The Yellow World (5 page)

My medical record is endless; it grew fatter day by day, month by month, year by year. The last time I went to the hospital they brought it on a cart; it was so big that they couldn’t carry it.

I like the color of the file they used for the record, mostly because it’s the same shade as it was on the first day. There are few things in our lives that stay the same. It’s still a neutral gray color. I don’t think gray is ugly; it’s just got a bad reputation: gray days, gray suits … It’s a much underappreciated color, beaten only by black. But I think it’s the perfect
color for a medical record because, as I see it, a record has to be distinguished, and gray is a very distinguished color.

There are letters from more than twenty doctors in my file:

The list goes on. I remember when I was a kid I went to get soccer players’ autographs; this is the same but with doctors, and with the added difference that instead of a single illegible scrawl there are hundreds.

The last day that I saw my file was in the oncologist’s office. He wrote, “The patient is cured.” Underneath it, I remember perfectly, he drew a horizontal line. The line impressed me greatly. He closed the file, put it back on the cart, and the orderly took it away. That was the last time I saw it.

I thought I wouldn’t miss the file. But when I returned to normal life, I thought it would be a good idea to have one: not a medical history but a life history.

I bought a file (gray, of course) and thought about what to
put into it. I was sure that I would write a diary: Diaries are living objects and extremely recommendable. How good it is to be able to read the things that worried you two or three years ago and to realize that now you couldn’t care less about them (sometimes because they’re goals that you’ve attained, sometimes because they’re things you didn’t really want anyway).

But diaries are only a part of a life history; they’re not enough in themselves. The pleasure of having a life history is to be able to include anything that happens in your life, every important moment, and when something stresses you out you can go to your record, open it, and calm yourself down.

You might ask if it’s necessary to have this sort of control for your life. My answer is a definite “yes.” Do you know why people have medical histories? Simply to note down and be sure about when a crisis occurred, how it was overcome, when the next setback occurred, what they felt when it came along, how it was sorted out. Whenever there was a problem, my doctors would always look at the medical record. I’m sure I managed to avoid loads of X-rays, blood tests, and duplicate prescriptions. Memory is so selective.…

The good thing about writing these things down is that it shows you how life is cyclical: Everything comes back and keeps on coming back. The problem is that our memory is very small and very forgetful. You’ll be fascinated to see how your high points and low points repeat themselves, and your life history will have a solution for everything in your life.

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t be afraid; it won’t take up too much of your time. All you need to do is write for a few minutes each day and gather together objects and
things that are comparable to X-rays or the results of blood tests. These are important: There’s no good record that doesn’t contain evidence (in this case bits of your life). They could be bits of napkin (from the restaurant where you managed to get something you wanted), rocks from some beach (where your life took one step forward and you felt complete), or even just the ticket from the parking garage at the shopping center where you parked the day you saw the film that changed your life.

Your life record will get bigger and bigger and eventually maybe you’ll need to buy a second and a third file.

If you’re lucky, one day you’ll die (yes, if you’re lucky) and your children, your friends, your yellows (who are your yellows, you wonder? We will get to that in due time) will inherit this life history and will know what it was that made you happy, what made you feel complete. Is there anything more valuable than that they should know you better? I don’t think so. This is the true reward: to open up the private boxes of the people we love and know more about them. I have so many friends with information hidden away within them, and whenever I find out something more about them I feel happier, more complete.

Here’s the list for your life record:

I think that the day someone inherits my medical history and my life history will be a marvelous one. The person who
gets them will be happy with both records. One will tell him how many leucocytes I had in October 1988, what my left leg looked like in X-rays (there’s not a lot of people who know that), and, above all, will give him that final horizontal line. How beautiful a single line can be! The other record will show him why I laughed, what I got excited about, why I died. I think I’ll give them to two different people. It’s always good for knowledge to be shared.

This is a piece of advice that an old man with whom I shared my first hospital room gave me. It was a six-man room; later they moved me into a two-man one. He gave me this advice very early one morning: Early mornings bring people together so much that you get the courage to confess desires and inadmissible dreams. Then the day comes and with it … with it … sometimes there comes regret.

Mr. Fermín was an impressive man: He’d had thirty different jobs, was seventy-six years old, and had a life full of incredible stories. For a kid of fourteen who was coming into the hospital for the first time, this was the mirror I wanted to
reflect myself in, the future I wanted and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to attain. I thought this man was really great. He was pure energy.

He always ate oranges; he loved oranges. He smelled citrusy. Over the seven nights he shared a room with me he gave me advice about how to have a good life; he gave me what he called the seven rules for being happy.

Every rule came with an explanation that lasted an hour, with lots of graphic examples. The people who studied in these life-lesson classes were a fellow Egghead from the Canary Islands with one arm and me (who would later end up with one leg). His dissertations were very enjoyable, great fun. He made us take note of everything. I think that a lot of times he thought we didn’t understand anything at all. And he was right. I understood almost nothing, but those notes in my adolescent handwriting have lasted me the rest of my life.

He made us promise that we would never tell these seven rules to anyone unless we felt ourselves to be close to death. Both of us promised, although we argued with him about this. (We were adolescents: At that age you argue about everything.) We thought it would be difficult to keep those secrets. There was a difficult period of give-and-take, but eventually we got him to tell us one of the rules. And this is the one I’ll tell you.

What I’m going to tell you is the first piece of advice he gave. I heard it the first morning I ever spent in the hospital. It’s a memory that smells of oranges. I like it when memories have a smell.

He asked us to sit up, looked at both of us, and said:
“Write this down. In this life you’ve got to know how to say no.”

The guy from the Canary Islands and I looked at each other: We didn’t understand a thing. How to say no? And anyway, why did we have to say no, when it’s so great to say yes?

Next, just as he would do on the next six nights, he gave us a long explanation about why you have to say no. I wrote down the following:

I think that saying no to yourself must have been the most important one because he made us put down lots of exclamation marks after it. Next to the last exclamation mark there’s even a stain made by a segment of orange (or that’s what I think when I look at it). Sometimes what one wants is so intense that it becomes a reality.

The day after giving us the seventh piece of advice, he died. It was one of those deaths that mark you: He gave us seven rules to be happy and then he died. The guy from the Canary Islands and I were both aware of what he had left us. We decided to make a pact: We’d never lose the notes he’d
made us take, and when we understood them we’d put them to use.

I forgot about these pieces of advice about being happy for years. This posthumous list contained, although I didn’t yet know it, all that you need to know to be happy. I started to understand them little by little and eventually internalized them.

I can assure you that I’ve said no to lots of things in my life: no to things in the hospital, no to things out of the hospital. I’ve never felt that a no should be a yes. But it’s clear that when you say no and you are sure about it, success is almost assured.

Sometimes I want to feel that I’m about to die so that I can tell people the other six rules. My friend from the Canary Islands was lucky like this: He died six years later and with a smile told me that he had passed the rules on to three other people. He was a great guy, who didn’t speak all that much: He thought that words were overrated.

The list of nos:

The last thing I wrote down in the notebook was “Don’t fool yourself: a no will bring you lots of yeses.” When I was fourteen I didn’t understand anything, but now that I’m thirty-four I think I’ve got a meaning worked out. I want to make it as far as sixty to see what new meanings appear out of what he told me. Every year, the list of seven rules gathers more meanings, shows a different face to the world. This is the good thing about age: It changes everything. I think this is the greatest thing about getting older, about becoming an adult.

Every year I go back over those notes, getting more and more juice out of the seven rules to happiness. Enjoy the first one. One out of seven isn’t bad.