The Road to Mecca

“ELSA: If my friends in Cape Town were to have seen that! You must understand, Miss Helen, Elsa Barlow is known as a ‘serious young woman.’ Bit of a bluestocking, in fact. Not much fun there! I don’t know how you did it, Helen, but you caught me with those stockings down from the first day we met. You have the rare distinction of being the only person who can make me a fool of myself…and enjoy it.

HELEN: You weren’t making a fool of yourself. And anyway what about me? Nearly seventy and behaving as if I were seven!

ELSA: Let’s face it, we’ve both still got a little girl hidden away in us somewhere.”

Elsa and Helen have this exchange after the two women act out an “arrival game.” It introduces Elsa and her “serious” and “bluestocking” (intelligent/literary) nature, while also demonstrating the special bond between Helen and Elsa, as they can let out their inner “little girls” around each other.

“I nearly didn’t stop for her. She didn’t signal that she wanted a lift or anything like that. Didn’t even look up when I passed…I was watching her in the rearview mirror. Maybe that’s what told me there was a long walk ahead of her…the way she had her head down and just kept on walking. And then the baby on her back. It was hot out there, Miss Helen, hot and dry and a lot of empty space…There wasn’t a farmhouse in sight. She looked very small and unimportant in the middle of all that. Anyway, I stopped and reversed and offered her a lift. Not very graciously. I’d already been driving for ten hours and all I wanted was to get here as fast as I could. She got in and after a few miles we started talking. Her English wasn’t very good, but when I finally got around to understanding what she was trying to tell me it added up to a good old South African story. Her husband, a farm laborer, had died recently, and no sooner had they buried him when the baas told her to pack up and leave the farm. So there she was…on her way to the Cradock district, where she hoped to find a few distant relatives and a place to live.”

Elsa says this to Helen while telling her about her drive to New Bethesda from Cape Town. The story of the woman on the side of the road will become a recurring symbol and talking point throughout the play, as Elsa continues to dwell on it and compares the woman’s life with her own. The story also demonstrates the inherent racial inequality prevalent in South Africa at the time.

“HELEN: It grows on you, Elsa.

ELSA: Which is just about the only growing it seems to allow. For the rest, it’s as merciless as the religion they preach around here. Looking out the car window this afternoon I think I finally understood a few things about you Afrikaners…and it left me feeling a little uneasy.

HELEN: You include me in all you’re saying.

ELSA: Yes. You might not go to church anymore, but you’re still an Afrikaner, Miss Helen. You were in there with them, singing hymns every Sunday, for a long, long time. Bit of a renegade now, I admit, but you’re still one at heart.”

Helen and Elsa have this exchange as they discuss Elsa’s drive through the Karoo, a desert area of South Africa, and its desolation. It introduces the traditional values of Helen’s town—thus helping to illustrate why she and her “Mecca” are such social pariahs—and also establishes Helen’s persona as being in line with these values and as a churchgoing woman. Helen will somewhat contradict this view later, when she reveals she lost her faith long ago.

“Good luck to him. I hope the friendship continues. It’s just that I wouldn’t want him for one. Sorry, Miss Helen, but I don’t trust your old friend, and I have a strong feeling that Pastor Marius Byleveld feels the same way about me.”

Elsa says this to Helen when Helen mentions that Marius has been coming to visit her. It introduces Marius and the mutual dislike between him and Elsa, which will come to define much of the second act.

“HELEN: Those attitudes might be all right in Cape Town, Elsa, but you should know by now that the valley has got its own way of doing things.

ELSA: Well, it can’t cut itself off from the twentieth century forever. […) Your little world is not as safe as you would like to believe, Helen. If you think it’s going to be left alone to stagnate in the nineteenth century while the rest of us hold our breath hoping we’ll reach the end the twentieth, you’re in for one hell of a surprise. And it will start with your Coloured folk. They’re not fools. They also read newspapers, you know. […] As for you Helen! Sometimes the contradictions in you make me want to scream. Why do you always stand up and defend this bunch of bigots? Look at the way they’ve treated you.”

