The Yellow World (12 page)

Everybody has to be capable of looking for yellows when they need them, but not in the sense that they need to rush out into the street looking like crazy for yellows. Yellows will appear; you’ll run into them when you need them.

But everyone has only twenty-three yellows. I know twenty-three seems like a small number, but it’s the right number. I’ve always believed in the power of twenty-three; it’s the magic number. Blood takes twenty-three seconds to travel around the human body; the spinal column has twenty-three discs; they stabbed Julius Caesar twenty-three times. Sex is described in chromosome twenty-three, and each man and woman gives twenty-three chromosomes to their child.

In fact, twenty-three’s amazing. But it’s not just these facts that make me think that twenty-three is something basic in life, it’s because I’ve got a personal relationship with the number: I lost my leg on April 23. And I started to think that it was true what a lot of people said, that twenty-three is connected with lots of people’s lives, and that if you are looking for an exact number for anything in this world it’s bound to be twenty-three. It’s a number loved by nature.

So I believe in this number, in its positive potential. I’m completely convinced that twenty-three is a magical number, a lucky number. Curiously, there are also twenty-three discoveries in this book.

So let’s carry on with this premise that you have only
twenty-three yellows in this world. How do you find them? Should you look for them very slowly so that they last you your whole life?

The answer for how to look for them depends on you as an individual. You should look for them when you need them. How you find them depends on what I call marks.

Marks, or traces, are the way you recognize a yellow. Here’s an example: I’ve got a great friend who lives in Colombia, in Cali. I’ve never been to Colombia; he’s never been to Barcelona. But six years ago we met each other on a chat site for cripples; he was missing a leg and so was I. I think that someone wanted us to meet each other, marked us, and set us down in two places on the earth. The way that we got to know each other was this mark, which was like a coincidence, a chance, a signal that we had to meet. When I say “someone” I don’t mean God or any kind of being; I mean nature, the natural order of things.

It’s the same with the yellows: Someone has marked twenty-three yellows for you to meet them. So you have to make the effort to find what your marks are, because they’re not the same for everyone.

I could leave it here, like one of those secrets that you don’t tell anyone. M. Night Shyamalan, the director of
The Sixth Sense
, was speaking in Barcelona a while back, and he said that he was going to tell us a secret, something that no one knew and that he was going to trust to us. We all drew closer, listened to him with our full attention. He wanted to tell us the secret of his success, how he made
The Sixth Sense
, and why, after two failures, he’d known that his third film would be a success.

The whole auditorium was on edge; we wanted to hear the secret. And he said: “I decided to watch films by directors who have only ever had one hit in their lives. I saw a lot of these films and found eight common denominators, which I used to make
The Sixth Sense.”

That was it. I’m not lying. It was a secret that left you wondering, and I can’t think of anything worse than that. Everyone felt cheated; when someone tells you a secret it shouldn’t leave you in the dark. But maybe that’s what M. Night Shyamalan wanted. I started watching the films he recommended and came to my own eight conclusions, but I don’t know if they were his or not. But actually, as time went by, I realized I’m glad he didn’t tell us what they were, because we’d only have copied him and repeated him. Everyone has to find their own common denominators, come to their own conclusions.

So I’ll tell you the way to find your marks, but then it has to be you who makes finding them a reality. So that it’s something tangible.

Everything to do with finding yellows has to do with beauty. I’ve always believed that beauty is something senseless, chaotic. What one person finds beautiful another person will think is horrible. Beauty is relative. Why are people attracted by a particular head shape, body type, way of speaking, way of looking, way of not looking? I’ve never understood it. It’s something that fascinates me. You can be in a room with five thousand other people and you can say which are the beautiful ones, which ones are beautiful according to your criteria. But this beauty has different aspects: poetical beauty, sexual beauty, yellow beauty.

Beauty is something the yellow mark hides behind. Hasn’t it ever happened that you see a figure in a crowd and you just can’t take your eyes off them? It’s got nothing to do with sex, you don’t want to sleep with this person; it’s just that they fill a gap in your world. You think that they understand you, that you could be friends, that there’s a common energy between you. Then the person disappears and you forget about them. They won’t stay long in your memory; it’s as if their departure caused no sadness, it was something that had to be accepted. This is part of the yellow world; yellows leave and don’t make you sad. And this happens even if you don’t know them.

