The Yellow World (7 page)

I got very angry that day, cried so much that night.… I didn’t want that kid to die in a couple of months. The way that boy looked at things had to survive, had to get him as far as running countries, leading men. There was something in his passion that dazzled me. I don’t know what became of him. So I hope that wherever he is he’s still looking at things with the same passion.

I never judged anyone again. I just enjoy other people’s passions. I have friends who like looking at birds, looking at walls, looking at the waveforms emitted by cellphones.

Find what you like looking at and look at it.

They took three CAT scans of my brain. You have to stay very still. I tried not to think about anything personal; I was scared that the machine would print it. I knew that the machines didn’t print these things out, but I felt that everything was being recorded, so I didn’t think about anything.

One summer, the summer of the World Cup when Gary Lineker was the star, I spent three hours waiting in the hospital and the only thing that I could think of was that I was missing one of the semifinals. I was sure that when they did the CAT scan they’d see Lineker and his goals and the whole stadium going wild.

There was a man there who looked at me. He was an older man with little eyes. He was wearing blue pajamas like
me. We started to talk to each other: “They’re taking ages. Is it for a CAT scan?” It’s that sort of question that brings people together in waiting rooms.

We went to sit next to each other. Neither of us went to where the other one was but we both went to a third place. He told me he was a neurologist. The conversation we had was about the brain, the famous 10 percent of the brain that we use. This is something that has always bothered me; I want our successors to be able to use 30 or 40 percent. In the end we’ll go down in history as the guys who used only 10 percent, the ones with the sticks and the rocks and the 10 percent, that’s those guys, over there. We’ve come a long way, but for the people of the thirtieth century we’ll be primitives.

This neurologist told me that in order to use more of the brain all we have to do is change our brain.

If you say the words
change
and
brain
to a fifteen-year-old boy, then you’ll get his attention pronto. “How can you do it? I want to change my brain.”

He spoke to me about numbers. It was a simple example. He showed me four objects: In this case it was four magazines. He asked me to count them. I said that there were four of them. He asked me: “Did you need to think?” I said no, that it was easy. I started to wonder if he really was a neurologist; he was more like a patient from Floor 8 (Psychiatry). He showed me five magazines and asked me to count them. Suddenly I realized that my brain had started to work. I was counting: I couldn’t do it without counting. He smiled at me, and his eyes grew even narrower: “You’re counting, right?” I looked at him in amazement.

He explained to me that when you get to five, our 10 percent of the brain starts to count. The way to exercise it is to try to make it start counting at six, and then at seven. In this way we force it to increase its capacity, so more neurons fire up when we use our brain. We change it a little bit at a time, so that it isn’t so weak, so that we notice it start working.

I wanted more. He spoke to me about when you see nine people and have the sensation of a group. Up to eight, you don’t think of them as a group, but when you hit nine your brain identifies them as a little crowd. Another way to change your brain: Make it start seeing a crowd when you hit fifteen, or even twenty.

I said it was like changing the factory settings of something. Was it possible? He told me that we were talking about a brain, that it didn’t have factory settings and that all changes were possible.

They called me for the CAT scan. I knew that when I came out I wouldn’t find him again. This happened a lot in the hospital: You’d go away for a minute and a person you’d made a connection with would have disappeared.

As I was leaving I shouted to him: “I’m going to use fifteen percent of my brain! Twenty percent!” He smiled at me. A moment before they shut the door to the room where they were going to test me I noticed sadness, a huge sadness flooding from him. I don’t know what it was, but it made me tremble; this man radiated something.

They shut me into the CAT scanner and asked me not to move. I remember that this was the first day I started to change my brain. Every time it tells me something is definite I reject it and change what my brain thinks is the correct
answer. I am in dialogue with my brain and have changed its factory settings.

Over time I have realized that this man was not sad but was instead very happy. My brain thought that his lost gaze, his stare, radiated sadness. That was the factory setting. But it was actually happiness; he was happy to hear a kid of fifteen shout out the phrase that he most believed in.

Does this discovery help in our daily life? It’s really useful. You could put it this way: Don’t obey your first thoughts blindly. Consider well what it is that you are thinking. Look for things; don’t just be happy with your first thought.

It is possible to change your brain. I have trained myself to start counting at six; maybe it doesn’t seem like much, but I’m very proud.

So, don’t believe anything that comes straight from the factory. Think about it carefully and your life will improve.

This is a piece of advice that speaks for itself.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on something that’s so obvious.

Where did I hear it? In the intensive care unit. I’d just come out of the lung operation and I had lost lung capacity—one of my lungs was missing. What did they do with it? I’ve always asked myself that.

A nurse came up and looked at me. She stroked my hair. I liked it a lot. Through the mask I tried to thank her for her kindness, but I’m sure that my face was made stupid by the anesthetic and I must have said just the opposite.

