The Yellow World Read online

  A Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Translation copyright © 2012 by James Womack

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Spain as El Mundo Amarillo by Random House Mondadori, S.A., in 2008, copyright © 2008 by Albert Espinosa, afterword copyright © 2008 by Eloy Azorín. This English translation was originally published in the United Kingdom by Particular Books in 2012.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Gabriel Celaya for permission to reprint “Autobiography” by Gabriel Celaya. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gabriel Celaya.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Espinosa, Albert.

  [Mundo amarillo. English]

  The yellow world: how fighting for my life taught me how to live / Albert Espinosa.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-345-53812-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53811-6

  1. Espinosa, Albert—Health. 2. Espinosa, Albert—Childhood and youth. 3. Espinosa, Albert—Philosophy. 4. Cancer—Patients—Biography. 5. Cancer—Psychological aspects. 6. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Title.

  RC265.6.E76A3 2014

  362.19699′40092—dc23 2014029594

  Title-page and part-title image: © iStockphoto.com

  Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Cover image: Shutterstock

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Beginning …

  The Yellow World

  Where Were You Born?

  What Is the Yellow World?

  Carrying On …

  List of Discoveries to Make Your World Yellow

  1. Losses are positive

  2. The word pain doesn’t exist

  3. The energy that appears after thirty minutes is what you need to solve a problem

  4. Ask five good questions every day

  5. Show me how you walk and I’ll show you how to laugh

  6. When you are sick, they keep tabs on your life, a medical record. When you are well, you should do the same: Keep a life record

  7. There are seven tricks to being happy

  8. What you hide the most reveals the most about you

  9. Put your lips together and blow

  10. Don’t be afraid of being the person you have become

  11. Find what you like looking at, then look at it

  12. Start counting at six

  13. The search for the south and the north

  14. Listen to yourself when you’re angry

  15. Positive wanking

  16. The difficult thing isn’t accepting how you are, but how everyone else is

  17. The power of contrasts

  18. Hibernate for twenty minutes

  19. Look for your hospital roommates outside of the hospital

  20. Do you want to share an REM with me?

  21. The power of the first time

  22. A way never to get angry

  23. The best way to know if you love someone

  Twenty-three Discoveries That Connect Two Ages: From Fourteen to Twenty-four

  Living …

  The Yellows

  The Yellows

  How Do You Find Yellows and How Do You Identify Them?

  Yellow Q&A

  Conclusions About Yellows

  And Relax …

  The Yellow End

  The Yellow End

  Epilogue

  Afterword by Eloy Azorín

  About the Author

  Introduction

  My Inspiration

  Gabriel Celaya was an engineer and a poet. I am an engineer and a scriptwriter. We’re both left-handed. There’s something about his poem “Autobiography” that goes right through me, brings a lump to my throat. I think it’s because he creates his own world in this poem. His own world, Celaya world. There’s nothing that affects me more than people who create their own worlds.

  And this poem is built out of prohibitions, prohibitions that go to make up a life. Prohibitions that marked Celaya’s life. Somehow, if we can get rid of these prohibitions we will find his life, what he thinks his life should be. He has to use so much “no” to get rid of what he doesn’t want and leave us with a great heap of “yes.” I like this way of looking at life.

  Just like Celaya does in “Autobiography,” I want to divide this book into “Beginning,” “Carrying On,” “Living,” and “Dying.” That’s four blocks that, just as he says, add up to make anybody’s life.

  If you don’t know the poem, here you go:

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Don’t hold the knife in your left hand.

  Don’t put your elbows on the table.

  Fold your napkin properly.

  That’s the beginning.

  Tell me the square root of three thousand three hundred and thirteen.

  Where is Tanganyika? What year was Cervantes born?

  I’ll give you an F if you talk to your classmate.

  That’s how it carries on.

  Do you think it’s right that an engineer should write poetry?

  Culture is an ornament; business is business.

  If you stay with that girl you’re not welcome in our house.

  That’s living.

  Don’t be so crazy. Best behavior. Stand up straight.

  Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t cough. Don’t breathe.

  Yes, don’t breathe! Say no to every “no”

  And relax: die.

  —Gabriel Celaya

  Author’s Note

  Why write this book?

  The Yellow World is an autobiography. It is about my life when I was very young. I had cancer from the age of fourteen to twenty-four, and during those ten years I lost a leg, a lung, and part of my liver, but it was also a happy time for me. In The Yellow World I do not talk about cancer, I talk about what I learned from cancer, and everything it taught me about everyday life.

