The knock was soft, but the fine wood Alejandro’s father had selected for their front door carried it well, so that the sound still had a fullness when it reached the back of the house where Alejandro had laid down to rest, like the sound a wooden bell might make, or like the now-and-again beating sound of the wooden heart of the house itself.
He padded the long way through the house, avoiding the room where his father wept. All day his father slept, or his father wept, but he would not speak. Not to Alejandro. Not to anyone.
The man at the front door was Señor Echevarría. He had a face of split timber. “Is there work today?” he asked.
Alejandro shook his head sadly. “I am sorry. Not today. My father . . . my father says not any day. But perhaps someday. But not today.”
Señor Echevarría nodded but did not leave. Alejandro was ashamed, thinking that Señor Echevarría must recognize his lie. Alejandro did not know why he lied, except that his father’s crying and sleeping embarrassed him. Sleep eased his father’s pain but did not cure it, even after all these months. And as the only one his age in the village, Alejandro felt neither hombre nor chico. He had no one to tell the truth to. He was alone.
“De verdad,” Señor Echevarría said. “After my brother’s wife died, he could not live, and yet he could not die.” He rested his hand against the smooth wood of the door, his thumb caressing the grain one could see but not feel, the grain of a dream. Alejandro did not believe Señor Echevarría could have taken his hand away from the door and walked away then, even if he had wanted to, even if he had been paid. “The village . . .” His brown eyes drifted to the side, to the narrow dirt road. “They all need the work. But they all still wish him better.”
Alejandro stared up at the man, trying to remember how long he had worked for his father in the woodcarving business, and knew it had been longer than Alejandro had been alive. His mother had told him. His mother had known Señor Echevarría when all who were now old in the village had been young. “But it will happen someday they will not wish him better, they will not wish him well,” Alejandro said.
Señor Echevarría nodded solemnly. “The old ones will tell you that even a fly may have a temper. And the fish that sleeps is soon carried away by the current.” Then the man closed his eyes and leaned forward and kissed the beautiful wood of the door, the most beautiful thing his father had ever carved (“for it is the door to our hearts”) and then he left. And then Alejandro closed this beautiful door and it was all dark inside once again.
Since Alejandro’s mother died his father had carved no wood. Sometimes Alejandro would see him in his bedroom walking around, making strange motions with his hands, twisting his face into strange faces, and other idiotic things which might be substitutes for dreaming, and for carving. Perhaps being a fool eased his pain.
But it still angered Alejandro that his father had not spoken to him since the day of his mother’s death. And it shamed him that he had not spoken to his father because he did not know what to say.
“It will be dry again today,” Alejandro said to the wood of the house: the beams, the mantel, the smooth trim, the tightly-knitted flooring. “It has not rained for months. Your beautiful fathers and mothers in the forest must be parched and dying, leaning one against the other with bare, brittle limbs.”
But the wooden heart of the house did not reply to Alejandro, no matter how sweetly he talked. Perhaps it was aware how the boy had stopped oiling its wooden extremities, because they could not afford the oil. Perhaps it knew that it too would die like its relatives in the forest, die from the outside in, the dryness creeping from roof and timber to door to mantel and trim, drying into the heart where it would flake and disintegrate and disperse its memories of the lives it had sheltered up and down the dusty street.
Perhaps it was aware of how little the boy knew of the world beyond this dying village. For Alejandro, the son of the greatest woodcarver in the village, had never seen the forest.
In any case Alejandro decided the house need not worry about the drought, for in the other bedroom his father wept, and the house drank from his sorrow.
Alejandro spoke to the house and his father spoke to no one. The house drank his father’s tears and held its wooden tongue.
Alejandro’s mother had been the most beautiful woman to ever live in that village. There were some women in the village who dressed up more, who spent money on cheap jewelry, but a burro is a burro, even if he wears a silver collar. And all the old women said she had been the best mother as well. Alejandro did not understand how this could be, since she had died and left him—her only child—in this silent wooden house.
But she had been beautiful, this he had known to be true. And even as a small child he remembered how everyone—men and women both—had talked to her, how their voices had become softer when she was around, how they had pleaded so softly, how they had wanted. Felicia, they would call. Come sit with us! Felicia, come talk with us a while!
And she always had time. For the old ones, especially. Alejandro remembered being angry they took up so much of her life.
