The Yellow World (9 page)

We will talk about the yellows at length in a bit. Patience, patience. Let’s just build the hospital for the moment, the environment.

Nights are the yellowest part of the day. I like nights because almost everything is made real.

Nights in the hospital were great. They were calm. For years the Eggheads escaped at night: We took our wheelchairs and went looking for adventure, running all over those six vast floors.

We didn’t have wheels, we couldn’t go to the disco, but we had wheelchairs and so many places to visit and play. Every day one of us would choose a place to go, where to spend the night. My favorite was going to see the “other” Eggheads: the newborn babies. We’d go, we’d whisper sweet nothings
to them, we’d make them laugh, and they’d look at us and make their noises. It was a strange feeling: They had their whole lives ahead of them; ours were within touching distance of their end.

I’ve always believed in the power of the night; I’m sure that the night makes your wishes come true. There were so many nights in the hospital when I felt capable of overcoming my fears and changing the rhythm of my life, although this effort has only one obstacle in its way: You have to get past your dreams, avoid the cold light of day. This is where successful people live, people who turn their dreams into reality: They can overcome the dawn. This is what Christian always used to say. He was someone’s brother but I can’t remember whose. Sometimes the visitor is more important than the person visited.

I’ve always tried to have my best ideas born during the night: at three or four in the morning. This time of night is the right time to draw up plans. It’s as if when you are almost ready to fall asleep your whole self is in agreement with what you are thinking, and this encourages you and gives you energy.

Being tired makes us sweeter. So many good ideas don’t seem so good the next morning; so often the things we decide in the night fail to take place. I think that tiredness makes us less animal and more human, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

While I was in the hospital I made all my important decisions in these watches of the night, before falling asleep. I loved waking up at that time, when the whole hospital would be asleep, including the nurses; it was as if the whole place
belonged to me. I planned my life, worked on my dreams, and aspired to do everything.

When I left the hospital I went back to doing this. I trusted a great deal in the middle of the night. Also, I’m sure that when someone invents a drug that stops you from needing to sleep, the middle of the night will be the time for a new meal: the REM.

The REM will be even more important than lunch or tea. You’ll have REMs with people who are special, people who, like you, believe in this time of the day. When the moment comes I hope I’ll be ready.

He always started by saying, “There’s nothing like a good moment. A moment is a piece of life we’ve all lived through.”

I’m a big fan of moments, I’d say even more of a fan than that teacher (sometimes the pupil can be better than the master), because there was a time when I lost them. Moments occur most in childhood and adolescence. But everybody’s life is full of moments.

There was a time while I was in the hospital when I stopped having moments; well, maybe that’s not entirely true, but I exchanged them for other types of moment. Hospital
moments, which I share with other people who’ve lived in hospitals.

“Moments” can be defined as things that one day you do for the first time and which mark you, because they stay with you.

For example, here’s a triple moment connected to transport:

I think that there’s nothing in life that I like more than looking for moments. After discovering them, after that
teacher showed us what they were, I started to collect them. In the hospital, the moments I already had helped me to keep going. They happen at such a young age that they form the essence of your life. Every year I remember two or three moments and I feel good; I feel happy at this reencounter.

People sometimes forget that we are the fruit of what we live through in our childhood and our adolescence; we are the product of many moments. And sometimes we close the door to them when we should have it always open.

For a few years my moments were slightly strange: the first time my leg was amputated, the first time I lost a lung. But they were moments nonetheless.

And even when you are an adult, you live through a lot of moments, but what happens is that you stop noticing. I think that to truly know yourself you need to go back to your moments, analyze them, and accept them for what they are.

My life is made up of moments and odors, and they are what make me what I am.

I think that there’s nothing I hate more than getting angry: shouting, cursing, not being able to control myself.

Sometimes in the hospital we cursed our fate; sometimes we got angry about it. A doctor (a radiologist who sometimes told us jokes when he was on duty) taught us how to control our moments of anger, to be capable of knowing our limits.

He spoke to us about the “point of no return.” Once you’ve passed this point, you can’t avoid getting angry. It exists, it’s tangible, it’s physical; we can feel it and therefore we can control it.

Our radiologist friend made us take a piece of paper and
write down what it was we noticed before reaching this point, the levels of annoyance. What are they like? What do you notice when you feel that you can’t control your fury?

It was a list of three or four points a bit like this:

If there are three stages before you get to this point, then you will see, just before you reach it, just before you lose control and get angry, that the possibility of stopping exists. Maybe you’ll notice that just before the point of no return you move your hands a lot, or your voice shakes or you swear a lot. These are the effects you have to control.