  I was then inspired by this book to write a television series called Polseres vermelles, or Red Band Society. Polseres vermelles aired first in Spain, and then Italy, and perhaps the most incredible thing about this has not been the number of awards it has won or the audience it has found, but rather that Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the series for the Fox television network in the United States, with the adaptation to be done by Margaret Nagle. I have always thought that if you believe in dreams, they will come true. I’ve had the good fortune to have gone from a small hospital room to the big screen.

  In Red Band Society, the world I call the yellow world, which I will go on to describe in this book, is brought to life in a very beautiful and poetic way. It’s like seeing part of the book transformed and expanded. It was an honor to create and write the show in Spain, and it has been an even greater honor to be able to visit the beginning of the shooting of Red Band Society and know that it is in such good hands in the United States. Steven Spielberg, Margaret Nagle, Charlie Andrews, Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, Sergio Aguero, and everyone else involved will, I’m sure, take the series a long way.

  The day Charlie Rowe, the actor playing the lead character in Red Band Society, had his head shaved to prepare for his role, I gave him the casino chip my hospital nurse had given me a long time ago—a charm that, according to my nurse, brings good luck to the bearer. To me, the chip has its own yellow soul and reflects the virtues of Leo, the character Charlie is to play. Leo embodies my own life, my own strugg
le, and someone you’ll read a lot about from this page onward. I get very emotional every time I see the drama advertised as “an amazing real story.” It’s a great honor that the “real story” is my own story, and that it will be shared with so many people in a new way.

  Back to the book. The Yellow World is a positive creation that is full of humor and the desire to live. Often when I walk through the streets wearing shorts, people pretend not to look at my artificial leg, but two seconds after passing me they turn around to stare at it, but I always turn as well and catch them staring. And I sometimes ask them, “Instead of staring at it, why don’t you just ask me about what is clearly a very important part of my life?”

  I was thirteen years old when I lost my leg, but I was lucky enough to give it a farewell party (more on that later). Aside from the party, one of the good things about losing my leg was when they asked me if I wanted to leave my leg to science. I wanted to, but for some reason science wasn’t interested in it, so I ended up burying it instead. And that lets me say—and probably I am the only one here who can say it with complete confidence—that I literally have one foot in the grave.

  I always say that humor helps explain everything better. And I have discovered there is humor to be found in most situations, if we choose to look for it. For example, people always think that artificial legs, like the one I have, are made of wood, like a pirate’s. But I wear an electronic leg, and I find myself with the same problem that everyone with an electronic artificial leg faces: You have to recharge it at night. So in hotels where there is only one electrical outlet, I have to decide whether to recharge my laptop, my cellphone, or my artificial leg!

  When we were in the hospital, the only day that we behaved like really sick kids was Christmas Day. We all knew that was the day the local soccer team would come to visit us, and they always gave a signed ball to the kid who appeared to be the sickest. So that day we all stayed in our beds with our blankets pulled up to our chins, trying to look as weak as possible. I think my greatest achievement was not beating four types of cancer; it was putting on the world’s sickest face so that star player Gary Lineker gave me a soccer ball.

  So, as you see, this yellow world is full of this happiness. And I’ve always believed that it has something to do with the lives that live on inside of me. What happened was that all of us kids who had cancer—the ones affectionately nicknamed the Eggheads—had a pact, a life pact: We’d share out the lives of the ones who died. It was an unforgettable pact, a beautiful one—we wanted to live on somehow in the others, to help them fight against cancer. And we believed that our friends who had died had weakened the cancer a little and made it easier for those of us who survived to win the battle, so it was up to us to live out their hopes and dreams.

  During my ten years that I was in the hospital, when we shared out all the lives that had been lost, my share came to 3.7 lives—so with my own, that makes a total of 4.7. I’ll never forget those 3.7 lives and will try always to do them justice. If it sometimes seems complicated to live your own life, imagine the responsibility involved in living 4.7 of them! 4.7 people wrote this book—4.7 lives inside me that tell you that The Yellow World is my favorite of all my books, and that it is an honor and gives me great happiness that it has been translated into English. I know that you will take care of this world, and that you will make it very yellow.

  I hope this book will link us as yellow ones. If you have any suggestions, wishes, or you are looking for anything, you’ll find me at alberte​spinosa​23@​yahoo.​es.

  —Albert Espinosa

  July–September 2014

  Don’t hold the knife in your left hand.

  Don’t put your elbows on the table.

  Fold your napkin properly.

  That’s the beginning.

  —Gabriel Celaya

  Where Were You Born?

  Well, I was born from cancer. I like the word cancer. I even like the word tumor. It might sound creepy but it’s just that my life has been connected to these two words. And I’ve never felt anything horrible about saying cancer or tumor or osteosarcoma. I grew up with these words and I like to say them out loud, to shout them at the top of my voice. I think that until you say them, make them part of your life, then it’s difficult for you to accept them.