The other men his father’s age had still laughed about how the beautiful Felicia had hooked him all those years ago. How he had been such a poor fish, but a happy fish for all that.
Every Monday then his father would drive his truck out of the village and across the plain into the forest to choose the wood that he and his workers would turn into furniture and carvings for the shops in cities far away. And Alejandro’s mother, Felicia, had always gone with him. It was the only time she ever left the village. Alejandro never left.
Then one day there were no more trips. There were no more workers in the big workshop snug to the back of the house, on the other side of the wall from Alejandro’s room so that he could always hear the nick and the scrape and the tick and the saw as the beautiful carvings were made.
There were no more carvings, no more words or time for anyone from either of Alejandro’s parents. For that was the day his father had had the accident, and the day the splintered bit of wood had miraculously passed through glass and passed through metal and passed through the heart of the beautiful Felicia.
He had heard the old women of the village say how this bit of wood had been like a giant thorn, a thorn that had pierced the heart of Felicia. It was these same old women who had brought all the food to their house the day after his mother had died. They had come in their long black dresses and shawls, their faces barely showing, like large black birds, flock after flock, so many and all of them dressed alike. Alejandro had wondered who they were, where they had all come from. He had not believed there were so many old women in their small village. He saw some come from houses he had not known contained old women before that day.
They brought deep into the darkness of that hollow wooden house great bowls of steaming beans, tortillas, platters of meat, plates of silvery, staring fish, offerings of potatoes, cheeses, breads, and desserts of all kinds. Alejandro had never seen such a feast.
On their table top of tree slabs sanded and joined into a glass-like perfection, the feast had sat a day and then another day, untouched. Sometimes his father would come to the table at the usual time, sit and stare at the soft and gentle spread of food with tears in his eyes, his fingers rubbing the smooth edges of the table endlessly. But he would not eat. Alejandro, too, had sat solemnly, not touching the food the old women had brought, because perhaps this feast was for watching and not for eating.
Instead he had stolen fruit and bread from the local merchants to keep himself alive, nibbling on the small bits as he sat back in the dark and empty woodcarver’s shop.
After a few weeks the stretch of feast softened and ran like yellow wax in the heat. The nuts fell out of the cakes and breads. The fruit rinds blackened, the meat turned greasy and sour, and flies speckled the collapsed mounds like dark garnish. The fish grew thinner, their eyes larger and clouded. Sometimes he witnessed his father staring at the remains, whispering silently to himself. Sometimes he had to fight off the urge to cover the decay with a sheet, thinking it somehow obscene but afraid of how his father might react.
Eventually the flies spread beyond the dining room, gathering in neighbourly groups and filling the house with the first conversation Alejandro had heard in weeks. A sweet stench flavoured the young boy’s dreams. Alejandro expected the beautiful wood of the house to begin to show at least some small signs of this decay, but this did not happen.
Again he woke late in the night to the sounds of weeping. He wondered if his father was drinking his own tears, if that was what was keeping the master woodcarver alive. Alejandro missed even the nervous talk of the flies.
But then the weeping suddenly stopped, and he sat up in bed, trying to control his breathing. A rustling came from the dining room, and he immediately thought of rats though he’d never seen one in their house. He crawled out of bed and walked slowly down the dark hall, clouds of flies separating on either side of his face like a lively and murmurous beaded curtain. He clamped his mouth shut. Flies don’t enter a shut mouth.
His father sat slumped over the ruins of the table (Alejandro had to remind himself that it was the feast in decay, and not the beautiful table itself). His father stared off into the distance, as if waiting. The ragged shadows atop the table shifted, then moved with a scrape of claw and a slide of tail, slowly trundling off into the deeper black like props being moved about between scenes of a play. Occasionally some of the odd baggage revealed itself in a sliver of moonlight from the windows high in the wall: pale and mossy things, red-encrusted pink softnesses, sharp-edged, exposed bone, congealed liquid splatters, all kinds of obscene things Alejandro thought best buried, best all forgotten.
But to all this there was a strange quiet, a seriousness, unlike anything he’d witnessed outside a church. And then Alejandro wondered if he was in a kind of church here, watching the processional. The ushers were guiding the people to their seats. The props were being moved about. Someone hushed a talker in the back pew. Someone was weeping.
