The Yellow World (10 page)

The fourteen-year-old kids make us complicated, various. It’s a difficult period, one in which we make our most important decisions, the decisions that mark our characters. The problem is that sometimes we forget; sometimes we think that we were mistaken and try to build ourselves from the beginning again.

I think it’s good to build yourself up on the basis of what you already are: go back to the foundations, go back to the fourteen-year-old. The basis of what you are is certainly there. The basis of what you want to be. Now that I think about it, this could be another discovery, number twenty-four. But I’ll leave it here.

Just trust in the twenty-three discoveries. Trust in them and they’ll come true. And now let’s go to the yellows.… The time has come!

Do you think it’s right that an engineer should write poetry?

Culture is an ornament; business is business
.

If you stay with that girl you’re not welcome in our house
.

That’s living
.

—Gabriel Celaya

We’ve reached one of the chapters that I think is the most important and that makes me the most excited to write. I’m very keen on talking about the yellows.

You have to know that it’s 1:41
A.M.
on an August night (when I revise the chapter it’s 11:08 on an October morning). I’ve always believed that positioning the moment of writing, the day (it’s early Thursday morning), gives everything a far greater reality. (The revision takes place midmorning on a Tuesday.) It’s a dimension that you don’t normally get when you read a book. When did he write this? Where was he? What was the weather like?

A few months ago I was lucky enough to interview Bruce Broughton, the composer of famous soundtracks for movies like
Young Sherlock Holmes
and
Silverado
. We spoke about the possible variables that can influence the creative process: your partner? The place? The temperature? He thought that above all creativity has to do with the way you receive what you see and how you transform it. Your own speed of transformation.
It was really a great luxury to listen to someone who was so overflowing with creativity, although he acknowledged that his own speed of creation changed depending on whether he was alone or not, how hot it was, and how much he could concentrate.

But let’s not get off the main topic: the yellows. As well as being a chapter of the book, they also give the book its original title. It’s the great treasure that I gained from cancer. You can always learn something that takes you three steps or three miles further than the rest; there will always be an Induráin, a Borg;
^*
there’s always someone or something that stands out. And if you know, as I think you do, that I like lists, there has to be a well-ordered way of explaining why some things stand out.

This will be a long chapter, and because I don’t want to get lost I’ll try not to get sidetracked. Especially since if there’s one thing I want you to take from reading this book, it’s the idea of the yellows.

I hope that within a few months people will be looking for yellows, will use this term to describe them, will adopt it fully. There are words and phrases that appear and become popular, sometimes because of bad things (
tsunami
), sometimes because of good things (
Internet
), sometimes just because of the way fashions change (
metrosexual
). It’s not that I particularly want to invent a new term, but I think it’s necessary to have a word that defines this concept. Concepts
need words to define them, like people need names. There was a man in the hospital who always said: “They give you a name as soon as you’re born; you can’t not have a name!” I always looked at him and smiled—I didn’t understand what he wanted to say. This happened to me a lot in the hospital; I was fifteen or sixteen and the other patients were pushing sixty or seventy. They spoke to me as if I were an adult, they gave me adult advice, they looked at me like an adult. And I wrote down everything I didn’t understand but that I felt I might understand years later.

I love it when the brain decides to take in a concept, a language, a feeling. I think that the brain’s on a time lock; you have to push lots of buttons and enter lots of different codes for it to open and accept what it at first rejected. All you need to do is find the password. The same way I hope to find what the yellows explain.

I met lots of yellows in the hospital, although I didn’t know what they were back then. I thought that they were friends, twin souls, people who helped me, guardian angels. I didn’t understand how a stranger who had played no part in your life until two minutes ago could suddenly become a part of you, understand you more than anyone else on this earth, and help you to feel completely identified with and understood. What I’ve just written could, plausibly, serve as an initial definition of a yellow.

This usually happened with my roommates. They quickly became my yellows. I don’t know how long I spent talking with my roommates at ridiculous hours of the night. They were like detachable brothers. That’s just it. I even called them that back then: hospital brothers, brothers with an expiration
date. The intensity of our relationships was the sort that exists between brothers, and our friendships were very close.

But as the years went by I realized that the words
brother, friend, close acquaintance
weren’t enough.

I remember a day in the hospital when two or three of us Eggheads were talking about our roommates. Someone defined them as angels; someone else said they were friends. Another guy and I said: “They’re yellows.” It came out at the same time. I don’t know why we said yellows, but we felt strongly that this was the word that defined them. I’m a firm believer in chance and luck, and I think that chance is much stronger than luck. And I don’t know if it was luck or chance, but I think that the only word that can truly define this concept is
yellow
.

I’ve never understood why the concept of friendship hasn’t evolved. Sometimes I read books about the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, or about the beginning of this century, and they always talk about friendship in the same way: A friend is always a friend. Friends are friends and the relationship between friends is fairly similar at all times. On the other hand, the concepts of the couple or of the family have changed. The way in which we relate to a partner or a close family member nowadays has nothing to do with the way in which we related to them in the Middle Ages: Roles, customs, everything has evolved.

