but he wasn't going to be walking down the hill for a while. She'd found the notebook. It was a list. Every coffee, every date, every transaction ID, three years of them in a small careful hand, and at the top of the first page he'd written: "Proof that it works." "He wanted me to tell you the count," she said. "He was very insistent." "What's the count?" "Eight hundred and sixty-two." I've still got the sticker. It's faded now, you can barely read it. I've got a new reader and the app has updated four times and the code it generates looks different. A couple of the laptop people use it. It works. She brings him in on Thursdays now, in a chair. He pays with his phone. It takes him longer. I don't rush him.