The mother bent over to look at the images her young son, sprawled on the parlor floor, was putting on paper. Tears welled in her eyes. She turned to her husband. “Do you suppose,” she asked, and then hesitated to clear the lump in her throat. “Do you suppose,” she said again, “that the midwife could have switched babies on us? Do you suppose she could have taken our brilliant offspring to raise as her own and in those moments of emotion and confusion at the birthing substituted another baby to leave with us?”
El Senior P______, the husband, snorted. “Impossible!” he shouted. “ Look, how he has my face, my round head! Look how he has my hands, long, slim. Why, put a mustache on him, Woman, and he a pequeňo personification of me! I never again want to hear you say such a thing!”
Pablo, the subject of the father's outburst, looked up from his drawing. Every time I draw, he thought, she cries, and he shouts at her.
The mother picked up the son's drawing. “Look, Pablo, dear,” she said, softly placing a hand on his little shoulder, “you have made nothing but lines on your paper. Wide lines, narrow lines. Long lines. Short lines....” A deep sigh trembled in her throat as she spoke. “Oh, Pablo, my dearest little boy, what in the name of heaven is it that you are drawing?”
She's not very smart, , he thought. Always, she asks me to explain my work, and never does she understand.
“Well,” he said, pointing to a pair of wide long lines on the paper and trying hard not to show in his voice the impatience he felt, “this is Pappa.”
He pointed to a pair of shorter, narrower lines. “This is Mamma.”
Finally, with his finger on a pair of short stumps of lines, he said, “And this is Pablo. Now do you see, my mamma?”
From his position, lying on his stomach on the floor, Pablo stretched his neck to look up at his parents. He saw the two medium-sized, skinny sticks which were his mother's legs move closer to the thick, long sticks belonging to his father. He heard her sob.
Grown-ups!” he thought. But enough about them! I have to hurry and finish this picture before I forget my ideas.