The Yellow World (14 page)
Authors: Albert Espinosa
When I wrote María Ripoll’s film
Your Life in 65 Minutes
I went maybe even further. The film was about a kid who was
so happy that he didn’t want to continue; he wanted to put a proper ending to things. It wasn’t an apologia for suicide, but a film about life and death. Why can’t you want to die in the same way that lots of people want to live? Why should you always want more if you’ve got everything in life, if you’ve reached the heights of happiness? These were the premises of the film. Sometimes you have to go to extremes in order to make people get centered.
I would like to die on a Friday. I like Fridays; it’s when the new releases come out in the cinema and people are usually happy. I liked Fridays a lot when I was little because my parents would come to school to pick me up, give me a tuna sandwich, and take me to Cardedeu, where we had a summer house. We always got stuck in traffic jams on the way and my father would always put the radio on; this is where I heard the first songs that really excited me. I remember most clearly when I first heard Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” It made me stop eating my tuna sandwich. It seemed so beautiful that I was transfixed while the trumpets and the violins mingled with the clicking of the turn signal.
I’d like to die on Friday because such beautiful things happen on Fridays!
You should start by asking for a date of death: a day, a season, a place. It’s nothing creepy; death isn’t creepy; leaving this world isn’t creepy. In fact, thinking about your death is necessary and should be obligatory. They should teach “life and death” in schools. No black humor—it would be fun, and it’s important for us to have contact with the end of our lives from the time we are children. That great book
Tuesdays with Morrie
tells us that “learning to die helps you learn to live.” I want to go further: Think about your death, think about the details, think about the end, and you’ll be able to think about your life, concrete ideas about what you want to do in this world.
Death is something fundamental in the yellow world. The yellow world is based on knowing what you can lose and what you can win. Life is about that: losing and winning. There’ll be times when you only lose, so remember that there was a time when all you did was win.
To finish this chapter off, here’s a little list about death:
1. Think about death as something positive.
2. Talk with your friends about their deaths or deaths that have affected them. Let the conversation flow; forget about pity and that you are talking about a taboo topic.
3. When someone dies and you go to the funeral, don’t try to avoid talking about it. Forget the phrases “My thoughts are with you,” “I’m sorry for your loss.” Look for the phrases that truly define the death. There is no set phrase for a death, but don’t use a phrase that says nothing. It has to come out of you. It could be a detail from the dead person’s life, maybe what you felt when you heard about the death.
4. Call your friends and family after the death of a loved one. Don’t be afraid. Call after twenty-four hours, ask questions, talk about what they’re feeling, and keep on doing this for as long as you think necessary. It’s bound to be one of the things that have marked them most in
their life. Why do you think they’d be upset talking about something so important?
5. Think about your own death. Think about the day, the season, what the weather should be like, the place, who you’d like to be with. Don’t think about whether you’d like to be buried or cremated. Think about the moment—nothing but the moment—not what happens afterward.
6. Talk with your friends about these details. And explain to them the things you’d like them to do after your death, things filled with life. Not things to do on the anniversary of your death or in the cemetery, but things that celebrate life. There was one Egghead who said that if he died one day and I wrote a book, he’d like the word
grapefruit
to appear somewhere in it. He loved grapefruit, thought it was the best fruit in the world. I said I would put it in. He died a year later. Now when I see the word
grapefruit
written down I feel that he’s alive, he’s fine, and he’s inside me. I can imagine his face, his eyes; I see the grapefruit being eaten. Can someone who makes us feel so much actually be dead?
7. Die. Whenever, whenever it’s your turn. Don’t look for death but don’t be scared of it, either. Cancer made me bump up against death lots of times. Meet it head-on. And forget your fears: fear of losing your friends, fear of losing things, fear of losing who you are. You don’t actually lose anything, nothing at all. Believe me, stand back from the fear, stand back from the terror, and look the word
death
in the face. Visualize it. Nothing else.
It’s over.
I feel good.
I like what I’ve written; I hope you like reading it.
These last words complete the journey of my Egghead memories onto these pages.
Thank you, Eloy, for the great Afterword. I’ve just gotten it and it touched me; it hit me right in the esophagus. You make me happy.
I see how thick the book will be and the color it’ll have. I thought that it could flow and it did flow.
Nothing else, I’ll leave you now. And I hope that you’ll meet me.
And remember: Trust your dreams and they’ll come true.
“Careful, this book is Albert. If you get into it you won’t want to get out.”
Albert has the curiosity of Sherlock Holmes and the looks of Dr. Watson. He’s so scruffy it makes you wonder if he spends time making himself look scruffy before he leaves his house. He’s so weird that it’s even attractive.
One of his favorite activities is looking. Without permission, he enters your head through your eyes and gets all the information he needs. His emotional radar is almost infallible and judges people as easily as those supermarket checkouts that know how much your goods cost simply by reading the bar code. When he’s right he knows more about you than you do yourself.
Albert has won several battles with death, which is why his stories are so full of life. He’s hyperactive, and prefers losing sleep to losing experiences. His mind works so fast
that it makes you dizzy. If you want to tell him something it has to be very good or told very fast.
If you want to catch his interest, don’t tell him about your life; let him find out about it for himself. This is another of his favorite activities.
He loves to provoke people but he does it in order to make provocations normal. He gave me an audition for his film
Don’t Ask Me to Kiss You, Because I Will Kiss You
, where we practiced a sequence in an imaginary swimming pool. I’d just met him. Suddenly he took off his artificial leg. He did this so normally that I touched my leg to see if I could do the same. It was a hysterical action on my part—I was trying to appear normal—but this really knocked me off my stride. He realized this, and with the same normality that he had removed his left leg he started to talk to me about one of the most recurrent themes in his life and his movies: the world of masturbation. We formed an immediate connection. I forgot the audition, forgot about the leg, forgot that he was the director, and found myself next to a guy who was talking about feelings we all share.
He looks thirty, but he’s spent more than fifteen years recovering his adolescence. This is how he can be so fresh and so clean. This is how he can keep on thinking about whatever he can imagine, everything he can do.
Albert is powerful because he never gives up. And as a last resort he bargains: He swapped a leg and a lung for his life. He has learned how to lose in order to win. And he writes: plays, films, TV series, novels … He uses humor to show us human drama. And he connects daily reality with our most distant dreams. And now he wants to tell you that the only
handicaps are emotional, that we live in a society that doesn’t value feelings.
Albert wants to tell us about a world that’s within everyone’s reach, a world the color of the sun: the yellow world. A warm place where kisses can last ten minutes, where strangers can be your greatest helpers, where physical contact loses its sexual overtones, where receiving affection is something as basic as buying bread, where fear has no meaning, where death isn’t just something that happens to other people, where life is the most important thing, where everything is wherever you want it to be.
This book tells us about all of this, everything that we feel and we don’t say, about the fear that they’ll take what we have away from us, about being able to recognize ourselves in our entirety and appreciate who we are every second of the day. Long live Albert!
—Eloy Azorín, actor
A
LBERT
E
SPINOSA
is an industrial engineer, screenwriter, actor, and director. He is the creator of the hit Catalan television series
Polseres vermelles
(known in English as
Red Band Society
) and the author of three novels. He has written screenplays for the internationally acclaimed films
Your Life in 65 Minutes, Nobody’s Perfect
, and
4th Floor
. He debuted as a film director in 2007 with
No me pidas que te bese porque te besaré
, which he also wrote and starred in himself.
