The Weekender, July 2006

I reach Nieu Bethesda at night. It is dark. There are no street lights for me to follow. The shadowy light of the moon slips through a slash, a slit in the sky, a new moon. But I know that I will not get lost; there is only one main road in this slow, quiet Karoo town.

And as I drive down the gravel I wonder why people come to Nieu Bethesda; a lonely isolated town with uninteresting buildings and regular Karoo sheep; black and white faces do not make a rainbow? Do they come for the scenery? Landscape, dreamy spacelessness, wild and windswept?

I check into the guest house where I am to stay, ‘Die Windpomp’. It has three floors, an old windmill bright white paint, or maybe it is not an old windmill, it is just pretending to be old, and a windmill; a theatre. I sit on the wooden balcony and wonder how I will write this story, this creative cliché?

Above me a ferocious watercourse of stars covers a black and gold heaven; ballerinas pirouette in the sky, their toes bleed onto the Milky Way. I follow the sting in the tail of Scorpio, around and down, the fatal tip, a poisonous drop, deadly. I stare at the mountain peaks that reach tall, taller, into streaks of fire that long ago died, silhouetted. I hold a flame to a cigarette and sip red wine from a short stemmed opaque wine glass. Scenery is so obvious. I can write scenery in whatever way you want me to: the blonde moon goddess on whom Armstrong walked that invades the soul, an eternal prisoner, conquered; the ruthless sun that, as it circles, penetrates small blue veins that run across my wrists, cross ways; the cold, icy, biting winter that chills me, my spine adheres to my flesh, I am the walking dead, I tear the skin to feel alive, passion; the snow capped Compasberg that points me northwards, an explorer …., but scenery is so obvious, so I leave it alone.

I take another sip of the wine, it warms me. I think back to my question; why come to Nieu Bethesda at all?  And people do come; they come to the Owl House. Why? Is it the romanticism of the ‘Miss Helen’ story: a regal tragedy, betrayed by a man, love across the colour line, a woman who lost her sight, and because it was sight that inspired her to live, and because she no longer had sight, she killed herself, in a horrifying way. A woman who made owls; owls with green and yellow round glass eyes.

The next morning I buy a brochure from the woman who sits at the front desk near to the entrance of the Owl House. She smiles at me and tells me that she is the daughter of the man that made the flowerless garden that I am to visit. I sit on the outside steps of the house, I feel the waning sun thaw me and I read.  ‘Helen Martins – Miss Helen, as she was known, lay ill in bed one night, with the moon shining in through the window, and considered how dull and grey her life had become. She resolved, then and there, that she would strive to bring light and colour into her life. That simple decision, to embellish her environment, was to grow into an obsessive urge to express her deepest feelings, her dreams and desires ….’

I walk up the stairs and through a doorway. I walk past the advertisement for ‘PPC Cement’. I am in a cement garden. I wander aimlessly through the grey sculptures and think about the words in the brochure. What are they? Phrases to entice me, words to beguile me, they give me no choice but to admire: romance, exoticism, despair.  But all they are is a description of a woman who crushed glass and pasted it to the walls of her house; red and green glass, shiny glass. A narrative of a woman who made cement sculptures, repetitions of the well-worn themes; missionary art for Africa, naive Bible scenes, the unnatural light of Christianity, the star followed by the three wise men as they rode their camels towards Bethlehem. A truism; making art as salvation; a Madonna and child.

The green and yellow eyes of the owls stare at me, they unnerve me. Am I being perverse, I wonder, are these thoughts dishonorable?

Outside the house the clouds are grey, it is a lonely cold day in the Karoo, must be the weather patterns for this time of year. The sun is so slight; the light darkens me.

Helen Martins was ill when she arrived in Nieu Bethesda. Betrayed by a fickle husband, left to care for her invalid mother, who was soon to die, then left to care for the one parent that survived, a father, moody, depressed and taciturn. He lay in his bed, a bed with long legs, high off the ground. What else could this unfortunate woman do but express her dreams and desires? And so she did. She built the cement sculptures in the garden, with some help, a little; the definition of the word ‘little’ has never been understood, of Koos Malgas, a ‘coloured’ man who did not live in the town. How could he, he lived in the township across the river that never ran. The dream of, and desire for Christian iconography, fantasy mermaids who walk a knife edge for the love of a man, the words of Omar Khayyam, ‘the moving finger writ, and having writ moves on’. When her father died, and there was no space left for cement in the garden, she coated the walls of the house with glass, bright gleaming glass that she ground with a maize grinder. Koos Malgas worked patiently with her so that she could realize her dreams; create from her vivid and unique imagination. Or maybe it was his dreams that were realized? But he was poor; he needed to earn money to feed his ever growing family and his habit of drinking alcohol late into the night; alone. Maybe, as solace to both of them, as they said good bye at the end of the day, they kissed each other lingeringly, chastely, on the cheek, a radical gesture for a woman who lived alone, revolutionary, for he lived across the river that never ran. And then, for the story must have its proper and tragic ending, the glass that she ground got into her eyes, the moon faded to just a spot of gold, then it faded completely, it was gone. She could no longer see the stars as she lay in her bed thinking about brightness. What could she do to end the perfect story? She drank caustic soda and died in excruciating pain, her guts burning in the hope that she would die immortal.

