I am a court reporter. For fifty weeks a year I sit in a courtroom in Des Moines and take down every single word that anybody says. Every "um." Every "objection." Every "could you repeat the question." I am very good at it.

For the other two weeks, I go somewhere I can't understand a thing.

I started in 1993. Forty dollars out of every paycheck goes into a Folgers can on top of the refrigerator with OUT written on the lid in marker. When the can is full enough, I go. I go alone, I go in the off-season, and I bring one bag. When I get home I write about it, because it turns out that after fifty weeks of other people's words, I have a few of my own.

This is where I keep them.

Everyone tells you to ride the 28. The guidebook tells you, the woman at the pension tells you, and the man at the next table in the café tells you in careful English after he has watched you fail, twice, to order a coffee. So on my second morning in Lisbon I went and stood at the stop with a crowd of other people who had been told, and when the little yellow tram came grinding around the corner we all climbed on as if we'd been waiting our whole lives for it.

It is not a big tram. It's a wooden box on rails about the size of my kitchen, older than I am, with a driver up front working a brass handle like he's steering a ship. It creaks. It sways. It rings a bell at people who are standing in the street, and the people do not move, and then at the last second they do.

The 28 climbs. That's the whole point of it. Lisbon is built on hills, seven of them, people will tell you, and the tram goes up the steepest of them into the Alfama, the old quarter that came through the great earthquake of 1755 when so much of the city below it did not. The streets there were laid out long before anybody dreamed of a tram. On some corners it passes so close to the houses that you could reach out the window and take a geranium off somebody's sill. I didn't. I thought about it.

About halfway up the tram lurched on a curve and I grabbed the nearest thing, which was the arm of a tiny woman in a black cardigan with a shopping bag full of oranges. She did not let go of me. She held on to my elbow for the rest of the hill as if I were her niece, and she talked to me the whole way, a long, warm, serious story in Portuguese with a lot of shaking of her head. I understood none of it. Not one word. I nodded where it seemed right. Once she laughed, so I laughed. When she got off at the top she patted my hand twice and gave me an orange.

I have thought about that story ever since. It might have been about her son. It might have been about the price of oranges, or the tram, or the government, or a dog. It might have been a warning. For fifty weeks a year I would have had it all down, every word, spelled right, with the time noted. On the 28 I just had the sound of it, and her hand on my arm, and an orange. It was, I think, the best testimony I've ever heard.

I rode to the end of the line and then walked back down, which is the other thing everyone tells you to do, and got lost, which is the thing nobody tells you but everyone does. The Alfama is all stairs and alleys and laundry. Shirts hang across the lanes on lines strung between windows, so you walk under other people's sleeves. Old men sat on doorsteps. A cat watched me from a pile of tiles with the look of a clerk who knows your paperwork isn't in order. Somewhere somebody was grilling sardines and the whole hill smelled of smoke and salt.

Down at the bottom they were busy getting the city ready for the Expo, which opened the month after I left. There were cranes everywhere and new paint and banners going up. I was glad I came before it. I liked the city in its work clothes.

On my last afternoon I bought a paper bag of custard tarts, the little ones with the burnt tops, and took the 28 up one more time. I didn't see the woman with the oranges. I didn't expect to. But I held on to the strap on the curve where I'd met her, and I let the whole car talk around me, a river of words I couldn't catch, and for once in my life I didn't even try.