When you have a child, you have the child in the house and the one out in the streets, you have the one that rides the female beggar’s haunch and the one in the stroller pushed by the English governess and the gringo kid carried by the local and the white kid carried by the black woman and the Indian kid carried by the female Indian and the black kid carried by the earth.

When you have a child, you have so many children that streets are fi lled up and the square and the bridge and the marketplace and the churchand is ours any kid that crosses the street and is run over by a passing car and when he pokes his head out of the balcony and when he comes up to the pool and when a kid shouts, we don’t know if ours is the kid or the scream, and if he bleeds and wails, for a moment we might not know if that “ouch” is his or if the blood is ours.

When you have a child, ours is the kid who accompanies the blind woman and the court girls and the dwarf girl, too and the Prince of France and his princess and the one San Antonio carries in his arms and the one sitting on Coromoto’s lap. When you have a child, any laughter catches on, any cry makes us cringe, no matter where it comes from. When you have a child, you carry the world within and your heart out on your sleeve.

And when you have two children You have all the kids on the face of the earth, the millions of children the lands cry for, the mothers laugh for, the worlds dream of, the ones Paul Fort wanted with their hands locked together for the whole world to be a ring-around-a-rosy tune, the ones the statesman, who’s got a cute kid, wants with God inside and his guts out, the ones that fl ed Herod to die in Hiroshima,their eyes half open like the children of war, because that’s enough to see the light come out of a child, a Chinese slant or a Japanese look. When you have two children you hold all of the planet’s fears, all the fright of enlightened men who want to kill the light and lower the sails and stain rubber balls with blood and soak windup trains in tears.

When you have two children you carry the bliss and the “ouch” of the world on two heads, all the anguish and all the hopes, the light and the weep, to see which one hits us fi rst, either the way of crying for the universe or the way the stars shine bright up in the sky.