The Yellow World Read online

  From here on in, everything you read is a big list. A list of concepts, a list of ideas, a list of feelings, a happy list. A list of discoveries that I made and that make up what I think of as my world.

  They’re short discoveries that I set out in short chapters. They’re little elements that let us see the world in a different way. Don’t be afraid of living in the yellow world. All you have to do is believe in it.

  I’ve got one maxim: Trust your dreams and they’ll come true. Trust and true are very similar words, and they are similar because they are actually close to each other, really very close. So close that if you do trust something, it will come true.

  Trust it.…

  And now we’ll go straight to the big section where I’ve put all these discoveries: how to live … Here are the experiences of cancer related to life, which form the elements you can combine to create your yellow world.

  It’s a list of twenty-three points that you should connect with lines, connect conceptually in your mind: Do this and a way of living will appear. A yellow world.

  Every point, every discovery, is connected with one of the phrases I heard during my hospital life. They’re things people said to me while I was ill and that had such an effect on me that I’ve never forgotten them. They’re like extracts from a poem, or the beginnings of songs, sentiments that will always smell of chemotherapy, or bandages, or waiting for visits or roommates in their blue pajamas. Sometimes it’s words that show you the way. A few words can come together and provoke an idea. Sometimes the most important phrases are those we give the least importance.

  So come in, and trust this, a little. Believe what I’m saying, but keep your eyes open. Everything can be questioned, debated. The guy who’s telling you this is me, Albert. Agnostic. Apolitical. Yellow.

  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.

  —Gabriel Celaya

  1

  Losses are positive

  Give your leg a goodbye party. Invite all the people who have some connection to your leg and give it a great send-off. Hasn’t it supported you all your life? Well, support it now that it’s walking away.

  —my traumatologist,

  the day before they cut off my leg

  Losses are positive. I know that’s a hard thing to believe, but losses are positive. We have to learn how to lose things. You need to know that whatever you win, sooner or later, you’ll end up losing.

  In the hospital they taught us to accept loss, but rather than putting the emphasis on accepting, they put it on loss. Accepting something is only a matter of time; losing something is a question of principles.

  Years ago, whenever someone died, his close family would go through a period of mourning: They would wear black, suffer, and stay at home. The mourning period gave them time to think about the loss, to live for the loss.

  We’ve gone from mourning to nothing. Now when someone dies they tell you in the funeral home that you’ve got to get over it. You break up with your partner and people tell you that you’ll be going out with someone else in a couple of weeks. But what about the mourning? Where’s the mourning gone, the thinking about the loss, about what loss means?

  Cancer took a lot away from me: parts of my body, mobility, experiences, years of school … But what I felt most of all was probably the loss of my leg. I remember that the day before they cut it off my doctor said to me: “Give your leg a goodbye party. Invite all the people who have some connection to your leg and give it a great send-off. Hasn’t it supported you all your life? Well, support it now that it’s walking away.”

  I was fifteen and I hadn’t organized a party to lose my virginity (I’d have liked that) but I was organizing a party to lose my leg. I remember as if it were only this morning how I phoned people who were connected with the leg (it was a bit tough, it wasn’t easy to get people to come). After going over things a lot in my head and talking about hundreds of things, I ended up saying to them: “I’m inviting you to the goodbye party for my leg; you don’t have to bring anything. And come on foot.” I thought it was important to mention that just to stop things from being awkward. Some genius decided to give us a sense of humor, the cure for all our worries.… A strange ability: to be able to turn everything upside down and laugh at it.

  The people I invited to this strange party were those who had had some kind of relationship with my leg: a goalkeeper who let in forty-five goals from me in one match (well, okay, only one, but I invited him anyway), a girl I played footsie with under the table, one of my uncles, who took me hiking (because of the cramps I’d gotten in my legs, and anyway I couldn’t think of many more people to invite), and a friend who had a dog that bit me when I was ten. The worst of it was that the dog came and tried to bite me again.

  It was a great party. I think it was the best party I’ve ever given, and definitely the most original. Everyone was a bit shy at the beginning, but we started bit by bit to talk about the leg. Everyone told stories about it. They touched it one last time. It was a night I’ll never forget.

  When the night came to an end and dawn was breaking, a few hours before I went into surgery, I suddenly thought of the best possible finishing touch: one last dance. I asked a nurse to dance with me and she said yes. I didn’t have any music but my roommate had lots of Antonio Machín CDs (he was a big fan of Machín, and even called himself “El Manisero”*). I put on the CD he lent me and out came “Wait for Me in Heaven.” There was no more suitable song for this moment, for the last moment. I danced maybe a dozen times with the nurse. My last dozen dances. I danced so much! All I really wanted was not to hear anything, for Machín to melt magically with my mind, become nothing more than a repetitive noise, the perfect soundtrack. Don’t you like it when a piece of music is repeated so many times that you don’t hear the words, the individual sounds? This music, these words, they end up being just like the wind, something that’s there, that you notice, that you don’t need to listen to, just feel.

