The Yellow World (11 page)

Where did I get this list of how to be with yellows? Once again, from my time in the hospital. Like I said before, in the hospital you’re likely to find quite a few potential yellows: Living through such an extreme situation and spending so much time together over such a short period makes it more likely for a yellow to appear.

I think that my list derives from experience, from things that we do without knowing that we do them. It’s amazing, the number of things we do without knowing that we do them. A friend of mine, Eder, wrote a story where he talked about “the three seconds that we manage to look at the sun.” It’s true; although it is probable that nobody has ever told you that you can’t look at the sun for more than three seconds, you somehow know that you can’t and so you don’t do it. It’s strange, the sun is always above us, looking at us, heating us, and we can’t bear to gaze at it for any length of time. The sun is the greatest yellow. We feel it, we notice it, we know that it’s there, but we shouldn’t look at it all that much.

Something similar happened in the hospital. I remember that whenever I left after being there for a long time I would say goodbye to all the people and not feel sad. I knew that they would stay there because that’s where they were meant to be at that moment, and that I was going home because that’s where I was meant to be. Sometimes it happened the other way around: They’d go and I would stay. I didn’t feel like I was abandoning them or that I was losing them. I just
felt that these roommates or these Eggheads had looked after me, listened to me, supported me, and had helped me grow. And more than anything else, that they had embraced me.

And this is how we reach another of the characteristics of the yellows, perhaps the one that most distinguishes them from friends: feeling, touching, stroking. I’ve never understood why we touch our friends so little—proof of the lack of evolution that there has been in friendship. Someone can be your friend and maybe never manage to come closer to you than six inches, or never give you a big hug, or never see you asleep or watch you wake up. To see how someone wakes up, how anyone wakes up, creates a sensation of closeness, of seeing someone being born, seeing them return to life; it’s like a thousand, a hundred thousand conversations.

All the Eggheads, when we were in the hospital, sleeping next to one another, saw each other wake up a lot. They saw me wake up; I saw them wake up. Nobody should have to wait for a trip or an illness to see how someone sleeps and wakes up. It’s something you can look for. The important thing to remember is that yellows are not just friends; friendship has very little feeling in it, very little touching, very little stroking.

I think that in friendship talking is overrated and touching is underrated; the physical distance that separates two friends isn’t thought about enough.

I’ve always thought that it’s unfair that your partner should get 95 percent of all your physical contact. Nobody would put 95 percent of their money in a single bank, but you put 95 percent of your caresses, of your hugs, into a single
person. This is where mistakes are born. This is why there are so many infidelities. This is why people feel so alone; this is why you notice a lack of physical contact, of affection, of caresses.

Now that we’ve got to this point the question has to be asked: Can you have sex with a yellow? And another question is also going through your head: If we’re talking about yellows, do we mean men or women?

Maybe these questions are only occurring to you now, or maybe they’ve been there from the first moment that I started to talk about this concept. Be that as it may, I have to make it clear that my reply is conditioned by what I think, by the way in which I have found and cultivated my yellows.

Yellows are defined by affection, stroking, and hugging. When I talk about sleeping together and waking up together, I’m talking about loss (sleep) and waking up (rebirth); I’m not talking about sex. It isn’t convenient to have sex with a yellow. Of course you could, but I think that the important thing about a yellow, about the concept of yellowness, about the essence of yellowhood, is that yellows occupy space that had previously been taken up by friendship. They get 40 percent physical contact, whereas beforehand friends got only maybe 3 percent.

Now that we’re here, I think it might be a good idea to redefine yellows.

I will try to make a list of things that can be done with a yellow. The list, like everything in this book, needn’t be obeyed, still less followed slavishly. Of course, each person has to decide what works and does not work for him. It’s not a philosophy, it’s not a religion; it’s just lessons from cancer applied to life, and that’s how it should be understood. So there’s not really any room for debate. I know that someone’s going to say: “You can sleep with a yellow.” Someone else will think: “Yellows are your life partners.” Another person would say: “All this nonsense about yellows doesn’t make any sense. I’ve always had friends that I’ve done all this stuff with that you say you’ve got to do with your yellows.” My response to all this: “That’s fine, great.” Everyone has their own friends and their own way of dealing with them. Like one of the hospital psychologists said: “Luck means being just the way you are. The shame of it is that you can’t understand what other people are like.”

Let’s carry on, but first I need to answer the question about whether yellows are male or female. You can have girl yellows and boy yellows; what matters is the concept of yellowness, something that encompasses both sexes.

Back to the question of what you can or can’t do with a yellow, which I’m sure you want to know. Here’s a four-point list. We’ll add more as we go on.

I should make it clear that they’re not in any order, nor do you have to do all these things with a yellow. The important thing about yellows is having the feeling of having met a fellow
soul, a person who marks you (an evolution in friendship).

After you’ve convinced yourself that someone can be a yellow, you can try these things with them:

In this, yellows aren’t much different from other kinds of relationships. Perhaps there’s a slight difference if you’re speaking to someone you don’t know and what made you start speaking was the suspicion that this person was a yellow.

With yellows you feel that you can tell them hidden secrets, you can open yourself up. You can call them at any hour of the day or night. You feel that sometimes you don’t need to maintain contact; you can spend months and months without saying anything and when you see them again everything is just as it always has been.

Words are overrated; it’s not their quantity but their intensity that matters. There are yellows who are good for two conversations and yellows who are good for fifty.