I think that this is one of the bad things about our society. The concept of friendship, the role of the friend: These need to change for the technological age we live in. I think that it’s impossible to maintain contact now with friends in the same
way you could in past decades. Everybody loses friends every year, and the excuses are very varied: We live in different countries; I got a new job; I don’t have time to meet up; we only message each other from time to time; we were only friends in school or college.

Losing a friend is always connected with stopping seeing them. Friends are defined above all as people one sees, people you see a lot of in your life. Can you be friends with someone you never see, someone you never meet up with? In theory it’s impossible. In theory.

For example, I always met my Egghead friends only in the hospital: It was a golden rule. We helped each other, we looked after each other, but when we left the hospital we had a pact not to see each other again. It’s not that we forgot each other—quite the opposite, we kept each other inside ourselves—but we didn’t need to keep on seeing each other. There were other things that tied us together.

It took me a long time to realize it, but these were the foundations of the yellows. One fine day I saw it clearly. There are friends who give you friendship; there are love affairs that give you passion, sex, or love; and, finally, there are yellows.

Perhaps you’ll ask me if what I’m trying to say is that the yellows are substitutes for friends. The answer is no. Friends, traditional friends, still exist; we all have them. But there’s a new rung on the ladder, a new concept: the yellows.

Everybody has yellows, but the problem is that until now there hasn’t been a word to define them. I’m sure that yellows have always existed, but have just been lumped in with friends. Or sometimes a yellow turned into a lover. A yellow
is in between a lover and a friend, and that’s why things so often get confused.

Before I carry on, I’ll give a definition of yellows. A definition of what I’ve explained up till now.

According to this definition, how is it possible to distinguish between a friend and a yellow? Is there any way of knowing who is a friend and who is a yellow? In fact there is. You need a bit of practice and you need to know yourself quite well. Yellows are a reflection of you; they have some of the things you lack, and knowing them causes a qualitative leap forward in your life.

I’m going to tell you a little more about the yellows. Imagine that you are in an airport, in an airport in a foreign city. There’s a delay, two or three hours. You’re alone in this city and suddenly you start speaking to someone (a boy or a girl). To begin with it might just seem like a trivial conversation, but little by little you notice there’s something between you; I’m not talking about love or sex, I’m talking about the feeling that you’ve met someone (a stranger) to whom you can tell the most intimate things and who understands you and advises you in a different and special way.

The plane’s got to take off, so you’ve got to separate (in the best-case scenario you’ll swap email addresses or cellphone numbers) and stop seeing each other. Maybe you’ll
write; maybe you’ll send a message; maybe you’ll never see each other again.

Traditionally, you couldn’t consider such a person a friend—developing a friendship takes time, years. But maybe this person has given you more than a friend of six or seven years has; you’ve exchanged confidences and intense emotions. Also, one of the characteristics of a friendship is that seeing each other, regularly or at least assiduously, is important. And here you are meeting a stranger who affects you and makes you feel better, though you’ll probably never see him again.

Normally such a situation causes sadness, a feeling of loss rather than gain, a feeling that you’ve found something and know that you have lost it. But really what you’ve done is gain a yellow. One of the twenty-three yellows you will have in your life.

So, what? A yellow is a stranger who understands me? Not exactly. A yellow can be someone you know, a yellow can be a friend who one day steps up the ladder to the level of yellow. It doesn’t have to be a stranger. All it has to be is someone special who makes you feel special.

The most important thing is that a yellow doesn’t need telephone calls, doesn’t need to be looked after for years, doesn’t need to be seen often (just once is enough for someone to become a yellow). So maybe there are lots of those people you don’t see very often, who you don’t think are your friends anymore because you don’t have time to see them; maybe lots of them are your yellows.

Yellow
is the word to define people who change your life
(a lot or a little) and whom you may or may not ever see again. It’s like a new category among those who used to be called “best friends.”

Most of all, there’s nothing random about yellows. What I mean is that in this hypothetical airport it’s perfectly possible to recognize a yellow (there are ways of recognizing them) and strike up a conversation to see if you’re right, if your radar’s working properly. Yellows sense each other, realize that you could be one. A relationship with a yellow doesn’t begin by accident.

Haven’t you ever noticed when you walk down the street that someone catches your attention? It’s not necessarily a question of sexual attraction or beauty, but this person makes you feel you have to talk to him or her, to say something. It’s a feeling, not love, and you suppose it can’t be friendship, because friendship needs time or a job or a hobby in common. What you feel comes from seeing a yellow, being lucky enough to meet one of the yellows in your world.

What I’d like to happen is that when this book is published, someone comes up to me (or comes up to you) and says: “Would you like to be my yellow?” It would be great to be able to be like that with people. And because one of the characteristics of a yellow (although this isn’t absolutely obligatory) is to be a complete stranger, it would be perfect.

But let’s not get too happy. You still need to know how to find yellows, how to notice them. And know the ways (but not the rules) you need to get along with them.

Everybody knows how to get along with friends, with a partner or with a lover (although there are a thousand and one possible ways, of course). I’m going to talk about my
way of dealing with yellows. In other words, what I’m going to give you is the theory, the organization, and the list, and, using that as a base, everyone can find the most appropriate way of dealing with their yellows.