  The next day they cut my leg off. But I wasn’t sad; I’d said goodbye to it, I’d cried, I’d laughed. Without realizing, I’d had my mourning period. I’d spoken about the loss without any hang-ups and I’d turned it into a gain.

  I like to think that I haven’t actually lost a leg but gained a stump. Along with a list of leg-related memories:

  1. A wonderful goodbye party. (How many people can say that they’ve had a party that cool?)

  2. The memory of my second set of baby steps (you forget about the first ones, but you never forget your second set, the first baby steps with your mechanical leg).

  3. Also, as I mentioned earlier, because I buried my leg, I’m one of the few people in this world who can literally say that they’ve got one foot in the grave. I always like to think that I’m one of the lucky ones, to be able to say that.

  Of course losses are positive. Cancer taught me this. But this is something that can be brought across into the noncancerous world. We suffer losses every day: sometimes important ones that upset us; sometimes smaller ones that only worry us. It’s not like losing a leg, but the technique for getting over them is the same as I learned in the hospital.

  If, when you lose something, you convince yourself that you aren’t losing it, then you’ve beaten the loss. Let it go: Mourn for a bit if you need to. The steps are as follows:

  1. Focus on the loss; think about it.

  2. Suffer with it. Call the people connected with the loss, ask their advice.

  3. Cry. (Our eyes are our private and public windshield wipers.)

  4. Look for what you can gain from the loss (take your time).

  5. In a few days you’ll feel better. You’ll see what you’ve gained. But remember that you can lose this feeling as well.

  Does it work? Of course. I never had a phantom limb. A phantom limb i
s when you still feel the leg even when you don’t have it anymore. I think that I don’t have one because, even without knowing, I gave the real leg such a good send-off that even its ghost went away.

  The first discovery of the yellow world: Losses are positive. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

  Sometimes the losses will be small; other times they’ll be big. But if you get used to understanding them, to facing up to them, in the end you’ll realize that they don’t really exist. Every loss is a gain.

  * * *

  * Antonio Machín (1903–77): Cuban singer, most famous for “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”), the first Cuban song to be a hit in the U.S.

  2

  The word pain doesn’t exist

  What if injections don’t actually hurt? What if what happens is that we react to pain like they show us in the movies without noticing if we really feel it? What if pain doesn’t actually exist?

  —David, a real Egghead,

  who gave me 60 percent of his life

  There’s no such thing as pain. This was the phrase that I heard people using most often with the Eggheads while I was in the hospital. The Eggheads was the name that some of the doctors and nurses used for us, on account of our lack of hair. It normally means someone really bright, but I like it when words do their own thing, when mistakes create different sorts of ideas. We liked the name: It made us feel part of a gang, made us feel young, strong, and healthy. Sometimes labels work so well that they make you feel better.…

  In the Eggheads, just like in any gang with any pride, we had a couple of slogans that we liked to shout: “I’ve only got one leg, but I’m not lame.” That made us feel proud of ourselves. The second-most popular: “There’s no such thing as pain.” Because we shouted it so much, threw this statement out to the world, eventually the pain itself went away.

  There is something called the pain threshold, the moment when you start to notice pain; it’s the doorway into pain, the moment when your brain thinks that something is going to make it hurt. The pain threshold is half a centimeter away from actual pain. Yes, it is possible to measure it. I think it must be because I’m an engineer that I use numbers to judge feelings, people, and pain. Sometimes I think that it’s the mixture of engineering and cancer that’s made me like this.

  So little by little, we stopped noticing pain. First of all it was the pain of the chemo injections; it always hurts when they give you an injection. But we found out that the pain came from thinking that it existed. “What if injections don’t actually hurt? What if what happens is that we react to pain like they show us in the movies without noticing if we really feel it? What if pain doesn’t actually exist?”

  All of these ideas came from the cleverest of the Eggheads. He’d had cancer since he was seven, and when he came up with this he was fifteen. For me he was and always will be a mirror in which I see myself. He pulled us together; he talked to us; you could almost say that he taught us; and certainly he could always convince us of anything.

  When I heard him say that pain could disappear if we just refused to believe it existed, I thought this was an incredibly stupid idea, and when he spoke to me about the pain threshold I didn’t understand anything.

  But one day in a chemo session (and they gave me more than eighty-three), I decided to believe what he’d told me. I looked at the needle, I looked at my skin, and I didn’t introduce the third variable. It didn’t form a part of the pain equation. I didn’t think that pain was inevitable. It was just a needle that came close to my skin, went through my skin, and took some blood. It was like being caressed, a strange, different kind of caress. Iron stroking the flesh.

  And mysteriously it happened, just like that: For the first time I didn’t notice any pain. I just felt this strange caress. That day the nurse needed to stick the needle in twelve times to find a vein, because with chemo the veins hide away and get more and more difficult to find. I didn’t complain a single time, because it was magic, almost poetic, to think about this sensation. It wasn’t pain; it was something that didn’t have a name but which didn’t resemble pain at all.