His father jerked out a hand desperately and tried to stuff some of the moving food into his mouth, the great black backs of shiny insects drifting over his face like crude widow’s lace. Kissing the food, spreading it over his mouth and cheeks for comfort. For communion. “Felicia . . . Felicia . . .” He mouthed the name over and over, but would not release it.
On the other side of the room someone moved in and out of shadow.
The woman in the grey dress carrying the large splinter of dripping wood might have been his mother as she had been at a younger age. The old women said that a man sometimes saw a woman like that—not as she was but as she used to be. Certainly the woman in the grey dress was beautiful in the same way that his mother had been beautiful. This he was sure of.
His father opened his mouth but would not speak. Alejandro wanted to ask him if he saw the same things as he, but could not bring himself to do this. His father had caused all this—the rotting feast, the woman carrying the great, bleeding splinter—just as he had caused the death of Alejandro’s beautiful mother. It was a hard thought. Once he had admitted this in his head he felt tension melting away from his face and chest, as if it were food rotting and falling into bits, even though he knew he could never say such a thing aloud. His father’s fantasies, his father’s grief, embarrassed Alejandro, and he could not make himself speak to him.
A hand appeared out of the darkness and set a plain wooden cup of smooth, white milk on the table by Alejandro’s hand. He looked at his father’s face, the lips struggling for sound, the lips pale, dry, dead-looking.
He needed to speak the truth, but he could not. He needed to talk to his father of his grief, but he could not. The milk sat in its cup unused, souring, until after the woman had left the room and the remains of the feast were gone.
Still his father could not speak, and Alejandro could not bring himself to speak to his father. Alejandro would brood over this failure, he knew, the rest of his life. But he could not help himself. And he could not change things now.
When the old people in the village had a problem they went to find a bruja. His father was sick, he could not speak, and he was seeing things. A mestizo woman who lived in an old shack a half-day’s hike outside their village was said to know of such things. Some said she was a witch and some said she just had friends who were witches. All the old men in the village were suspicious of the old woman and some said they should go to her shack, drag her out to the arroyo and kill her there. The old women said the men were just jealous of a woman’s warmth, a woman’s strength. They laughed about the old men’s complaints and pointed out that the men never did anything about them. The old men blamed everything on this old woman: when the crops failed, when business was bad. Alejandro thought that soon they would blame these things on his father.
First Alejandro gathered together what little money had been left in the house: old coins from the sooty can above the wood stove and newer pesos and centavos from the small mahogany box with the carving of a pig on its lid. Alejandro had never had any use for money before and knew very little about what was the proper amount for things, and besides that he felt strange about taking his father’s money, even though his father would never miss it and even though it was to help his father. Witches always wanted money for what they did—he had heard the old men and women say this many times.
Then for something extra he caught the scrawny yellow cat with the red eyes who always stayed behind their house and howled. He had heard that those who deal with magic like to keep such odd-looking cats around, for companionship, or perhaps for ingredients. He tried to keep the cat in a bag but it kept clawing its way out and crawling up Alejandro’s back to perch on his shoulder, its claws dug in until they stabbed through the thin cloth of the boy’s jacket and into his brief coating of skin. This was very painful but the cat did not attempt to escape from here so Alejandro left him on his perch.
Finally Alejandro went to his room and retrieved the staff he had carved under his father’s supervision. It wasn’t a very good staff and the carvings were amateurish but it was large and it was thick. He had shaped one end into the crude form of a snake’s head. A narrow, crooked tail turned slowly on the other end when Alejandro rolled the staff in his palms. Out on the plains near the forest he had heard that wolves and great cats lived. His staff would not be much help, but it was all that he had to protect himself. And it seemed right that he should have a decorated staff with him when he met the bruja.
He started out early in the morning with a fog sour and milky still filling the dirt lanes. They had terrible fogs here, the old people said, because the village was by a brackish, shallow river that had turned bad because it passed through the dirty cities far away. He did not recognize his village at first. Since his mother had died, he had hidden from his neighbours, a boy without a mother.
Then he wondered if the village looked so different because of the fog. It drifted high and low, aimless and wild as the drought-plagued villagers’ dream of fresh water. It collected in the sinkholes like milky pools waiting to be drunk from. The scrawny cat leapt from his back as if to oblige, but then scampered back when it crept close enough to the pools to smell.
