Cathedral of the Wild

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by Boyd Varty


  The robbers began leading us off one by one, motioning us into rooms in the hope that we’d bring them to hidden treasure. “Money. We’ll kill you.” One of them had grabbed an old cowhide bullwhip from my room and shook it threateningly at us. “Tell us or we’ll kill you.” My greatest fear was that my sister, mother, and teacher would be raped. In a moment when the villains were out of the room, we agreed that if it started to go that way, the victim would call out, and the others would rush in and fight and to hell with the guns.

  Thousands of years of evolution spoke through our actions. And then there was magic—or, rather, something divine. Hours into our ordeal, when Bron was near despair, as she was marched past a closed cupboard, her hands bound, the cupboard suddenly popped open and dozens of sympathy cards for the loss of our grandmother, whom Bron had loved dearly, poured out. Gogo Varty’s photo fluttered down right on top of them. I felt sure that she was watching over us.

  One of the invaders unloaded and reloaded his Glock in front of us, pointedly counting out the bullets—more than enough to shoot all of us. They took turns taking loot outside. We later learned they’d loaded it into one of our vehicles as a getaway car. At one point they took a break from their ransacking and went to the fridge, wolfing down that evening’s Indian takeout. I was revolted by the normalcy of the one action combined with the menace of the other.

  I’d become aware of something in me that made me even sicker. I’d weighed up my moment and knew that if given the chance, I would kill any way I had to. The knowledge of evil had reached the center of my being, where it could control my actions, where I would become the one without empathy and without mercy. I looked around the room, wondering what I could turn into a weapon that could induce blunt force trauma or a wound that would bleed heavily. Here was the perverse opposite of my bush training. Instead of saving a life, I was methodically and cold-bloodedly inspecting each object in the room for its potential to kill or maim.

  Every time the robbers moved us around the house, I tried to position myself as a target. We were shoved into a small bedroom upstairs. Bron, Mom, and Kate hid beneath the bed. I sat on top, waiting. It had already been more than three hours, an eternity. We felt desperate, fearful that they would shoot us before they left, a common trend in these kinds of attacks.

  One of the gunmen came into the room, grabbed me by the arm, and shoved me down a hallway. He pressed his gun’s cold metal barrel against my forehead. And at that moment, piercing the deadness of my own capacity for evil, I felt a massive power protecting me, its only concern for the pain of others. The assailant then slid the gun into my mouth. A voice boomed inside my head and body; a knowing overcame me: “You are always safe.”

  It felt like a moment of divine clarity. I didn’t stop to contemplate where this message had come from. In that instant, I knew only that it was absolutely true. I was loved and protected.

  I looked up the barrel at the man with the gun.

  And I winked.

  It was a moment of silent connection. I was seventeen; he was perhaps only a few years older. But now I saw that he had become a boy, a scared little boy, with nothing else to live for and no other way to sustain himself. This wasn’t some political throwback of blacks robbing whites; this was a desperate person doing what he had to do to survive. I saw him for what he really was under the paper-thin act, and I forgave him.

  Downstairs, in the bar area, the robbers demanded the house and car keys, which I handed over. Then I handed them the panic button, which would send an alarm signal to a security company. “This is the gate remote,” I told them. “Press it when you get close and the gates will open automatically.” They led me back upstairs to a spare room, where Bron, Mom, and Kate sat mutely. One of the robbers was still brandishing my bullwhip. We heard the key turn in the lock, and the sound of their footsteps faded away.

  A few moments later, our alarm started shrilling; the robbers had tried to get out through the gate. Armed security guards would arrive soon, although our assailants were never apprehended. Our ordeal was over. Tatty was safe and sound behind a closed door. Mom phoned Dad, who hopped the next plane from London to get home. Uncle John drove straight through the night for seven hours to be with us the next morning.

