The Yellow World Read Free

way. A few words can come together andprovoke an idea. Sometimes the most important phrases are those we give the least importance.
    So come in, and trust this, a little. Believe what I’m saying, but keep your eyes open. Everything can be questioned, debated. The guy who’s telling you this is me, Albert. Agnostic. Apolitical. Yellow.

Tell me the square root of three thousand three hundred and thirteen
.
    Where is Tanganyika? What year was Cervantes born?
    I’ll give you an F if you talk to your classmate
.
    That’s how it carries on
.
    —Gabriel Celaya

1
Losses are positive
    Give your leg a goodbye party. Invite all the people who have some connection to your leg and give it a great send-off. Hasn’t it supported you all your life? Well, support it now that it’s walking away
.
    —my traumatologist,
the day before they cut off my leg
    Losses are positive. I know that’s a hard thing to believe, but losses are positive. We have to learn how to lose things. You need to know that whatever you win, sooner or later, you’ll end up losing.
    In the hospital they taught us to accept loss, but rather than putting the emphasis on accepting, they put it on loss. Accepting something is only a matter of time; losing something is a question of principles.
    Years ago, whenever someone died, his close family would go through a period of mourning: They would wear black,suffer, and stay at home. The mourning period gave them time to think about the loss, to live for the loss.
    We’ve gone from mourning to nothing. Now when someone dies they tell you in the funeral home that you’ve got to get over it. You break up with your partner and people tell you that you’ll be going out with someone else in a couple of weeks. But what about the mourning? Where’s the mourning gone, the thinking about the loss, about what loss means?
    Cancer took a lot away from me: parts of my body, mobility, experiences, years of school … But what I felt most of all was probably the loss of my leg. I remember that the day before they cut it off my doctor said to me: “Give your leg a goodbye party. Invite all the people who have some connection to your leg and give it a great send-off. Hasn’t it supported you all your life? Well, support it now that it’s walking away.”
    I was fifteen and I hadn’t organized a party to lose my virginity (I’d have liked that) but I was organizing a party to lose my leg. I remember as if it were only this morning how I phoned people who were connected with the leg (it was a bit tough, it wasn’t easy to get people to come). After going over things a lot in my head and talking about hundreds of things, I ended up saying to them: “I’m inviting you to the goodbye party for my leg; you don’t have to bring anything. And come on foot.” I thought it was important to mention that just to stop things from being awkward. Some genius decided to give us a sense of humor, the cure for all our worries.… A strange ability: to be able to turn everything upside down and laugh at it.
    The people I invited to this strange party were those whohad had some kind of relationship with my leg: a goalkeeper who let in forty-five goals from me in one match (well, okay, only one, but I invited him anyway), a girl I played footsie with under the table, one of my uncles, who took me hiking (because of the cramps I’d gotten in my legs, and anyway I couldn’t think of many more people to invite), and a friend who had a dog that bit me when I was ten. The worst of it was that the dog came and tried to bite me again.
    It was a great party. I think it was the best party I’ve ever given, and definitely the most original. Everyone was a bit shy at the beginning, but we started bit by bit to talk about the leg. Everyone told stories about it. They touched it one last time. It was a night I’ll never forget.
    When the night came to an end and dawn was breaking, a few hours before I went into surgery, I suddenly thought of the