The Yellow World (8 page)

This discovery, which seems so complicated, came from a nurse. There was a guy who managed not to vomit when he had chemotherapy, and from that day on he got annoyed when there were other people around him who were vomiting. He didn’t try to understand and get to know other people; he’d attained his objective and as far as he was concerned the rest of humanity was just trailing in his wake. The nurse told him that some people vomit and others don’t vomit. And that’s where it all started.

She managed to get the guy who didn’t vomit to tell us some of his tricks; one of them was to drink Coca-Cola, which he claimed was a great antivomitory measure.

It was amazing to see him give advice. Sometimes it’s not so important to follow a path as to leave the path we’ve been following, choose another one, and realize that there’s more than one way to get where we’re going. Don’t judge; try not to be absolute. Every path can be good; it just has to be clearly the product of a particular decision.

On the fourth floor of the hospital where I was always sent as an inpatient, we dreamed of things we didn’t have.

A long time after that I’ve given talks in hospitals, and lots of patients have said the same thing: There isn’t enough stuff in the hospital, there’s no fun.

We used to say in the hospital that we weren’t going to die of cancer but rather of boredom. It’s because everyone thinks that when you’re in a hospital your life has to stand still, that you shouldn’t have any fun. And the truth is completely the opposite. Your normal life stands still and so you need many more activities to fight against all this not living.

I remember when people were saying that the late-night talk show
The Martian Chronicles
was trash. I think that all
those critics must never have been in a hospital where they were showing it. Thousands of sick people laughed with that program, enjoyed it. It gave them strength; it gave them life. It made them participants in a world that had stepped away from them for a moment.

It’s always seemed to me that not much imagination goes into designing hospitals. When I started treatment, the chemotherapy rooms didn’t have any sort of entertainment at all. Later there was a little television set looking over the room, but you had to be eagle-eyed to see it.

But where were the chessboards, the board games, the cards, the fifty-inch plasma TVs, the consoles, the Wi-Fi connection? Yes, yes, no joke, there should be all these things in a hospital. Connecting people to the world is vital in helping them fight illness properly.

Sometimes people don’t realize how much life force patients have. I’ve always recommended that patients should give talks themselves. They’ve had experiences that would leave you astounded. In the hospital, I’m sure that if there was a talk given by someone from outside, then you’d go, so just imagine that it’s a proper talk, but it’s your roommate in his blue pajamas right next to you giving it.

When you’re sick your second life appears. A life that you can’t stop living, because however ill you are you’ve got to carry on being alive. I’ve had my life outside and my life inside. Now I’m living my life outside, but maybe my life inside will start again someday. Both lives have aspects in common but are very different in other ways. To carry on living is the important thing. Childhood, adolescence, adulthood: They all have to be lived through, even if you are ill.

But you need the track to be able to run, you need the stage to be able to act. Sometimes hospitals lack contrast, and the most important thing about life is putting contrasting things together. I’ve always thought that when you put two opposing things together, something magical happens. This is why lots of relationships are founded on the complete lack of common ground between the two members of the couple.

We should put more contrasting things together. These are a few that I hope will soon happen. The list’s not in any order; it’s a list that comes from years spent in a hospital and years spent outside one:

There are phrases in the hospital that you hear until you’re fed up with them; they end up forming part of you. It’s as if they were suddenly in fashion. It’s like when there’s a phrase that gets famous on a TV program and then people don’t stop repeating it. In the hospital world it’s the same sort of thing; this is one of those phrases.

“Don’t move. Breathe, don’t breathe” is what you hear most often when they give you an X-ray or a CAT scan. They above all need you not to move; you have to stay very still so that everything shows up in the right place. This period of immobility lasts between fifteen minutes and an hour and fifteen minutes. You have to be very patient to get much out
of these moments; you have to take them as moments of inner peace.

Of course, to enjoy having cancer you have to enjoy dead time, which is the basis for everything when you’ve got this illness. It’s the hardest thing: to not do anything, to stay still even though inside you really want to walk away, to fly, to play, to work.

This is what you have to control, and this is also what it’s most difficult to accept. You’re alone in the room, because no one else wants to irradiate themselves. What about me? Do I want to irradiate myself? I always asked myself that when the others left the room.