The obsessive, lonely, compulsive woman artist in the middle of the Karoo is original and exotic, and it is a cliché. Helen Martins, a lonely spinster, not really a spinster although, to the town, the small town people, she took on the qualities that the word has assumed, reaches out and takes inspiration from her isolated world, and from a drunken ‘coloured’ man. Did she transgress? Was she a solitary spinster who, when alone, did the all those things that her trivial society never spoke about? Did she anticipate a calloused brown hand under her long skirt, lingering on a bare thigh, or did she just remember these moments as they never happened, a selection of thoughts, a selective memory? The story intrigues people; it makes them curious, admiration for this creator of art, sympathy for an eccentric and friendless woman. And the pity and the intrigue and the curiosity make them drive to the Eastern Cape. They follow the signs that say ‘Nieu Bethesda’, they take a side road, move off the main stream highway from Graaf Reinett and drive still further, thirty kilometres down a dirt road into the valley. The suspension of the low slung city Volvo groans, their suspension grows. They come to visit the Owl House. Most people who visit are not just passers by, just following a sign that says ‘Nieu Bethesda’, most of them come to this town with the express purpose of visiting this house, a pilgrimage. They want to see the owls and stare into the life of someone in a tourist brochure.

But is the lonely isolated obsessive who makes art interesting and new? Or has it been done time and time again? Insanity and banality repeat themselves in stories. It’s everywhere: in novels, poetry, picture books and even stylish fashion magazines, so much so that it has become ordinary.

And yet I am still curious. Curious not about Miss Helen herself, or about the cement garden and the glass walls, but curious as to how ordinariness and banality have become a national monument, a legacy, iconography?  How did this story, this prosaic hyperbole become born?

Was it Athol Fugard? He wrote a play, ‘The Road to Mecca’. He was able to present Helen Martins as both mundane and an anomaly. A romantic heroine, passionate, a beloved creation; a plain woman who feared rejection from a town, she made butter and washed her clothing in an outside tin sink, far from imitation city life; she took care of her father, there was no one else to nurse him. Following the success of Fugard’s play, he was already well known when he wrote it so how could it fail; ‘Miss Helen’ generated countless words and photographs. She became the subject of innumerable tourist brochures and theatre programmes, not quite a household name, but someone known, an art work. We are proudly South African. The words gave people a reason to visit the Karoo, the words made people want to move into the town for they too want to be, and maybe even are, weird.

I wonder as I walk in the garden, can this be art? Can the eccentric sculptress, the cement garden, this fixation, this cherished desire to become a national figure enclosed behind the walls of a museum; can this be art?  Or is this just a repetition of a gesture, a gesture that has been done time and time again, the gesture of the peculiar, the strange?  Was building this folly a folly, or was the building of an odd and solitary life well-rehearsed, felicitous, done in the knowledge that this is how you will never die?

Romantic; the stuff that myths are made of. How was ‘Miss Helen’ to know that in this dusty out of the way town in the beautiful Karoo she would create a legend? Or maybe she did know this, and built upon her mysteriousness, her transgressions, her art.  Athol Fugard knew this so he wrote a play. He put ‘Miss Helen’ and Nieu Bethesda on the map. He repeated the gesture. He even bought a house in the town when he could sit in lonely remoteness and write. The property prices in Nieu Bethesda were, after all, low. A man drives a donkey cart, his voice filters past the people who sit in the back, “Athol; Fugard lives there”, and they turn and try to find him sitting on his wide open veranda. Sometimes they even walk back up and past his house; possibly he will be home today. And yet he is seldom home, he lives in San Diego, and it is much too far to come to the Karoo for just a visit. And people recognize him in San Diego; he does not need the recognition of those who pass his house in Nieu Bethesda.

I buy a Taschen art book from the souvenir desk, an affordable art book. I buy ‘Miss Helen” and her garden and the glass beaded walls for my coffee table. Taschen, a piece of ‘Miss Helen’s’ garden, a commodity, PPC cement.

And where is Koos Malgas in this story? I walk outside the house. A young boy sits on his haunches.

“What is your name?” I ask him.

“Fabian”, he replies.

Next to him are five cement owls, some are big and others are small, an owl for all sizes. And they all have eyes in the front and the back of their heads. They look much like the owls that are in the garden that I have just come from. I can buy an owl and put it next to the Taschen art book. The Owl House in Johannesburg, the Owl House in Cape Town. Fabian has crafted this owl so perfectly, the eyes stare through me; glass reflects history. He repeats the work of the man who never could create; who for twelve drunken chaste years helped the creator, as Fabian succors the visitor in their own longings and hopes for dreams and desires.

“Are you related to Koos Malgas” I ask him, for I have heard that there are many relatives of the man, the lover of transgression, who still make the cement sculptures that he made long ago.

“No”, Fabian replies. “There, that is his grand daughter and her husband.” He points across the dusty road. A woman sits there; she looks sixty years old, old for a grand daughter. “His son, he was taken away to live on a wine farm in Cape Town”, he continues, “Hamilton-Russell or something. He has a good life on that farm, I think.”

“He must have a good life,” I say, as I take out the sixty rand that is the price of the owl, “he must be happy on such a beautiful farm surrounded by all that wine. It is green there.”

I take the owl. I put it gently in the back of the car. The cement comes off grey on my finger tips. I look up at the sky, it too is grey, the paltry rays of the sun that I sat in on the stairs have gone now, gone behind the snow clouds, or maybe just gone to a wine farm in the Cape to be happy. I look upwards towards ‘Miss Helen’s’ house, an owl stares down at me from the roof.

Later that night with no owls to unnerve me, for the owl that I bought is safely wrapped in plastic and in the boot of the car; I lie back on the hard single bed in ‘Die Windpomp’. I indulge in my own selected stories and desires and memories. The wind rattles the window frames. The ghost of ‘Miss Helen’ laughs.