The Yellow World

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:

—Gabriel Celaya

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 struggle, 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.