  That’s why I need to speak about cancer in this first chapter, because later in the book I’m going to explain the lessons that cancer taught me to survive my life. So I’ll start off by talking about it and how it affected me.

  I was fourteen years old when I had to go to the hospital for the first time. I had an osteosarcoma in my left leg. I left school, left my home, and started my life in the hospital.

  I had cancer for ten years, from the ages of fourteen to twenty-four. This doesn’t mean that I spent ten years in the hospital but that for ten years I was going to various different hospitals to get treated for four cancers: leg, leg (same leg both times), lung, and liver.

  En route I left behind one leg, one lung, and a chunk of my liver. But I have to say that, at the time, I was happy when I had cancer. I remember it as one of the best times of my life.

  It might be a shock to see these two words next to each other: happy and cancer. But that’s how it was. The cancer might have taken material things away from me, but it taught me lots of other things that I would never have found out by myself.

  What can cancer give you? I think the list is endless: You find out who you are, you find out what sort of people you live with, you discover your limits … above all you lose your fear of death. Maybe this last is the most valuable thing.

  One day I was cured. I was twenty-four and they told me that I didn’t have to go back to the hospital. I was scared stiff. It was weird. The thing I knew how to do best of all was to fight against cancer and now they told me that I was cured. This weirdness, this stupor, lasted for six hours, then I went mad with joy; not to go back to the hospital, not to have any more X-rays (I think I’d had more than two hundred and fifty), no more blood tests, no more tests of any kind. It was a dream come true. It was completely unbelievable.

  I thought that in a few months I’d forget all about cancer. I’d have a “normal life.” Cancer would just be a stage I’d gone through. But instead (I’ve never forgotten it), something strange happened. I never imagined how much the lessons of cancer would help me in my daily life.

  It’s the great gift that cancer has given me: lessons (you have to call them something, although maybe I prefer the word discoveries) that help my life to be easier, happier.

  What I will explain in this book is nothing more than how to apply to your day-to-day life the lessons I learned from cancer. Yes, exactly, now that I think of it, that’s what this book could be called: How to Use Cancer to Get Through Life. Maybe that’ll end up being the book’s subtitle. It sounds odd, it sounds just the opposite of most of the books that get written about cancer, but that’s just how it is. Life is paradoxical (I love contradictions). I want to make it clear that this book is a collection of everything I learned from cancer and also of the discoveries that my friends who were also fighting this illness showed me.

  Well, that’s the story of cancer and me up till now. I like how I’ve summed it up; I’m happy with it. The story has begun. Now let’s carry on with the yellow world.

  What Is the Yellow World?

  This is something you’ve probably been asking yourself ever since you bought this yellow book (at least, I imagine it as being yellow; we’ll see what happens when it gets published—maybe the cover will end up being red, or orange, or a kind of brownish gray).

  The yellow world is the name I’ve given to a way of living, of seeing life, of nourishing yourself with the lessons that you learn from good moments as well as bad ones. The yellow world is made out of discoveries, above all, yellow discoveries, which are those that give it its name. But don’t worry; we’ll get there in a bit. No hurry.

  What I can tell you from the beginning is that this is a
universe with no rules. Most worlds are controlled by a set of rules, but the yellow world has no rules. I don’t like rules, so I wouldn’t like my world to have them. It’d be a bit odd. And I don’t think that rules are necessary; they’re useless, they exist just to be jumped over, gotten around, bypassed. I don’t think that anything they tell you is sacred actually is. I don’t think that anything they tell you is correct actually is. Everything has a flip side; everything can be seen from lots of different points of view.

  I have always believed that the yellow world is the world we actually live in. The world we see in movies, the world of cinema, is one created out of false ideas, and we end up thinking that the world is really like that. They show you what love is like, and then you fall in love and it’s not like it is in the movies. They show you what sex is like, and then you have sex and it’s also not like how it is in the movies. They even show you what breakups are like. How many times have people met their boyfriend or girlfriend in a bar and tried to break up like they do in the movies? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because on film they can get it over and done with in five minutes, but it actually takes you six hours and in the end you don’t break up but promise to get married or have a child.

  And I don’t believe in these labels that they say define various generations. I don’t think I’m part of Generation X, or Generation iPod, and I’m definitely not part of any metrosexual or übersexual generation.

  What am I? Yellow (something individual that isn’t part of any collective). I’m yellow, I’m somebody’s yellow. But like I said, we’ll get there in a bit.

  So, there aren’t any labels, any rules, any norms of behavior. I suppose you’re probably asking how I’m going to put this book, and this world, in order; how I’m going to get my thoughts straight. Well, I’m going to make a list. I believe in lists; I like lists. I’m an engineer; I became one because I like numbers, and if you like numbers then you like lists.