  By the time we’d given our reports to the police, it was four a.m. and we were too wired to sleep. Mom lit hundreds of candles—her equivalent of cleansing the area with sage—and made each of us take a bath with sandalwood soap, for its calming effect. We told ourselves the story of what had happened over and over, still in the grip of terror.

  We moved out of that house the very next day, never to return, but even so, we were shattered for months afterward, each of us in a unique way. If somebody slammed a car trunk at a shopping center, Mom would flinch or even dive to the ground. She had the head of lodge security put up a target, took out a 9mm gun, and just blasted that thing to smithereens. When she and Bron visited a trauma-release expert, he had them tell and retell their stories, then asked them to frame a new outcome for the robbery. “How do you want to finish it?” Mom conjured a vivid image of following the men and shooting them dead.

  Various triggers could send Bron racing off at forty miles an hour: having to sleep in a big house, driving at night, when a guy—even a friend, sometimes—came anywhere near her. She couldn’t breathe properly. It took months of breath- and bodywork before she could release the scream that had lodged itself so deep inside her.

  Kate discovered a seething rage she’d never known. When Mom insisted that she do Reiki, the therapist gently touched her back and Kate broke down in racking waves of sobs.

  Many months later, Mom decided that she no longer wanted to be frozen in fear. “Africa is my place, where I’m meant to be,” she declared, “and I will accept it and make this thing pass. It will not have any power over me.” She, Kate, and Bron wrote letters of forgiveness to the robbers, expressing gratitude for everything the incident had taught them. They believed that they had been allowed to survive in order to do some great work in the world. Then they released the letters into the sea.

  I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—process the experience. “No, I’m fine,” I told Mom when she pressed the point. I wasn’t. We made a family decision to keep the whole thing quiet.

  Dad was also shattered, but in a completely different way. For him, this was the third blow, following short on the heels of two other heartbreaks.

  Four months earlier, I’d been with Dad and Mom when we got the news that Dad’s mother had been in a car crash. We drove straight to the hospital. No one would tell us what was going on. I grew very suspicious. “Just come and wait in here,” a nurse instructed, and stuck us in a side room. A huge bell rang for me. Sure enough, a doctor arrived a few minutes later. “Are you Mr. Varty?” he asked Dad. “I’m sorry to tell you that your mother died at ten twenty-five this morning.”

  Dad collapsed straight down into a chair and buried his face in his hands. I felt like I’d just seen someone blow up the base of a huge statue, so that it crumpled where it stood. My dad, the pillar of strength who would grab me by the shirt in the face of danger and guide me to safety, who tore holes in thorn trees, had now been leveled by one sentence.

  “Do you want to see her?” the doctor asked. Gran was on the table in the operating theater with a sheet pulled up under her chin, lying there as if she were sleeping. Dad looked down at his mother numbly. Mom gently removed Gran’s rings and necklaces so she could give them to us.

  We all knew Gran as “the mother of Londolozi.” When everyone else had urged her to sell the farm, she’d trusted that her teenage sons could make their dream of a safari business work. For fifteen years after my grandfather died, she hadn’t gone back to Londolozi—the memories were too painful—but since then she’d become a regular presence. On every visit, she brought aloes for replanting along the pathways, a milk tart wobbling precariously on top of the box. She’d sit by Dad’s side in the Land Rover, holding hands with him on long
private game drives.

  In that moment at the hospital, Dad became a small boy in front of my eyes. The knowledge that someday I would be a body on a slab hit me hard. But I stayed calm. My job was to support my father, to keep it together for him.

  Two weeks after Gran died, Dad had flown to London to meet with the shareholders of CC Africa. It looked like the hammer was falling for him. The company was losing money, but Dad was confident that he could get it turned around with some adjustments. After all, he’d worked with these businessmen for ten years to launch twenty-three ecotourism operations, employ thirty-five hundred rural African people, and create a whole new park in Phinda. Dad was desperate for the corporation to wait out the losses and hold his vision for the long term.