The pale brick and wooden houses floated out of the fog like great sea creatures coming up for air. He had never seen a sea creature, but he had learned enough from the old people’s stories that he knew this must be how they would be.
No one was in the streets. The cat dug its claws into him until he cried out. The houses were in poor repair, the roofs torn and many windows shattered. Bushes and flowering plants were brown, or grey as ash. Winds had painted the walls with shadowy faces of dust. But there were no human faces in the windows or at the doors to serve as models for these portraits. There had been a time when the people of his village would be out and working by now. A giant hand of fog drifted by him and the faces disappeared from the walls nearest him.
But then he recognized the Lucero house, and the Echevarría house, and he knew this surely was his village. He moved down the dusty lane holding his staff tightly, the scrawny cat stiff on his shoulder like one of his father’s carvings of cats that were so popular with the American tourists.
Sometimes the walls of the houses seemed to melt down into the fog, thickening its pale colour. Sometimes the walls seemed not to be there at all, as if the house had rotted away a long time ago. The dark windows watched stupidly. The roofs sagged in despair. No chickens squawked at him. No cows bellowed. No dogs sniffed at his heels. The villagers had eaten all of their animals.
Once he left the village the world became a noisier place. This made no sense to him because the village was full of people, and no one lived out here on the plains. But he had not realized how very silent the world of the village had become until he was on the road out on the plain, where gravel crunched beneath his soles and the wind crackled the few dry trees and insects and birds were waking to begin their daily labour of survival.
Several hours outside the village he met his first wolf. It didn’t seem as big as he had imagined a wolf to be—more like a medium-sized dog that had been poorly loved—and by walking a good distance out of his way he was able to avoid the creature entirely.
The next wolf to come into the road was another matter, however. It stood crouched and heaving, large enough to satisfy even Alejandro’s generous imagination. Alejandro approached it slowly, wiggling his snake stick back and forth near the wolf’s head. The wolf’s huge grey eyes followed the wiggling stick with interest. Then the great beast leapt and turned somersaults in the air like some circus animal before lying down to sleep in the middle of the road.
Beyond the wolf, immediately past a bend in the road, Alejandro found the shack of the bruja.
There was no answer to his knock. He was amazed at how grey and worn the door to this shack was—his father would have been dismayed, if he had senses back, to see such a thing. If this were the door to the old woman’s heart, she was an ill old woman indeed.
There was no reaction when he rattled the windows in their loose frames. “Hola!” he cried, but there was no response. He went around to the back of the shack, where he found a huge cow standing in a pitiful patch of grass. The cow, fat rolling down its sides and with an udder as large as a soup kettle, gazed at him with blue, unblinking eyes.
You miss your mother, muchacho. The cow spoke inside Alejandro’s head. Alejandro stared at the cow. But you miss your father more.
Alejandro had heard that in the old days the witches had more power. Back then a witch could turn herself into a cow. Verdad! the old people would say. “What do you know about me? What do you know about my father?” Alejandro asked with a trembling voice.
The cow lowered her head and dropped open her mouth. She bit into the dirt around a clump of poor-looking grass and pulled it in with her tongue, roots and all. Alejandro saw the scrawny cat approaching her udder with great slowness. He had not realized it had even left his back. The cat went to one of the cow’s great teats and began to nurse. The cow sighed contentedly.
I know you have lost your mother, the cow began. And your father has lost his wife. Which is like losing your mother, since even old men are like boys. Your father misses the same things you miss, muchacho. He misses holding her. He misses nursing at her breast.
Alejandro blushed and looked down, dropping his staff. The staff shook and wiggled, becoming a long black snake that rippled like a narrow shadow across the ground to where the cow stood. Then it raised its head and grabbed a nipple beside the cat, and it too began to nurse. The cow closed its eyes and chewed. It moved its great hooves back and forth, finally stepping on the snake which snapped into two rigid pieces of staff.
All living things require such healing. All living things must drink at the place of their beginnings, a drink that takes them back to the times before their beginnings.
Without thinking, Alejandro had gone to the side of the cow, and now knelt there, where he touched the full roundness of the udder. The cat stopped nursing a moment and opened its mouth. Alejandro could see blood dripping from the nipple.
And they must believe they will live forever, even though they know they will not.
“What can you do for my father, you old witch?” The boy had begun to cry.