Helen and Elsa have this exchange while discussing New Bethesda’s racial attitudes, after Helen says that there’s a controversy over the town opening a liquor store over fears it is “ruining the health and lives of our Coloured folk” (12). It shows the conservative attitudes of New Bethesda and of South Africa during apartheid in the 1970s, as well as how Helen, though she stands apart from her community in many respects, still seems to subscribe to its racial hierarchy. It also shows Elsa’s passion for racial equality and her “outsider” status in New Bethesda.

“Do you know what the really big word is, Helen? I had it all wrong. Like most people, I suppose I used to think it was ‘love.’ That’s the big one all right, and it’s quite an event when it comes along. But there’s an even bigger one. Trust. And more dangerous. Because that’s when you drop your defenses, lay yourself wide open, and if you’ve made a mistake, you’re in big, big trouble. And it hurts like hell. Ever heard the story about the father giving his son his first lesson in business? […] He puts his little boy high up on something or other and says to him, ‘Jump. Don’t worry, I’ll catch you.’ […] Eventually the little boy works up enough courage and does jump, and Daddy, of course, doesn’t make a move to catch him. When the child has stopped crying—because he hurt himself—the father says: ‘Your first lesson in business, my son. Don’t trust anybody.’ […] I think it’s ugly. That little boy is going to think twice about jumping again, and at this moment the same goes for Elsa Barlow.”

Elsa gives this speech to Helen after telling her about her breakup with a man who had a wife and child and would not leave them for her. It introduces the idea of trust, which becomes a major theme throughout the play and between Elsa and Helen. The “joke” that Elsa tells Helen also makes a reappearance at the end, when Elsa references it after Helen asks whether she trusts her.

“I was never ‘wide open’ to anyone. But with you all of that changed. So it’s as simple as that. Trust. I’ve always tried to understand what made you, and being with you, so different from anything else in my life. But, of course, that’s it. I trust you. That’s why my little girl can come out and play. All the doors are wide open!”

Helen says this to Elsa as they’re discussing the idea of trust. It reinforces the trust between the women and what makes their relationship unique. It also provides a contrast to what transpires later in the play, when their sense of trust is tested after Elsa finds out Helen lied to her about the fire.

“I wish I could make you realize what it’s like to be walking down a dusty, deserted little street in a God-forsaken village in the middle of the Karoo, bored to death by the heat and the flies and silence, and then to be stopped in your tracks—and I mean stopped!—by all of that out there. And then, having barely recovered from that, to come inside and find this! Believe me Helen, when I saw your ‘Mecca’ for the first time, I just stood there and gaped. […] And then you! Standing next to a mosque made out of beer bottles and staring back at me like one of your owls! (A good laugh at the memory) She’s mad. No question about it. Everything they’ve told me about her is true. A genuine Karoo nutcase.”

Elsa tells this to Helen about their first meeting. It shows Elsa’s admiration of Helen and her “Mecca” and provides some reasoning for why she continues to return; it also highlights the difference between Helen’s home and her surrounding community, introducing Helen’s status within the town as being “mad” and a “nutcase.”

“All those years of working on my Mecca had at last been vindicated. […] I suddenly realized I was beginning to feel shy, more shy than I had even been with Stefanus on my wedding night. […] You see, when I lit the candles you were finally going to see all of me. I don’t mean my face, or the clothes I was wearing—you had already seen all of that out in the yard—I mean the real me, because that is what this room is…and I desperately, oh so desperately, wanted you to like what you saw. By the time we met I had got used to rude eyes staring at me and my work, dismissing both of them as ugly. I’d lived with those eyes for fifteen years, and they didn’t bother me anymore. Yours were different. In just the little time we had already been together I had ended up feeling…No, more than that: I knew I could trust them. There’s our big word again, Elsie! […] You liked what you saw! This is the best of me, Elsa. This is what I really am. Forget everything else. Nothing, not even my name or my face, is me as much as those Wise Men and their camels traveling to the East, or the light and glitter in this room. […] Dear God. If only you knew what you did for my life that day. [(…] When you walked into my life that afternoon I hadn’t been able to work or make anything for nearly a year…and I was beginning to think I wouldn’t ever again, that I had reached the end. The only reason I’ve got for being alive is my Mecca. Without that I’m…nothing…a useless old woman getting on everybody’s nerves…and that is exactly what I had started to feel like. You revived my life.”

