Esperta is definitely not slow, dim, unimaginative.
Sometimes it’s easier to understand something by what it is not. Someone esperto can, she says, use his or her instincts to take advantage of others to trap or fool them into trouble. I grew up in Portugal and have always felt an undercurrent of admiration, almost affection, for the espertas.Ī Brazilian friend, Tatiana, though, warns of a negative sense. On the ball, quick-witted, with-it, canny, having common sense, intuitive, someone who gets things done: these all help shade in the space occupied by esperto. There are words that come close, that encapsulate something of the spirit of this word – and the word itself is spirited. It feels almost counterintuitive to have to explain what esperto/esperta means, a Portuguese word without true parallel in the English dictionary. Lunch was followed by a seven-hour sobremesa, and, reportedly, a couple of bottles of whisky.Īfter all, what does the loss of a premiership matter after a fine meal, a good cigar and some booze-soaked reminiscing? ¡Salud! Sam Jones in MadridĮsperta (Carmen Miranda) and esperto (Jose Mourinho) Composite: REX/Shutterstock and Getty Images PORTUGAL: esperto/esperta At the end of May, as it became clear that he was going to be turfed out of office in a no-confidence vote, the then-prime minister did something very Spanish: he and his close circle retreated to a private room in a smart Madrid restaurant. The world may not have been put completely to rights by the end of the sobremesa, but it will seem a calmer, more benign place.Īsk Mariano Rajoy. It is also a sybaritic time a recognition that there is more to life than working long hours and that few pleasures are greater than sharing a table and then chatting nonsense for a hefty portion of what remains of the day. The sobremesa is a digestive period that allows for the slow settling of food, gossip, ideas and conversations. Coffee and digestivos will have been taken, or perhaps the large gin and tonic that follows a meal rather than precedes it here. Lunch – and it is more usually lunch than dinner – will long since have yielded to the important act of the sobremesa, that languid time when food gives way to hours of talking, drinking and joking. Sitting clumped around tables inside restaurants or spilling out on to their terrazas, are friends, families and colleagues, preserved in the post-prandial moment like replete insects in amber. You may have witnessed the ritual, knowingly or not, while on the hunt for a coffee or a cold beer towards the end of another long Spanish afternoon. Salud! Photograph: Molly Aaker/Getty Images SPAIN: sobremesa
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