Word: lia
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...Portugal, Amália Rodrigues is considered the world's greatest singer. When she sings on television, theaters empty; there are fist fights in the cafés, and worried queues leading to the squares that have public television sets. At 43, she is everything to Lisbon that Edith Piaf was to Paris, and because she is a singer of fados, she is also considered a liberator, a philosopher, an antagonist, a revolutionary...
...fact, a kind of savior. When she became a fadista in the late '30s, the fados were in bad flower because of their unpleasant exaltation of poverty, disease and death. Amália, reeking of pathos, rescued the art of the fado by lifting its emotional sights to the level of pain, nostalgia and despair. Such suffering is delicious to the Portuguese, and the fados cover everything-defeated souls, wasted nights, strange shadows. Americans who have a feeling for the blues can understand the spirit of the fado, but you ain't really been blue till...
...Bullfights. Fados sound like torch songs sung from the top of a mosque: sobs, wails, cries from the soul. Even when performed by as dulcet a fadista as Amália, they are more forlorn than a foghorn, more despairing than a moan. Fado means destiny in Portuguese, and the Weltschmerz of a good fado gets a physical grip on its audience; like "ffillie Holiday's blues, fados encourage a state of mind well beyond the reach of popular music...
Fado's dark charms are, indeed, perceivable beyond Portugal. Amália has sung in New York and Hollywood, made a dozen successful visits to Bra zil and just finished a triumphant engagement in Mexico City. But back home, her spell is so strong that she easily persuades Portugal's leading intellectuals and composers to write songs for her, thus taking the national art form from the hands of the dejected lovers and sentimental ladies who anonymously contribute most fado lyrics...
...between Rio and São Paulo - the first successful air shuttle in the world. Called an "air bridge," it provides nonreservation flights that take off every 20 minutes during rush hours, carrying more than 2,000 passengers a day. Air bridges also reach from Rio to Brasília and to the inland industrial city of Belo Horizonte. Last year the country's eight heavily subsidized commercial airlines carried 4,000,000 passengers nearly 2 billion passenger-miles; only U.S. and Canadian airlines in the free world cope with more domestic traffic in a year...