Helen tells this to Elsa about their first meeting. It shows the bond between the two women and why Helen feels as strongly about Elsa as she does, while also revealing the personal importance of Helen’s “Mecca” in her life, as her home represents who she is and serves as her life’s purpose. It also hints at the depression that Helen has felt, as well as how her town has ostracized her and made her feel like a pariah.

“I try to be patient with myself, but it’s hard. There isn’t all that much time left…and then my eyes…and my hands…they’re not what they used to be. But the worst thing of all is…suppose that I’m waiting for nothing, that there won’t be any more pictures inside every again, that this time I have reached the end? Oh God, no! Please no. Anything but that.”

Helen says this to Elsa after Elsa asks why she hasn’t made any new artwork lately. It suggests Helen’s mental and physical decline—which will soon become a major focus of the plot through Helen’s letter and the debate over her elderly home application—as well as her inner agitation and mounting depression.

“My very own and dearest little Elsie,

Have you finally also deserted me? This is my fourth letter to you and still no reply. Have I done something wrong? This must surely be the darkest night of my soul. I thought I had lived through that fifteen years ago, but I was wrong. This is worse. Infinitely worse. I had nothing to lose that night. Nothing in my life was precious or worth holding on to. Now there is so much and I am losing it all…you, the house, my work, my Mecca. I can’t fight them alone, little Elsie. I need you. Don’t you care about me anymore? It is only through your eyes that I now see my Mecca. I need you, Elsie. My eyesight is so bad that I can barely see the words I am writing. And my hands can hardly hold the pen. Help me, little Elsie. Everything is ending and I am alone in the dark. There is no light left. I would rather do away with myself than carry on like this.

Your ever-loving and anguished

Helen.”

This is a letter that Helen sent to Elsa, prompting Elsa’s visit, and which Elsa reads aloud. It’s important for showing Helen’s current mental state and troubles, as well as providing the catalyzing incident for the play and the impetus for discussing Helen’s potential move to the elderly home, which will then go on dominate the rest of the play. It also suggests the potential fate of Helen, whose real-life inspiration committed suicide.

“I’m sorry, Helen, but what do you expect me to do? Pretend you never said it? Is that what you would have done if our situations had been reversed? [(…] God knows, I came near to feeling like it a couple of times. […] But if I can hang on, then you most certainly can’t throw in the towel—not after all the rounds you’ve already won against them. So when the dominee comes around, you’re going to put on a brave front. Let’s get him and his stupid ideas about an old-age home right out of your life. Because you’re going to say no, remember?”“I’m sorry, Helen, but what do you expect me to do? Pretend you never said it? Is that what you would have done if our situations had been reversed? [(…] God knows, I came near to feeling like it a couple of times. […] But if I can hang on, then you most certainly can’t throw in the towel—not after all the rounds you’ve already won against them. So when the dominee comes around, you’re going to put on a brave front. Let’s get him and his stupid ideas about an old-age home right out of your life. Because you’re going to say no, remember?”

Elsa tells this to Helen after Helen asks her to talk to Marius about Helen’s not wanting to go to the old age home. It shows Elsa’s forceful nature in how she interacts with Helen throughout the play, as well as the common trouble in their lives at the time. It also suggests how Elsa admires Helen for her independent spirit and wants to encourage it in her; later monologues in the play also reflect this admiration.

"Darkness, Elsa! Darkness! (She speaks with an emotional intensity and authority which forces Elsa to listen in silence) The Darkness that nearly smothered my life in here one night fifteen years ago. The same Darkness that used to come pouring down the chimney and into the room at night when I was a little girl and frighten me. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, blow out the candles!

But those were easy Darknesses to deal with. The one I’m talking about now is much worse. It’s inside me, Elsa…it’s got inside me at last and I can’t light candles there. […]

I’m frightened, Elsie, more frightened than that little girl ever was […] and the candles don’t help anymore. That is what I was trying to tell you. I’m frightened. And Marius can see it. He’s no fool, Elsa. He knows that his moment has finally come.”

Helen says this to Elsa to explain what her letter was truly about. It shows Helen’s mental decline and incoming depression, and it illustrates how Helen uses notions of darkness and light to reflect her mental state. Her mention of Marius also foreshadows the ensuing arguments in Act II, as Marius tries to get Helen out of the “Darkness” that he thinks comes from her retreat into her “Mecca” by cajoling her to be admitted to the old age home.

