I was standing at the corner of Consejo de Cientos and Pau Claris yesterday when a tiny old woman carrying a huge cardboard box spoke to me. “Uh groarh,” she said. I immediately began the process of declaring the day ruined, which is what I do when I am given a sign that I still can’t understand even the tiniest of small talk. First you understand English-speakers speaking Spanish, and then you understand teachers, and then, after a long, patient wait on their part, you understand your friends. But a distant last is the hombre en la calle. What good are the first three if you can’t understand the fourth? Even with friends, we must have gotten to know them somehow (“somehow” = they speak English). The Spanish speaking there is more like we all learned a new game.

But there I was, still waiting for the light, still waiting for my brain to make sense of, “Uh groarh.” She said it again, waving at the sky. I looked up. She fanned herself. Ah hah. “Calor?” I said. “Heat?” In Spanish, when it is hot out, you say that “It makes heat.” It was, in fact, making heat yesterday. For the record, when you are hot, you say, “I have heat.” Saying, “I am hot,” comes out sounding something like, “I’m in heat.”

The old woman smiled, revealing several teeth. Maybe six, or seven. She made Sue and Jeff look like Pierce Brosnan. I felt better about not understanding what she had said and agreed that it was hot out.

Then she said something like, “Well, that’s green.” What’s green?, I wondered. Was she talking about the light? It wasn’t.

“I’m sorry?” I said. “What’s green?”

She looked at me with sympathy. Poor lost foreigner. She pointed at some of the words on her box. They were green. “These are green,” she said. “Like trees, you know?”

“I know,” I said, probably being more sensitive than I should have been about a language assessment conducted on the corner by someone with six teeth. “I know what ‘green’ means. But what are you talking about?”

“It’s just that it’s not blue,” she said. “That’s blue.” She pointed at something else. “You see? Blue.”

“What’s blue?” I said. I was really emphasizing the word “what’s” by this time, to avoid any confusion about what I wanted to know. Apparently that sort of emphasis is an English-language thing.

“What’s blue?” she said. “Right here.” She pointed at some other words on the box, blue words.

“Thank you,” I said. “But what I mean to say is, ‘Why are you talking about blue things and green things? What do you mean?”

She looked at me for a moment, still smiling. She was, it was clear, trying very hard to be helpful. “What do I mean?” she said. “I just don’t want you to make a mistake with the colors.”

There are many levels in the process known as “communication,” and I, at least on the corner of Consejo de Cientos and Pau Claris, am on one of the lower ones.