I can do nothing for your father. He has become a ghost. Your mother has passed on, but into the realm of transformation. What changes, lives. It is your father who has died, for your father is frozen, and refuses to change.
“But what do I do?”
Take him some of my milk. Make him drink. Speak to him of your mother. Shake him from his dream.
“But you’re a witch! You could bring my mother back! Let me lead you into the forest where she is buried, and bring our mother back to us!”
Stay out of the forest, niño. It is a perilous place.
Then the cow disappeared, leaving a bucket full of milk, the cat mewling around its rusty sides, and the staff broken in half on the ground.
Alejandro fully intended to do what the bruja said. He had the two pieces of staff wedged under his belt, the bucket of milk in his hand, the cat following closely behind to lap up any spills. But then he caught a glimpse of the tall trees at the edge of the distant forest, and their trunks gleaming despite the drought, and all that they promised. This was the source of all the wood in the village. This was the place where the legendary Black Walnut and Spanish Cedar grew, the raw materials of his father’s dreams. This was where the thorn that ended his mother’s life came from, and where his mother now lay buried.
Alejandro walked away from the road and toward the distant line of trees, hoping that the witch cow would not see him. The milk bucket suddenly felt heavier in his hand. He wondered how much of it his mother’s corpse would have to drink before she would consent to come back to them.
He had of course never seen where his mother was buried; the old woman who stayed behind while the others were at the funeral had told him simply that she was buried behind the chapel at the edge of the forest. Happily, the chapel proved easy to find.
He approached the chapel slowly, as there was much weeping and wailing inside. It was a simple structure of mud bricks and boards, but with no roof: the wreckage of this lay to one side, as if torn off by the wind. Tall trees surrounded it, their lower branches knit together and hanging over the bare walls. A small goat cart with digging tools inside was parked by the open front door. A gravedigger’s cart. The goat stared at Alejandro with eyes like a woman’s. A beautiful wooden cross had been planted in the ground near the door. Buds had sprouted from one arm of the cross; two pale green leaves had opened. The sound of weeping from inside the chapel was tremendous, and frightening.
But when Alejandro entered the chapel the weeping stopped. There was no one there. A woman lay on the altar, but evaporated into the shadows when Alejandro reached to pull aside her veil. Behind the altar Alejandro could see there was no wall: he could see the forest there, endless and cool and a green so dark it might have been a shade of black. He walked past the empty altar and into the dark green.
The ground between the trees was littered with broken headstones and splintered wooden crosses. But one remained standing and whole, and unmistakable in the excellence of its sad, sad carvings. The empty eyes and the empty arms and the long and intricate flow of his mother’s hair. Two feet from this cross a giant tree reached toward the distant dim light of sky. Alejandro turned, and the goat cart was there beside him, the goat smiling, winking at him, pursing its lips. Alejandro reached into the back of the cart and pulled out the ancient pick and shovel.
The work was hard, the roots of the tree growing through the grave tough and massive. Alejandro pulled the axe out of the cart and worked on the roots, which sighed and trembled with each new loss of sap. He chewed the ground without mercy, creating a wide hole around the tree and descending well below its roots. Soon he was covered with the thick, black dirt. He could hardly breathe, but he persisted in his descent.
Alejandro dug and hacked his way through brush and soil, roots and finally the long wooden box of walnut, finely detailed with scenes of his father and mother embracing, the village so busy he barely recognized it, the shallow faces of the villagers so serene. But eventually the well-made box fell apart under his hands, and then there was his mother’s beautiful dark hair, her limbs thin, skin clinging stubbornly, and her steady look, as if chastising him for what he had done.
The base of the tree pierced her chest. It was the thorn; in her endless sleep she had dreamed it into a tree.
But Alejandro hacked and hacked until he had his mother free. He reached down under and between the roots and embraced her, pulling her out of the ground. Dirt filled his eyes and his mouth until he could no longer feel himself; he was a worm filled with dirt and wiggling up out of the darkness. A splinter of wood still grew from Felicia’s chest, but she was up into the light now, his mother once again.
He laid her on the ground. He fed her some of the witch’s milk. He was amazed at how light she was when he lifted her into the cart. The goat smiled, seeming to laugh at Alejandro, but willingly followed the boy’s tug.
