The Yellow World (3 page)

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:

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:

Does it work? Of course. I never had a phantom limb. A phantom limb is 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.

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 …

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.

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.

Anyway, the important thing is not the envelope but what’s in the envelope. The problem is how to face an important piece of news, one that could change your life. We learned how to do it in the hospital; we learned by making mistakes, which is how you learn almost anything in this life.

To begin with, we would open the envelope frantically, right there in the hospital, two minutes after it was handed over. I remember a few images from the hospital corridor: my father, my mother, and me leaning over the sheet of paper, reading (maybe better to say devouring) what was written on it.

A little bit later we realized that it wasn’t a good idea to open it in the hospital: You shouldn’t give or get bad news in a place where you have spent or are going to spend a lot of time. You have to find somewhere neutral. So we would open the envelope in restaurants (ones that we were going to for the first time), in unknown streets (whose names we later forgot), or in the metro. But we were still making a mistake: We never let more than fifteen minutes pass from getting the envelope to opening it. Without realizing, we looked for nearby restaurants, streets, or metro stations. We had an urgent need to know what was in the envelope, as if something were burning us from the inside.