But it’s not just about being still, it’s also about keeping quiet.

And as if that weren’t enough, you have to control not only your silence but also your breathing. Lots of silence, lots of stillness, and lots of controlled breathing.

Without knowing it, every time they gave me an X-ray I came into contact with my inner self. It was like looking for something and finding it: self-examination, a strange yoga that made me feel better. I came out of the X-ray room improved.

And so, after I was cured, I carried on using this method. Every month I try to make an appointment to give myself an X-ray. I don’t actually have an X-ray machine at home, but they’re not necessary for you to examine yourself from the inside.

It might seem like meditation, but really it’s just being still. Everything in this world would be a great deal better if we just stayed still for a while, stayed very still. Twenty-minute hibernations.

I’ve been lucky enough to have great roommates. In another chapter I’ll speak about some of them. They’re like brothers you have for hours, or days or months. They really are like brothers, potential “yellows.”

I love the feeling of coming into a room dressed in your street clothes, finding someone unknown (wearing pajamas and with his closest family members around his bed), and knowing that in a few days you’ll be intimate friends.

Every time you get to a hospital they give you the bed closest to the window. It’s like an unwritten rule, but they know that you’ll need to go to the window and look at the world you’re leaving behind for a bit. Another unwritten rule is that the patient doesn’t have to get into pajamas on the
first day. The new arrival has twenty-four hours to acclimatize.

It’s a struggle to take off your day clothes and go to bed at noon when you feel well. Normally, after putting on the hospital pajamas, it takes you almost another twenty-four hours to get into bed.

These first forty-eight hours are when your roommate starts helping you. Sometimes with words, sometimes only with gestures. Sometimes, simply and straightforwardly, by explaining what he’s got, what he felt when he arrived, and what he’s been feeling in the hospital. Experience is the basis of communication; to see yourself reflected in someone else means you’re halfway to winning the battle.

My best roommate was called Antonio and he was from Mataró. He had a huge hole in the sole of one foot, almost big enough to hide a Ping-Pong ball. But he was all energy, all nerves. He had more energy than almost everyone I’ve met since.

He was nineteen and I was fourteen. He made me laugh a lot. He let me spend almost four days without getting into pajamas and protected me from the doctors and the nurses; he said he liked seeing me dressed, that it made him feel as if he had a visitor.

He had a little piano that he used to play songs, and little by little, using music, he started to help me. He would play and I would sing. We wrote great songs. Our most successful one was “Give Me a Weekend Off” and our next-biggest hit was “Write Me a Ticket for the Sun.”

He was an amazing person who, without knowing it, was
fading a little every day. Every day there were fewer doctors who came to visit him and more people who came from outside. This is the clearest sign that you’re dying: when friends start to visit you at all times and the doctors ration their visits because they haven’t got much to tell you.

He spoke to me about women and love. It was his favorite topic: how to find the perfect woman, how to find the love of your life. When he had only two days left he was still looking for it, still philosophizing about it. I think it was love that made him so special; the search was reflected on his face.

He died. I didn’t see him die. We never saw them die: They almost always went home to die. We knew that when they left they would die, but we said goodbye to them when they were still alive; that was always very good.

He left me his piano; he said that one day it would be worth millions. I still have it; I still play it. There’s no doubt he also left me some of his energy. I didn’t share it with him, I asked for it all; I asked for it and he gave it to me. It’s inside me still and I’m sure that it’s 90 percent of all the passion I have.

I had twenty roommates. Nineteen were great; one was horrible. (He snored, he didn’t talk much, and when he did he was dull; he just kept on repeating: “I am a human being.”) The other nineteen have influenced me. It’s a positive statistic.

I’m still looking for roommates. I think it’s what I look for most of all. You can find roommates in real life; you just need to know that you won’t find them in a hospital but somewhere else: in an elevator, at work, in a shop.

Because yellows (and we will talk about them in detail at the proper time) are the foundations of the world.

The important thing to do is to look for them, to look for these roommates.

But this is just a start. If you find roommates outside the hospital, then you can find everyone else: the orderlies, the doctors, the nurses, the yellows.

I don’t mean to say that you need to find doctors outside the hospital and make friends with them; I mean that there are people who can have the same effect on you as the doctor has on your body and your illness.