This world would work better if there were more hugging and stroking. In the hospital we supported each other, we hugged each other. (The first thing you lose when you get ill is the hugs; people swap them for pats on the back. Sometimes
we thought that we wouldn’t die of cancer but of being patted so much on the back.)

A yellow hug lasts about two minutes. You feel the other person’s breathing. It’s important to feel their breathing.

As far as the stroking is concerned: Where to stroke? Wherever you want. On the hand, on the face, on the arm, on the ear, on the leg. Wherever you think you should stroke. I think it’s one of the great mistakes we make, not to stroke each other more often, to feel the warmth of a hand, the temperature and touch of a hand on you.

I remember in the hospital we used to stroke each other. It was something natural, normal. It was simply and purely affection; there was no other connotation attached to it.

I think that in this particular aspect of things, yellows take on a role that has always been that of the partner. But there’s no point being scared or jealous or even in thinking that you’ll be misunderstood; all you have to do is change the way you think about things. Like I said before, the brain needs the right combination to let new ideas come in. You have to understand something before you judge it.

Stroking and hugging are two things that friendship doesn’t include, although it’s the natural next step for friends. Yellows have taken this step and enjoy its results.

Half of a yellow life is watching someone wake up. You don’t have to be in the same bed, you could be in two beds, but you have to get into an environment where yellows can sleep and
wake up with each other after seven or eight hours. How many people have you slept with in your life without having sex with them? Was it on a journey? Ask yourself these questions. I’m sure there won’t be that many. And if you narrow it down to the people you’ve shared a bed with, I’m sure it’ll be even fewer. This is another error that society makes: thinking that sleeping and waking are something functional, when they’re actually something as important as lunch or tea.

Everyone eats with their friends. Want to have lunch? Want to come around for tea? It’s something friends do. That and going on trips together. But, shall we sleep together? Hey, why not wake up together? It’s not normal, but it’s absolutely necessary. I’d say more: It’s vital.

People think that sleeping is something so personal that it needs to be solitary or else shared via sex, but that’s another area where the yellows win.

You should know that a yellow doesn’t need as much time as a friend; you don’t need to keep a yellow all your life. A yellow can be for a few hours, a few days, weeks, or years. All the time you need.

But you don’t have to cultivate your yellows; you don’t owe them anything, you don’t need to do things for them. They have an expiration date, and they should have one. You don’t even need to send a yellow an email or a text or give them a ring in order to keep something alive.

They were with you; they helped you at a particular moment or you helped them at a particular moment. Then they carried on with their journey and became yellows for other people.

Not feeling obliged to do anything is fundamental for the yellow world. Obligations, expectations: These ruin everything.

Are there yellows that last a whole lifetime? Of course there are. I have a yellow whom I’ve known since I was nineteen; we’ve spent fourteen yellow years together. He’s my oldest yellow and I think we’ve got a few years left.

Are there yellows that only last a few hours? Yes, there are those as well. They’re the ones you meet at the outpatients’ clinic in a hospital, in a café, in an airport, in the street, in a swimming pool. Yellows who last hours. While I was in the hospital I managed to do all of the four things I’ve just listed with a lot of the people there: I had lots of roommates I slept and woke up with, whom I hugged (when we needed it), whom I spoke to about everything (death, loss, movies), and whom I lost but didn’t feel sad about losing. Because what I learned from the yellows, what they said to me, continues somewhere inside me.

But lots of these people weren’t yellows. I think that while I was in the hospital I got to know only seven yellows. The rest were friends.

I know that you’re going to ask me how to tell the difference and, above all, how to find them. How do you go looking for them? How can you know who’s a yellow and who’s a friend? Well, like everything in this life, it depends a lot on each individual’s sensibilities, but in the next chapter I’ll give
a few hints about how to answer these questions and many more.

Often, for me as a writer and for you as a reader as well, I suppose, we need a chapter to end. Sometimes it’s so that we can go to sleep (some of you will be in bed already); sometimes it’s so that we can leave the side of a pool, or a beach, or a hammock, or a chair, or a sofa. I hope and wish that this sofa, chair, or hammock is your favorite place to read.

Stephen King said you need to find the best place in your house to write a novel because you’ll want the reader to be in the best place in his house to read it. This is how total communication is created. I can assure you that I’m in my favorite chair, writing on a screen that I’ve chosen for this particular occasion, and feeling very happy to be telling you all of this.

Of course, I also need this chapter to end. Writers need to finish a chapter so that they can think, reflect on what they’ve just written, and have a break. Just as you are about to go to sleep, or to the pool or the beach, or to go and buy bread or to meet someone who could, with luck, turn out to be a yellow.

How indeed? This is one of the big questions. How do you know if someone is your yellow? How do you identify them, how do you know what they are?

There’s no single way; there are loads. I’m going to explain to you the theory that’s the basis of the yellow world, because lots of times you need to show something and then explain where it comes from. I’ve already spoken a bit about the yellows, a parenthesis between “Beginning” and “Dying,” but in this section on “Living” I’ve decided that everything’s going to have to do with the yellows.

I think that there are yellows in the world so that you can find out what it is that you lack, in order to open you up and help other people open up. I’m sure that I managed to get better when I was in the hospital thanks to the seven yellows I met there. Yellows give you strength to keep fighting.

As you can see, I’m not talking about spiritual peace and harmony; I’m talking about strength to fight. There’s nothing religious or cultish about yellows. Get rid of any ideas
you might have in connection with those things. Yellows help us in good times or difficult times, but they are individuals. Our yellows don’t form part of any collective; there’s not a new yellow religion, no yellow cult, not even a worldwide yellow club.