Un Tinto

In Spain, white wine is vino blanco, but red wine isn’t, as you’d expect, vino rojo. Instead, it’s vino tinto. Tinted wine. If you arrange to meet with friends before lunch to have something to drink, you’re having a vermú, an aperitif to stimulate your appetite, even if you don’t order vermouth but rather a beer or a soft drink. “Shall we stop and have something?” you might say to a friend. “It’s the vermouth hour.” “Yes, let’s go for a vermouth,” your friend answers. Un vermú. If your friend is not Spanish, but Colombian, she’ll laugh merrily and likely agree to stop, yes, but for a tinto.

“A tinto?” I repeated when my new friend proposed meeting for a tinto. Calling the hour of the aperitif the red wine hour was really no stranger than calling it the vermouth hour.

She smiled wisely. Then explained that in Colombia you meet for a tinto, not a vermú, though a tinto is coffee, not wine. You can, however, have whatever you want, just as in Spain. Okay. Tinto isn’t tinto but coffee, and meeting for a tinto isn’t meeting for coffee, but meeting for an aperitif. A little convoluted, but not impossible to understand. “No, no,” corrected my friend. “In Colombia, you meet for a tinto any hour of the day.” She added that in her country, people are always ready to share a moment with friends.

I think I have it down.

But no, not yet. Because a tinto, coffee, isn’t coffee as in Spain, but more like an infusion, coffee grounds steeped with other substances to make a drink that is lighter, sweeter, and richer than coffee. Colombian coffee is the best in the world, she explained, meaning both the bean and the drink made from it. And where, I wondered, do you go to drink it? Not to a bar, which is a general word for an establishment serving drinks and some light food, or to a café, a similar place but probably offering pastries as well as sandwiches, but to a tienda, a shop. A shop in the vein of a general store, a meeting place. Such multipurpose establishments were once common in Spain, as well, but are ever harder to encounter.

Once I had all that straight, I asked my friend, who immigrated to Spain two years ago to secure a better future for her children, what other differences she’d noticed between her homeland and her new home. In Spain, she quickly replied, everyone is equal, and no one looks down on you because of your education or job. In Colombia, a doctor is a person of importance whereas a street cleaner is not. Social distinctions are more important there than here, she explained. My friend has a master’s in administration, but in Spain she would have to work in a bar, or as a house cleaner, or as a caretaker for an elderly person, and she had expected her work to influence how people received her. It was not so. And really, why should it be? “I clean my own house without pay, I can certainly clean someone else’s for pay,” she told me. Her parents had died at 63, but she certainly knew how to take care of old people. She knew how to prepare food, and she was ready to do that as well. Her children were ready too. And so it was: with provisional papers and temporary work permits, all the family members, mother and three children, were now working. No one cared what the work was.

Which brought her to another difference between Spain and Colombia, which is how passive the youth are about working to get ahead. Why work when you can sign up for unemployment benefits? Why struggle when you can get aid from the government? She appreciated the welfare state, was here because of it, yet deplored how youth let the opportunities provided by the state replace those they could secure through hard work.

“Hmmm,” I answered. Spain has high unemployment. Not everyone finds work so easily. We both had smartphones, so it was easy to check on my assertion. Spain’s unemployment is 12 percent, higher than any other European Union country. For youth it is much higher than that.

“Exactly!” People don’t work because they don’t want to was her view. Mine was a little different. How to explain myself? While I was thinking, I sipped my tinto: not vermouth or coffee or a glass of wine but a clara, half beer and half lemonade. Then we thought some more about the positive and negative, the good and the bad. We didn’t agree on every topic, but we agreed that meeting for a tinto was a fine thing.

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