Blessed be the land, where grew the tree, from which came the wood to make the crib where you first drew breath.
When a turn-of-the-century caballero inclined toward a passing beauty and murmured a loping compliment like this, the girl could walk away in disdain but could hardly fail to blush with pleasure. Indeed, the word for this kind of verbal pass, piropo, is said to come from the Greek pyropos, meaning burning face. Fashioning the piropo used to be one of the pleasantest professions of Latin America, and nowhere was it practiced more artistically than in Maracaibo, a city...
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