  When the home invasion came, a few months later, it really punched Dad in the gut. His family had been under dire threat while he was back in London, in a last-ditch effort to keep CC Africa on board. The shareholders had decided against him at that very meeting. He’d loved CC Africa the same way he’d loved Londolozi, but the corporation hadn’t loved him back. It couldn’t, by its very nature. And now he was out. He had no idea what he was going to do next.

  On the small glass table next to my parents’ bed is a black-and-white photo of Dad in his first boxing match, at age six; he’s sliding under a heavy-looking punch from a bigger boy. On the back of the photo, written in faint pencil, the caption reads, “Dave’s first fight, received a bloody nose but went on to win the fight.” Despite countless bloody noses, he’s gone on to win many fights since, but I didn’t know if he had it in him to prevail over the three knock-down punches of his mother’s death, parting from CC Africa, and learning that he’d left his family unprotected during a home invasion. He didn’t, either.

  How many times had my father told me the story of “the Rumble in the Jungle,” the famous fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire? He was obsessed with it. I wondered if Dad could make it to the place far out over the horizon, a place only the great boxers can find, where they receive that miraculous second wind. Dad and I must have watched that video dozens of times: after being punished for the whole fight, Ali found that second wind in the eighth round. There’s an iconic moment where he hits Foreman and you can see the sweat explode off Foreman’s head. In that instant, the whole fight changes. Ali starts to chant into Foreman’s ear, “You shoulda never came to Africa!” A few right hooks, a few left hooks, a punch straight to the face, and Foreman hit the canvas. I’d always seen Dad as Ali. Suddenly he was looking like Foreman, down for the count.

  He didn’t talk to me about it, but I understood that Dad was profoundly disillusioned. Something had come into his eyes, a shadow I’d never seen before.

  Something had come into me, too. Something I was too numb to truly acknowledge. After the attack, I knew that none of us would ever be the same; we had learned that security from violence is a fragile illusion. On that particular Sunday evening, sleeping in bed, watching a movie in our own home, we were being watched.

  You can be sitting on your fat wallet when the market crashes. You can be sitting safely inside your beautiful home when it’s invaded. From the bush I’d learned that the most dangerous animals in nature were mostly predictable; now I knew that the most ordinary human was not.

  I felt poisoned by the complacent acceptance of crime, which dehumanizes victim and criminal alike. I hated that my experience had made me in some way a party to that kind of thinking. I hated the toll the invasion took on me, infecting my waking life with anxiety, my sleep with nightmares. And I hated the darkness inside me as I’d contemplated turning on our captors. You can’t ever be young again once you’ve mentally rehearsed the details of a murder you genuinely intend to commit. There was a grim satisfaction in knowing that my bush education had served me well; I’d stayed calm throughout the ordeal. But that deeper, more sinister knowledge of myself as a cold-blooded murderer took a high toll. Unbeknownst to me, invisible shrapnel had found purchase in flesh and bone, where it would fester as a numbness that became so normal I forgot it was there.

  “You are always safe.” The cold numbness shrouded the memory of that comforting knowledge. It would be a long time before I could look back on that night and see that moment of light as well as darkness.

  EIGHTEEN

  SEEKING

  “HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT what your plans are going to be?”

  Mom asked. “You’ve got a good brain. I hope you’re going to put something in it. Have you thought about going to university? It’s a good idea to get something under your belt.”

  I didn’t see the point. “I don’t know anyone who’s actually doing anything that they studied at university.” Through my post-traumatic haze, I’d barely managed to finish high school.

  “You’re right in some ways,” Mom said. “But it helps to have studied something.”

  Kate proposed a solution: “Boydie, why don’t you take a gap year?” For most eighteen-year-olds, the gap year was an opportunity to cut loose before the rigors of college. By all rights, I should be getting a job on a tropical island, working for a year as a barman while drinking rum and sleeping with pretty girls. Yet I felt only faintly in my own life. What I needed wasn’t mindless fun. The invasion had blown a big hole in my life, and I was embarrassed that it affected me so much. I thought that if I could find something meaningful, I could fix it without anyone ever noticing.