“But grateful? Yes! Our Coloured folk also have every reason to be. Ask them. Ask little Katrina, who visits Miss Helen so faithfully, if she or her baby have ever wanted for food…even when Koos has spent all his wages on liquor. There are no hungry people, white or Coloured, in this village, Miss Barlow. Those of us who are more fortunate than others are well aware of the responsibilities that go with that good fortune. But I don’t want to get into an argument. It is my world—and Helen’s—and we can’t expect an outsider to love or understand it as we do.”

Marius says this to Elsa after she asks whether the town’s “Coloured” population “had as many reasons to be as contented as you” (43). It shows the conventional attitudes toward race in conservative New Bethesda, in which Africans do not receive equal treatment but the white Afrikaners do not recognize, or perhaps care about, the injustices they’re perpetuating. It also shows how Marius still, at that point, considers Helen to be a part of the community, even as her life choices have put her so far outside its conventions.

“HELEN: Katrina is the only friend I’ve got left in the village.

MARIUS: That’s a hard thing you’re saying, Helen. All of us still like to think of ourselves as your friends.

HELEN: I wasn’t including you, Marius. You’re different. But as for the others…no. They’ve all become strangers to me. I might just as well not know their names. And they treat me as if I was a stranger to them as well.

MARIUS: You’re being very unfair, Helen. They behave toward you in the way you apparently want them to, which is to leave you completely alone. […] To be very frank, Helen, it’s your manner which now keeps them at a distance. I don’t think you realize how much you’ve changed over the years. You’re not easily recognizable to others anymore as the person they knew fifteen years ago. And then your hobby, if I can call it that, hasn’t really helped matters. This is not exactly the sort of room the village ladies are used to or would feel comfortable in having afternoon tea. As for all of that out there…the less said about it, the better.”

Helen and Marius have this exchange after Marius tells Helen that Katrina will be moving out of town. It demonstrates Helen’s social ostracism and shows how she is conflicted between self and community, at once renouncing society (Marius saying she wants the others to leave her “completely alone”) while lamenting her loneliness. It also shows how Marius judges Helen’s life choices, setting up their escalating conversation, and articulates the view that the town holds of Helen and her “Mecca.”

“MARIUS: (Trying hard to control himself) Miss Barlow, for the last time, what you do or don’t believe is not of the remotest concern to me. Helen is, and my concern is that she gets a chance to live out what is left of her life as safely and happily as is humanly possible. I don’t think that should include the danger of her being trapped in here when this house goes up in flames. 

ELSA: What are you talking about?

MARIUS: Her accident. The night she knocked over the candle. (Elsa is obviously at a loss) You don’t know about that? […] Helen knocked over a candle one night and set fire to the curtains. I try not to think about what would have happened if Sterling hadn’t been looking out of his window at that moment and seen the flames. He rushed over, and just in time. She had stopped trying to put out the flames herself and was just standing staring at them.”

Marius and Elsa have this exchange after Elsa gets angry and yells at Marius for “bullying” Helen into signing the application form. The anecdote of Helen knocking over the candle at once shows her ongoing decline—and potentially her suicidal thoughts—and provides a more concrete explanation for Marius’s desire to move her into the old age home. Elsa’s ignorance about the incident, which Helen deliberately didn’t tell her about, also ties into the theme of trust versus. love, giving Elsa reason to distrust Helen while still retaining her love for her.

“That stopped fifteen years ago when she didn’t resign herself to being the meek, churchgoing little widow you all expected her to be. Instead she did something which small minds and small souls can never forgive…she dared to be different! Which does make you right about one thing, Dominee. Those statues out there are monsters. And they are that for the simple reason that they express Helen’s freedom. […] I’m sure it ranks as a cardinal sin in these parts. A free woman! God forgive us!

Have you ever wondered why I come up here? […] She challenges me, Dominee. She challenges me into an awareness of myself and my life, of my responsibilities to both that I never had until I met her. There’s a hell of a lot of talk about freedom, and all sorts of it, in the world where I come from. But it’s mostly talk, Dominee, easy talk and nothing else. Not with Helen. She’s lived it. One dusty afternoon five years ago, when I came walking down that road hoping for nothing more than to get away from the flies that were driving me mad, I met the first truly free spirit I have ever known. (She looks at Miss Helen) It is her betrayal of all that tonight that has made me behave the way I have.”