The most important thing is to be able to distinguish between things, to take from beauty all the signs that have something to do with the yellows.

How to do it? I’ll tell you my method, the one I use to find the marks of my yellows. Although they won’t all work for you, each day more of them will be successful. You’ll note them down, corroborate them, and, above all, apply them to the yellows you already have. This helps prove that they are marks.

In list form, the method is as follows:

I know that it’s a difficult task, and that now you’re starting to have doubts. Are these the signs of yellow beauty, or the beauties of sex and love?

The best way to find out is to collect photos that catch your attention: photos of people in newspapers and magazines, pictures from the Internet. Languages with accents that attract you. Smells that you can’t get out of your head and that seem beautiful to you. Images that have stuck in your memory.

In your mind you have to run through everything that seems beautiful. Don’t think only about people but also places, periods of your life, feelings, and sensations. You’ll have to do a lot of searching.

But it’s just what M. Night Shyamalan said: To understand the secret you need to work a lot. But it’s worth it. You have to work, but the yellow world is worth it.

I know that maybe some ideas aren’t clear to you. So in the next chapter I’ll give you a yellow Q&A, which I hope will help to sort out whatever’s going around in your head.

I like computers. For some reason, I get along well with them. I like knowing that when things don’t work you can turn the computer off and on again; it’s a magical solution.

I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we could do the same with people, so when you didn’t understand someone or when someone behaved strangely you could reboot them, turn them off and on again.

This is the first thing that I’d bring to our world; the next would be the “undo” button that you get on computers. It’s amazing. If you make a mistake and click on undo, a little arrow rotates, then you get back the last thing you’ve done.

I don’t know how many times a day I click undo. I’m sure it must be an average of one or two hundred times a day. We never think we’ve made the right decision.

And what if we could undo things in our lives? I’m sure that loads of people would go back to when they were twenty and avoid doing something, or when they were fifteen and
not do another, or when they were eight.… Maybe even go back to when they were born, and not be born.

The third thing I like about computers is the “help” tab that programs have. There must be things that confuse a lot of people, and the programmers, who know this, include the answers in the program itself. I like it when I find my problem in the help database, because I know then that it’s going to be solved. But, do you know what? I also like it when my problem isn’t in the database, because it shows that I’m not as predictable as they think I am. I like that my problems are strange, surprising, and, most of all, new. It makes me feel alive.

So don’t worry if your problem isn’t in the yellow Q&A. It means you’re alive, really alive. And I’m sure you’ll find the answer somewhere.

Of course they can. Our brothers and sisters are the first possible yellows, prime candidates for yellowhood. You’ve slept with them if you shared a room when you were little. They hug you and stroke you. They are, or can be, yellows.

Fathers and mothers can also be yellows, but it’s less likely. But I am sure that cases exist.

You have to remember that anyone can be a yellow.

In life everything can change. I call it getting paler or getting brighter. Sometimes they become a paler yellow and turn into friends. Sometimes they go a bit orangey and become lovers, people you love.

You and your yellow need to decide what it is you want to be. What is sure is that there’s no way back. When the yellow becomes brighter or paler, there’s no way back to being yellow.

So think it through first.

Well, it takes two to yellow. I mean that someone can be your yellow only if you are their yellow. It’s not possible for someone to be your yellow and for you to mean nothing to them; it’s a two-way relationship.

I said that this wouldn’t be easy. It might also happen that someone doesn’t want to be your yellow (because they don’t believe in yellows or don’t think of you as a yellow); in that case you have to let them go, forget about them. Maybe it wasn’t the right moment to have that yellow.

In life you have to know how to say no and accept it when other people say no. Other opportunities will arise. Anyway,
who knows? Maybe you made a mistake and they weren’t a yellow.

I haven’t wanted to discuss this topic beforehand because I think that everyone should talk about whatever they want with their yellows. It doesn’t have to be deep things; they can be banal conversations that make you feel good.

The purpose of finding a yellow isn’t to have complicated conversations that will change the world, or your world, but for these people to give some sort of meaning to your world. They calm your inner struggle; they give you peace.