  That was the day when I discovered that pain is a word that has no real value; it’s just like fear. They’re two words that frighten you, that provoke pain and fear. But when the word doesn’t exist, the thing it tries to define doesn’t exist, either.

  I think that what this great Egghead, who gave me 60 percent of his life (the best 60 percent I’ve got), wanted to say was that the word pain doesn’t exist; just that, that it doesn’t exist as a word, as a concept. You have to work out what’s happening to you (like I did with the injection) and not think that it’s the same as feeling pain. You have to test it, taste it, and decide what it is that you’re feeling. I insist that often “pain” will be pleasure, “pain” will be enjoyable, “pain” will be poetic.

  In the seven years afterward that I had cancer I never felt any pain, because the majority of cancer cases (apart from 10 or 12 percent) are not painful. It’s movies that have turned it into something painful. It’s difficult for me to think of a movie in which someone with cancer doesn’t cry from pain, or vomit, or die, or take huge amounts of morphine. They always show the same things: pain and death.

  When I wrote 4th Floor* it was, above all, because I wanted to write a positive movie, a realistic one, one that would deal with the issue properly and show what the lives of people with cancer are really like. How they live through all this “false” pain that the movies show. How they fight and how they die, yes, but how not everything revolves around vomit, pain, and death.

  When I got better I thought that I’d forget this lesson, but actually it was the first one I remembered. There is a lot of pain outside of the hospital and hospital life, pain that isn’t medical, that doesn’t have anything to do with injections or surgical operations. There’s pain that comes from other people, people who inflict pain whether willingly or unwillingly.

  And it was in my cancer-free life that I really felt pain: pain from love, from sadness, from pride, in my work. This was when I remembered that pain doesn’t exist; the word pain doesn’t exist. When I started to go back to thinking about what I really felt when these things happened to me, I realized that sometimes it was nostalgia, sometimes it was defenselessness, sometimes unease, and sometimes loneliness. But it wasn’t pain.

  When I was a boy, when I learned in the hospital that pain doesn’t exist, I felt, at the age of fourteen, like a superhero whose power was never to feel pain.

  I had a friend who said: “It’s like you’re made out of iron; you never notice when something pricks you.” Now that I’m older I realize that I still get pricked all the time: sometimes three or four pricks all at once in different places, sometimes only once, right in the heart. The secret is not to be unfeeling or made of iron, but to allow yourself to be penetrated, to be touched, and then to rename whatever it is you feel.

  The list is easy. The discovery is easy: The word pain doesn’t exist. Step by step …

  1. Think of words whenever you think of pain. Look for five or six that define what you’re feeling, but don’t let any of them be pain.

  2. When you’ve got them, think of the one that best defines whatever you’re feeling; this is your “pain.” This is the word that defines what you’re feeling.

  3. Get rid of the word pain and substitute the new word. Stop feeling “pain” and feel this new definition as strongly as possible. Feel this sentiment.

  It might seem impossible for this to work, but with time you’ll control it and realize that pain doesn’t exist. Physical pain, an aching heart—all of these really conceal other sensations, other feelings. And these can be overcome. When you know what you’re feeling, it’s easier to get over it.

  * * *

  * 4th Floor (Planta 4a, directed by Antonio Mercero, 2003): a comedy-drama about four teenage long-term patients in the cancer wing of a Spanish hospital.

  3

  The energy that appears af
ter thirty minutes is what you need to solve a problem

  Whatever you do, don’t open the envelope with the results of the X-ray.

  —doctor to patient

  Let’s open it right away.

  —patient to family

  when he gets the envelope

  Very often in the hospital we had to get test results. There’s no moment of greater tension than when you’ve got the envelope with the CAT scan or the X-ray results in your hand.

  Over the course of ten years, this situation repeated itself lots of times. They would give you the X-rays and the envelope with the results and tell you again and again that you weren’t to open it, that you should give it to the doctor.

  There was normally about two weeks between getting the results and the doctor’s appointment. Two weeks is a long time to keep an envelope closed when what’s inside it might tell you that there’s been a relapse, that the cancer has returned in some part of your body. (That’s the shortest way to put it: A relapse means you can definitely say you’ve got cancer again.)

  All of my friends in the hospital, all of them, opened their envelopes. Of course they did. How can you think that it would be possible to keep something so important closed for two weeks?

  I’ve recently been giving some feedback to doctors about how they should treat patients and I always tell them that this is the first thing they’ve got to change: It’s such an old-fashioned procedure. The doctors always smile as if they are saying we know you’ll open it. It’s like an unwritten pact: You’ll open it, you’ll read it, you’ll stick the flap back down, and then we’ll pretend we don’t notice. I’ve always been shocked by this sort of pact; I don’t know why everyone knows things and then pretends that they don’t. It doesn’t make any sense.