Elsa gives this speech to Marius after he claims that the people in town have known Helen a lot longer than Elsa has. It illustrates the play’s theme of freedom by directly linking Helen’s life choices with her personal freedom, and it explains the reasons behind Elsa’s kinship and close bond with Helen. Her statement that in Cape Town people just “talk about freedom” also ties the characters’ apartheid-era context with the action of the play, linking Helen’s “Mecca” and Elsa’s activism for racial justice over their similar themes of freedom and demonstrating how Elsa’s activism against racism is buoyed by Helen’s own radical acts.

“Helen, Helen! I grieve for you! You turned your back on your church, on your faith and then on us for that? Do you realize that that is why you are now in trouble and so helplessly alone? Those statues out there can’t give you love or take care of you the way we wanted to. And, God knows, we were ready to do that. But you spurned us, Helen. You turned your back on our love and left us for the company of those cement monstrosities.”

Marius says this to Helen after she explains that she was once so inspired to create an owl sculpture that she spontaneously decided to skip church, which gave Marius great concern. He blatantly states that Helen has been shunned from his Christian society because of her statues and “Mecca” and her pursuit of artistic and personal freedom, illustrating the theme of self versus community and how this schism is exacerbated by religion and faith.

“They’re not only frightened of you, Helen; they’re also jealous. It’s not just the statues that have frightened them. They were throwing stones at something much bigger than that—you. Your life, your beautiful, light-filled, glittering life. And they can’t leave it alone, Helen, because they are so, so jealous of it.”

Elsa says this to Helen directly after Marius’s quote above. It puts a different spin on the idea of the self versus community, suggesting that those who conform to the community are in fact jealous of those who can break free from it, and once again spotlights how Helen’s “Mecca” has given her freedom and happiness.

“That I am frightened of what you have done to yourself and your life, yes, that is true! When I find that the twenty years that we have known each other, all that we have shared in that time, are outweighed by a handful of visits from her, then yes again. That leaves me bewildered and jealous. Don’t you admit that you are being used, Helen—she as much admitted to that—to prove some lunatic notion about freedom? And since we’re talking about it, yes yet again, I do hate that word. You aren’t free, Helen. If anything, exactly the opposite. Don’t let her deceive you. […] [S]ee yourself as I do and tell me if that is what you call being ‘free.’ A life I care about as deeply as any I have known, trapped now finally in the nightmare this house has become…with an illiterate little Coloured girl and a stranger from a different world as your only visitors and friends! I know I’m not welcome in here anymore. […] It’s unnatural, Helen. Your life has become as grotesque as those creations of yours out there.”

Marius says this to Helen as they argue about her and her “Mecca.” It again shows the view that Marius—and by extension, the more “conventional” South African society—has of Helen and her “Mecca”: he does not understand it, instead viewing it and her life as “grotesque.” It also adds nuance to the play’s theme of freedom versus oppression, showing that, for Marius, the isolation of Helen’s life means she is oppressed rather than free; this opinion stands in contrast to Elsa’s view that her non-conformity and individual thinking give her freedom, despite her solitude.

“What life, Marius? What faith? The one that brought me to church every Sunday? (Shaking her head) No. You were much too late if you only started worrying about that on the first Sunday I wasn’t there in my place. […] I’d accepted it. Nothing more was going to happen to me except time and the emptiness inside and I had got used to that…until the night in here after Stefanus’s funeral. […]

You brought me home from the cemetery, remember, and when we had got inside the house and you had helped me off with my coat, you put on the kettle and then…ever so thoughtfully…pulled the curtains and closed the shutters. Such a small little thing, and I know that you meant well by it, that you didn’t want people to stare in at me and my grief…but in doing that it felt as if you were putting away my life as surely as the undertaker had done to Stefanus a little earlier when he closed the coffin lid. […] My black widowhood was really for my own life, Marius. While Stefanus was alive there had at least been some pretense at it…of a life I hadn’t lived. But with him gone…! You had a little girl in here with you, Marius, who had used up all the prayers she knew and was dreading the moment when her mother would bend down, blow out the candle and leave her in the dark.  You lit one for me before you left […] That little candle did all the crying in here that night, and […] I was just sitting there staring into its flame. I had surrendered myself to what was going to happen when it went out…but then instead of doing the same, allowing the darkness to defeat it, that small, uncertain little light seemed to find its courage again. […] [A] strange feeling came over me…that it was leading me…leading me far away to a place I had never been to before. […]

And you know why, Marius? That is the East. Go out there into the yard and you’ll see that all my Wise Men and their camels are traveling in that direction. Follow that candle on and one day you’ll come to Mecca. Oh yes, Marius, it’s true! I’ve done it. That is where I went that night and it was the candle you lit that led me there. 