She was talking to another nurse who was stroking the
big toe on the only foot I had left. I swear I’m not making it up. It was a bit sexy, but it was great to wake up to such kindness after losing a lung.

The younger girl said to the older one: “Dreams are the north for everyone; if they come true then you’ve got to head south.”

That sentence fascinated me so much! I almost couldn’t breathe.… Luckily I was on a respirator so I didn’t have to worry about it.

They left, and I thought: How much north have I got left to travel? How much south will I conquer once my dreams have come true?

In my life outside the hospital I’ve put this into practice. Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough for your dreams to come true, you’ll see how you reach the north. I envisage the north of my life, and then I look for another dream and tell myself: “This must be in the south.”

I know, I was sedated and two nurses were stroking me. Should I trust so much in a piece of advice obviously influenced by external circumstances? The answer is yes; in fact, maybe I should obey it all the more because it touched me so deeply.

North and south. Nothing more. Look for the north; look for the south. Don’t stop traveling between them.

Sometimes you’ve got to let it all out. It’s a law of life. Shout three or four times into the air. Either that or you’ll explode.

There was an Egghead in the hospital who told us that he sometimes went with his father to the car pound; his father would shout at the duty officer there. He’d say that they should be ashamed of themselves, that they wanted to make him pay 120 euros; he got angry and shouted to the heavens. After ten minutes or so they’d head off. The police had never taken his dad’s car; it was just that the dad had found a place where he could go to let off steam. The wrong place? Well, of course the poor duty officer didn’t deserve that kind of explosion of anger directed at him. Sometimes I think about
those police officers, or the people who deal with lost luggage at an airport. Where do
they
go to let off steam? How can they want to go to work each morning?

I think that the father of Jordi the Egghead (an Egghead with hair—weird, weird) went to the wrong place: There must be easier ways to blow off some steam. In the hospital we sometimes shouted at a tape recorder. It was the idea of one of the cancer residents who came to see us every Saturday.

He was young and wanted to change the world. Now he’s the head of the department and the armor plating that most doctors end up wearing has made him forget all that. But I’m here to remind him about it. It’s good when people remind you of the worthwhile things you’ve done.

The resident brought a tape recorder and we took turns letting it rip. We said everything that really upset us. There were some of us who found a lot to shout about. For instance, it’s terrible when you think they’re going to give you a pass for the weekend and they end up not giving it to you. We shouted; we got rid of everything that was annoying us and getting us down. Other people said nothing; they just looked at you.

Then the resident made us listen to the recording. It was always a fascinating moment: to hear yourself shouting, to hear yourself angry, sounding like a madman, paranoid. Suddenly, everything that had seemed to make sense, that you would have defended a second ago, seemed baseless. It was as if your anger dissipated with the echo of your rage.

The echo of rage has this power: the power to minimize
your anger, the power to show you how ridiculous it is to shout and throw your toys out of the stroller.

Who better than you to put up with all your shouting? Try it, you’ll feel better; and little by little you’ll stop shouting, stop getting annoyed, and, above all, you won’t shout at other people. You’ll see how ridiculous you are when you get like that.

I’m very much in favor of wanking. A few years ago I wrote a play called
Wank Club
. My passion for wanking comes from the bad press that it gets. People always talk about wanking a bit disrespectfully, as a joke, as if it were something from the second division.

I’m extremely interested in wanking, especially what people hide behind it. Sometimes it’s unrecognized passion, sometimes it’s excessive love, sometimes it’s sex, sometimes shame, sometimes hidden desires. Wanking always tells you more about a person than all the personal details you ask them.

“You are who you really are after a wank.” A physiotherapist
told me this. He explained that after having a wank all that is left is what is really you. In those two or three minutes after masturbating the essence of who you really are appears.

He also said: “A wank is like an externalized suicide. It’s like killing yourself from the outside.” He was a very tall man, nearly seven feet tall, and he spoke about wanking like other people talk about soccer or the movies. He spoke about it with such passion that it was impossible not to listen to him. I really like discovering what someone’s passion is; passion is what interests me the most.

It must have been him who first made me interested in wanking, and this interest has never faded. I think that you wank when you feel good and also when you feel terrible. It’s something invariable in life, a form of channeling energy.

The physiotherapist was a fan of “positive wanks,” which, according to him, are wanks that make you think of another person and bring him or her luck. If you dedicate your wank to someone, your luck passes to them.

This way of focusing your wanks has always seemed to me poetic. So many positive wanks in my life! You feel powerful, as if you have a gift.

So go ahead, don’t be afraid. Just make yourself think about only one person. And let magic do the rest.

Well, this discovery is in fact two discoveries, two in one.

And this is where the rest of the chapter heading comes from. The most difficult thing isn’t accepting what you’re like, but what all the other people are like. This is the aim. Sometimes, when we know a few people, we might think we have reached our goal. But the goal’s a long way away, still very distant. Every day we will meet more and more people and we will have to dedicate all our efforts to understanding them.