  Dad had always maintained that Bron and I should have an international perspective. He believed that travel was the best way to broaden your horizons. I was looking for who I was and where I fitted in. Sometimes you learn that by finding out where you don’t fit. I decided to travel as a way of seeing myself out of the context that defined me; I hoped that journeying around the world would show me as much about myself as about other cultures. I was looking for answers to questions I hadn’t even fully articulated yet.

  After my adventures with Kate, I had a completely precocious idea of myself as a seasoned world traveler, but what I ended up with was a callow eighteen-year-old’s reality of a trip: no plans, no money, no direction.

  As a young boy, I’d pored over Julian Johnson’s The Path of the Masters, a guide to spiritual enlightenment my father had brought home. It was one of the first books that tried to translate Eastern spirituality for the Western mind. Now I had a longing to meet a guru or to have a vision. I wanted an answer to show up, like a burning bush or a voice from the sky. I’d read about a certain master in India. Surely he’d have my solution.

  Two weeks later, I was in New Delhi with a hundred thousand other people to listen to the master speak. There was a perfect order to the gathering; no one pushed or shoved, just endless line after line of people sitting in perfect stillness. Chants washed across the crowd like waves of energy passing across the audience.

  The master arrived dressed in white, with a proud-looking turban. He quoted from different sacred texts, including the Quran and the Bible. “At their core, all the teachings are the same,” he told us. “The journey is the same. Religious dogma and ritual created by men has obscured the simplicity of the journey.” He urged us to seek peace within through meditation.

  Perhaps this was the answer. I’d stay at the ashram, plant myself on a pillow, and find enlightenment. The next day I sat before the master in a private audience, waiting to present myself as his new acolyte.

  His eyes were beautiful in their softness. “Don’t join us,” he told me. “Go and experience the world. Remember that the whole spiritual journey is internal. When you get a bit older and if you still have the longing, come back to me and I’ll help you go on that journey.” The whole journey is internal. I didn’t even know what that meant.

  Perhaps enlightenment lay at the mouth of the Inca Trail, the sacred valley that leads to Machu Picchu. I teamed up with Andy, a friend of a friend, to meet an authentic South American shaman. He likewise turned me away, with far less kindness than the Eastern master. He knew that we weren’
t prepared to journey with him. Then Andy and I headed deep inside the Amazon jungle to wrap ourselves in the lungs and immune system of the world. What we got instead was a grim slog punctuated by a heaving case of turista.

  I was down in a squat, in great gastric distress, when out of nowhere a tree on the lip of the gully creaked and crashed down. I had to dive for cover to avoid being pulverized.

  “Shit, Varty,” Andy said when I told him what had happened. “I can’t work out whether next to you is the most safe or deadly place in the world. You’re a fucking magnet!”

  Andy was right; I did feel like something inside me was suddenly a magnet for all the woe around me. It was in the lost, unsure places that I had always felt most alive. But here, in this most alive of all places, I felt lost and unsure.

  After the jungle disgorged us, Andy and I went our separate ways. I kept taking aim at aimlessness, spending endless, monotonous hours on buses as Spanish movies blared through the night.

  On a tour bus out of San Pedro, Chile, to visit the local hot springs, our guide warned us that when we arrived, we should walk very carefully and not go too close to the steaming pools, because the mineral edges there were very fragile and broke easily. We’d been there for about ten minutes, casually strolling around, watching the steam billow out of the springs in great clouds, when a scream broke through the morning stillness. To my horror, I saw a man who’d fallen in trying to swim in the boiling water.

  All my years of safari lodge trauma training came back to me. I ran to him and, with a few others, managed to pull him out. But the boiling water had done too much damage, and his skin came off in great clumps in our hands.

 

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