(She is radiantly alive with her vision) A city, Marius! A city of light and color more splendid than anything I had ever imagined. […]

Light them all, Elsa, so that I can show Marius what I’ve learned! (Elsa moves around the room lighting all the candles, and as she does so its full magic and splendor is revealed. Miss Helen laughs ecstatically)

Look, Marius! Look! Light. Don’t be nervous. It’s harmless. It only wants to play. That is what I do in here. We play with it like children with a magical toy that never ceases to delight and amuse. […] This is my world and I have banished darkness from it.

It is not madness, Marius. They say mad people can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is not. I can. I know my little Mecca out there, and this room, for what they really are. […] My hands will never forget. They’ll keep me sane. It’s the best I could do, as near as I could get to the real Mecca. The journey is over now. This is as far as I can go.

I won’t be using this (the application form). I can’t reduce my world to a few ornaments in a small room in an old-age home.”

Helen gives this speech after Marius asks Helen what possessed her to “abandon” her faith. It is perhaps the play’s most important quote, giving Helen the chance to fully externalize her rich inner life while Elsa lights candles to show the room at its full power. The speech and her “Mecca” reaching its full power also give Helen the strength of will to renounce the conventions of her community (and explain for the first time that she hasn’t fit in with them as well as Marius, or even Elsa, thought) and give back the application form. It explains the play’s title, The Road to Mecca, as depicting Helen’s own journey to create the vision of Mecca that she had in her head. It also reveals why light and candles are so important to Helen, as she saw herself represented by the candle the night of Stefanus’s funeral, and their presence signifies her banishing the darkness she felt that night out of her life.

“A lift to where, for God’s sake? There’s no Mecca waiting for her at the end of that road, Helen. Just the rest of her life, and there won’t be any glitter on that. The sooner she knows what the score really is, the better.”

Elsa says this to Helen about the woman on the road, after Elsa says that she hopes the woman didn’t get a lift after Elsa left. It depicts Elsa’s cross mood and pessimism toward society, which she shows throughout the play, and it highlights the racial injustice in their South African society and the relative privilege of Helen’s “freedom.” Unlike Helen, who is white and has the freedom to live the life she wants, the African woman on the road cannot have the same “road to Mecca” and will never be truly free.

“It is as much as ‘we’ could do, Elsa. The rest is up to myself and, who knows, maybe it will be a little easier after tonight. I won’t lie to you. I can’t say that I’m not frightened anymore. But at the same time I think I can say that I understand something now. 

The road to Mecca was one that I had to travel alone. It was a journey on which no one could keep me company, and because of that, now that it is over, there is only me there at the end of it. It couldn’t have been any other way. 

You see, I meant what I said to Marius. This is as far as I can go. My Mecca is finished and with it—(Pause) I must try to say it, mustn’t I?—the only real purpose my life has ever had.

(She blows out a candle) I was wrong to think I could banish darkness, Elsa. Just as I taught myself how to light candles, and what that means, I must teach myself now how to blow them out…and what that means.

(She attempts a brave smile) The last phase of my apprenticeship…and if I can get through it, I’ll be a master!”

Helen says this to Elsa as they decompress after their long evening. It gives Helen a chance to reflect on her “road to Mecca” and consider its ending. It shows growth from the first act, when Helen despaired about the possibility of her road ending, while she now accepts it—and “darkness,” her former enemy—as necessary. It also shows growth from her previous feelings of loneliness, as she now realizes that her solitude was an essential part of her personal journey. However, the quote also hints that Helen’s suicidal thoughts are still present, though not in the depression-fueled form of Act I, and suggests what her fate could be after the play ends and the reasoning behind it. (The true-life inspiration for Helen’s character died by an apparent suicide.)