How? First of all by asking your partner, or your friend or one of your yellows, to use a key word when they see one of these symptoms. They should say “pistachio” or “United States.” Whatever it takes to make you realize that you are approaching the point. To begin with you don’t notice your points of no return; they go by so quickly that the line between one state and the next is almost invisible.

When they’ve said the key word a few times you’ll find that you start to become capable of hearing it. This is when you have to turn off your anger, take a step back, because if you don’t reach that point then you’ll be able to control
yourself. Everything can be sorted out if you don’t get to that point.

In the hospital I started to practice this; my key word was
tumor
. I’ve always liked giving a more positive spin to this word. Little by little I stopped getting annoyed. It worked, and I was overjoyed.

As you get older your point of no return changes position. As the years go by and we get more experienced we get angry less often and our point of no return is further away. So it is important to look for it: Every year you need to search for it, find it, and not go past it.

It’s good to get angry every now and then, but it’s not good to reach the point of no return.

This has to be one of the pieces of advice that fascinate me the most. On the third floor of the hospital there were special people, people unfairly known as the mentally handicapped. (I strongly believe that this phrase should be struck from the dictionary.)

I think that they’re special people because they make you feel truly special. They are extremely innocent people who make everything simple and easy.

Perhaps what I found most exciting about them was seeing how they solved their problems, especially how they found out whether they loved someone. I’ve always thought that the great problems in our society come from the fact that people don’t know whether they love the person they’re
with. This gives us a lot of headaches, lots of worries. Do I love the person I’m with or don’t I? Are they the right person? Is there another person whom I like more? What should I do?

What you should do with such problems is what the special people do, what they taught me to do. It’s nothing spectacular; it’s not a great trick or something so surprising that it leaves your mouth hanging open.

Lots of times when we had problems we went to see the special people. There would always be a huge number of details that had nothing to do with the decision we had to make, and they knew how to detect these. They knew how to filter the details that were necessary for making the correct decision.

They always advised us to shut our eyes. For them, shutting the eyes was almost magical. You shut your eyes and it is as if you’ve managed to get rid of all the unimportant details. Closing your eyes eliminates one of your senses, the sense that distracts you most, that brings in the most information.

We shut our eyes a lot in the hospital. Now I do it more than ever: how much I’ve discovered, how many decisions I’ve made with my eyes shut! And the most incredible thing is that you see everything so clearly.

These are the twenty-three discoveries and I hope that as you read each one you’ll make more discoveries.

I hope that they give you the basis for this yellow world, the foundation for a different world.

I used them while I was getting cured, I set them running and they helped link two ages. You can use them to link two ages, too, or two moments or two sensations, or else just to live a single instant, the actual moment.

I remember that when I discovered them or started to put them into practice I was twenty-four. Just as I said at the beginning of the book, I was completely cured and couldn’t believe it. A couple of days had gone by and I was completely disoriented: I knew who I was but not who I had been.

So I decided to bury myself in my childhood, in that fourteen-year-old pre-cancer kid, and to start to link the two ages: fourteen and twenty-four.

It was something magical, incredible. I returned to those memories, found what I had liked or desired, and it was as if I were transplanting them into a man of twenty-four. I spent a wonderful year building bridges, having a conversation between the two people who lived in this body. It was without doubt the most incredible year of my life: I listened to myself, understood myself, developed respect for myself. During this year I learned the lessons of cancer and applied them to my life. One of the two guys, the one who was twenty-four, had the weapons to fight cancer, and the fourteen-year-old had the innocence to keep on living as if he had never known cancer. What could be better than using both strengths together, both energies?

Of course, without cancer, the fourteen-year-old would have become someone different, and the twenty-four-year-old, who knew this, only wanted that younger kid to feel accepted, loved.

I liked it when they agreed on something, when they saw that there weren’t so many things that separated them in reality. In fact, maybe they wanted the same thing but expressed it in different ways.

I also liked it when they argued; that was when I grew up, when I realized that I didn’t now have the same objectives. And this was good, because somehow two people shared two interests, two aims. Debate is necessary to survive.

At the end of that year I made a pact with the fourteen-year-old: He would always have a vote, I would always listen to his opinion. Because that fourteen-year-old couldn’t be what he’d wanted to be, I’d let him be with me always. And
he’s never abandoned me; I get older and bigger, but the fourteen-year-old kid is still inside me, advising me and giving me his opinion.

Without knowing it, many people forget their fourteen-year-old kid, but I think that the important thing is to go back, dive in, and build bridges back to that moment. It’s like swimming along the bottom of a swimming pool, going through a little tunnel and ending up in a littler swimming pool; that’s where the fourteen-year-olds are. Speak to them, exchange things with them, and rescue what you can for the larger pool.