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My grandmother's bakery sat on a narrow street in Alfama where the cobblestones still wore the soot of the war. She opened it in the spring of 1948, with a sack of flour borrowed from her brother and a stove her husband — dead by then — had built with his own hands. Every morning she woke before the church bells, and by the time the first light came over the rooftops, the small front room smelled already of yeast and warm copper, and of the cigarette she allowed herself, just one, before the customers came.

I remember the bell. A thin brass thing she had taken off a fishing boat in Sesimbra and rigged above the door, and it would chime as the bakers from the next street came in for their coffee — men with flour on their collars and the news of the day folded under their arms. She called them all meu rico, my dear one, and poured the coffee from a copper pot she never let cool, and they pressed their thumbs against the warm bread and nodded, as if it were Sunday.

The bakery had three windows, and the morning light came through them in the order I now know was east to west. First the window above the counter. Then the one beside the oven. Then, last, the one in the kitchen, where she would have been already an hour at her work, sleeves to her elbows, the radio low. By eight she had made the day's broa, the dense corn loaves, and was beginning the pastéis. By nine the shop smelled of butter and cinnamon and a kind of patient certainty I have not, since, found anywhere else.

She is gone now. The bakery closed the year I started university. My mother kept the brass bell for some years and then, one morning when the wind came in off the river and the apartment felt too quiet, she gave it to me. It sits on the shelf above my desk. It no longer chimes. But there are days — especially when I am writing — when I think I can smell the flour again. And the smoke.