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night.

    E

    very day grandmother fixed our breakfast, whatever we wanted—soft-boiled eggs, cream of corn, oatmeal—and forced us to drink glasses of warm milk. She didn’t eat, but she stayed in the kitchen, keeping up a commentary with no one in par- ticular, her voice rising above the clatter of pans and running water,
    her hands deep in soapy water.
    She had a maid to clean the house and do the daily wash out back, but she liked to do the cooking herself. Sometimes she went out, making her visits to her sisters. But she never went to church, and she seldom went shopping, having been brought up with servants to do the housekeeping and the groceries, having been brought up to make her own clothes or to have a seamstress make them for her.
    When she had no maid, she managed somehow by herself. She bought vegetables and fruit off the carts that came down the street, and she made daily lists of groceries she needed and paid the street boys to get them from the supermarket at the corner. Occasionally she had lunch delivered. In those days there were places—bodegas, storefront kitchens—that made entire meals to order and delivered them in fiambreras, aluminum containers that were stacked one on

    top of another.All over the neighborhood, you saw delivery boys car- rying fiambreras, the food steaming, the smells of rice and beans, mofongo, alcapúrrias, lingering in the air.
    Each day around noon she sat beside her radio and listened to my uncle’s comedy show—Now, she would say to me, sit still and listen, José Luis is on the radio. He came to my grandmother’s house occa- sionally, making his entrances with much fanfare (which was mostly my grandmother’s, who preened around him, giving up to him her rocking chair, bringing him a cup of coffee, though she knew he would’ve preferred a shot of rum). His voice carried from the street, full of theater. I recognized it instantly. He sounded just as he did on the radio. He was not a big man, but he had girth, blocky shoulders and a large face, a large nose, a big mustache, and thinning hair. Blus- ter, he had bluster, and a raucous, hoarse stage voice, and exploded with laughter at his own jokes, which he invented on the spot. Once he went to Spain and he carried on as if he had discovered it—After Spain, there’s only heaven, he said over and over, looking up at the sky. Pictures of bloody bulls ran through my head.
    When a crowd gathered at his house, as it often did, he enter- tained in his pajamas and slippers, a handkerchief soaked in bay rum on his forehead. Standing in the middle of the room, he played magic tricks, bringing on laughter each time, and dashed off verses, which he recited with expansive gestures, his arms taking in the whole room, flowery lines that he later wrote down and dedicated to any of us in even more flowery language and signed in a heavy bold hand. My grandmother rarely went to his house, and months would pass between his visits. She seldom told me stories about him, but she didn’t miss his show—those slapstick skits and street jokes she hardly understood but that people loved. The crazy but lovable down-and-out characters he created made him a familiar figure, famous, a picture in the papers, a man known just by his last name.

    Late in the afternoon in those days, el panadero came by the house, always at the same time, crying out, Pan, pan, pushing his wheeled cart, which he stacked high with fresh loaves of bread wrapped in plain white paper. My grandmother would go out in her slippers, pick from the cart the warmest loaf she could find, and give the man his five cents. Then she would sit in the dining room and break off a crusty piece and spread it with soft butter. I would climb on a chair and bend over her big steaming cup of coffee, soaking my piece in it, crumbs of soggy bread and melting butter running down my chin.
    Just as the sun was setting, after the rainbow that came with the afternoon showers had faded, my mother