Word: rodr
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Because of la cometa, more people than usual were praying in Mexico City churches, but they lighted fewer candles at the altars. Explained sad-eyed Maria Rodríguez, as she stood in the queue at the corn mill on Niño Perdido Avenue: "When artificial light burns while a comet is in the skies, newborn babies will be marked, on their bodies if male and on their faces if female." The other women nodded soberly. "Even if all the lights are out," said Juana Sanchez, "one hundred children will be born this year with harelips, two prominent...
...tango tunes put together by the Tin Pan Alleys along the Plata, the one locally regarded as No. 1 is La Cumparsita. Gerardo Hernán Mattos Rodríguez, a Uruguayan, wrote it in 1916. An architecture student at the University of Uruguay, he had seen a group of boisterous fellow students, evicted from their rooming house, pick up the tables and chairs and march out in a noisy procession (cumparsa). That gave him a title. He quickly knocked out a doleful melody and a set of lyrics that were soon replaced by those of a rival lyricist...
...Racetrack. Young Mattos Rodríguez sold La Cumparsita to a Buenos Aires publisher for 20 gold pesos, lost them at the races next day, later had to pay the money back when his contract with the publisher was voided because he was a minor. That was luck in disguise. In the years that followed, he made enough from La Cumparsita-and other tangos-to stake him to a comfortable life in Paris and free-spending afternoons at many a racetrack...
When Mattos Rodríguez died last week in Montevideo, at 51, Buenos Aires newspapers barely mentioned it, and the deadpanned dancers in the big, middle-class dance halls, in the low dives and tony boîtes did not even know that La Cumparsita's composer was dead. But their feet still followed his rhythms and their silent lips mouthed the lines...
...bull caught up with Manolete (Manuel Rodríguez), Spain's No. 1 matador (TIME, July 21), at a benefit performance. His horn bit three inches into Manolete's calf, "destroying a muscle," the doctors said. But the great man stayed right in there until he had dispatched the beast, whose ears, as a token of popular esteem, were presented to him in the infirmary...