For hours they travelled the dusty road back toward the village: Alejandro and the goat, his mother leaned up straight and stiff in the cart, and the thirsty cat following behind. Now and then he would stop and give his mother another drink, and sometimes he could almost see her smile.
Just as he had the village in sight his mother fell over in the cart. Alejandro scrambled around to the rear and climbed inside with her, the bucket still in his hands, the milk slopping out and washing his clothes, turning the plank floors of the cart into healthy, green wood.
She stared up at him with wormwood eyes. He gave her more and more of the witch’s milk. Her pale white tongue lapped greedily, but still her wooden eyes would not move, no matter how much he cried for her, how much he screamed he still needed her, or how much he confessed to her about the anger he felt at her leaving. Her body lay stiff and unmoving, with only her wet white worm of a tongue wiggling obscenely in the dark bore of her mouth. Finally he poured the remaining milk over her, but this brought no further changes.
He knew he could bring her like this to his father, this creature so like a wooden carving, and his father would have been satisfied. His father would dress her and hold her and keep her forever, and no one would be able to dissuade him. Nothing would ever change. Alejandro had ignored the witch, and wasted her milk.
He retrieved the two halves of the crude staff from his belt. He wrapped the pieces together with twine, binding them tightly. He hefted the mended staff and tested it for strength. Then Alejandro stood over his wooden mother and brought the staff down again and again, the snake biting her into more chips and splinters than he could count.
Through the back door Alejandro let himself into the house of the woodcarvers, and into the empty shop. He examined the hollowed out blocks of wood his father had arranged on a dusty shelf. As he took down each one he tried to remember the things his father had taught him about these samples:
The cypress . . .it doesn’t wear well. The willow . . . your mother, she likes the willow tree—but it has a tendency to split.
Now the Spanish cedar, it is easy to cut. But when his father pushed the sample up to Alejandro’s nose he had shaken his head. He did not like the smell at all. He remembered how hard his father had laughed then.
Some like the finished look of poplar. But for the woodcarver . . . His father shook his head doubtfully. It bruises too easily, and it grabs the tool like a cat with the cheese, and will not let go of it. It refuses your cuts, so why should you fight with it? Life is too short, muchacho.
So Alejandro chose the Black Walnut, his father’s favourite wood. See the fine, tough grain, Alejandro? This wood will accept more detail and undercuts than the rest . . . it will welcome the hand guided by a dream. It finishes beautifully, and has the darkness one expects in a dream . . .
He worked carefully with his father’s tools, including the ones his father had not taught him yet, the ones whose names alone he knew from his father’s working sing-songs. The carbon knife . . .
take the carbon knife, make the stroke but don’t bump against the tang. The tang. Use the mallet well, but use the mallet care . . . fully. Take the needle rasp, take the rasp riffler, and the fishtail, the fishtail,
shank . . .
Alejandro adopted his father’s techniques to his own dream, making of the skew chisel a knife for carving all the faces of his mother he could remember, all the postures of his father’s hands during a day spent carving, paring and drawing the fine lines of their marriage, using chamfer cuts, hollow cuts, and rocking cuts to shape the designs on his black walnut bowl, using the scrapers to smooth out his mother’s undying cheeks, the rifflers to define the delicate contours of his father’s fingertips as they caressed his mother’s face, Alejandro’s head, and the sides of this bowl itself.
Until he finished, and took the bowl with its offering of plain water to wet his father’s silent throat.
Make him drink. Speak to him of your mother. Shake him from his dream. The witch cow had said these things and many more. He had spoken with a cow and he had spoken with their wooden house and he had spoken with his dead mother. Now it was time to speak with his father who lay weeping in the other room. He misses holding her.
Silently he entered his father’s bedroom, stepping in exaggerated fashion like a young fool, gesturing in mute pantomime. He showed his father what he had made with his hands.
He told his father how unhappy he had been, and how much he missed his mother, what he remembered of her, some things she had done and said to him, how much he missed the carving and the talk of the workers in the shop, and how much he missed his father’s own talk. He told him how angry he was sometimes.
He told him of the cat and the cow, his snake broken into two halves of staff, of the goat with a woman’s eyes, and the great tree that his mother had dreamed out of her grave.
And then they shared their drink of sadness. All living things must drink at the place of their beginnings.
And later the old men and old women would tell how there had been so much weeping in that house, and yet how now and then, could be heard the healing laughter.
For what changes, lives.