The Road to Mecca

The Road to Mecca takes place in the Karoo village of New Bethesda in South Africa in the autumn of 1974, in a room that the stage directions describe as extraordinary “by virtue of the attempt to use as much light and color as is humanly possible” (1). Outside the room, the audience learns, is Miss Helen’s yard filled with sculptures she created. It is late afternoon and Miss Helen, a “frail, birdlike woman in her late sixties” whose appearance offers a “suggestion of personal neglect” (1), is fussing around the room, laying out towels and soap and carrying an overnight bag that’s been left on the floor. 

Elsa, a “strong young woman in her late twenties” (2), enters and the two begin discussing Elsa’s recent unexpected arrival for an overnight stay. Helen fusses over Elsa until Elsa gets annoyed, saying, “For God’s sake, Helen! Just leave me alone for a few minutes!” (3). They quickly apologize and start over, with Elsa miming driving up in her car again so they can play their usual “arrival game” (5). Elsa tells Helen, “You have the rare distinction of being the only person who can make me make a fool of myself…and enjoy it. […] Let’s face it, we’ve both still got a little girl hidden away in us somewhere” (5).

Helen tells Elsa that her arrival made her “think I was seeing a ghost” and that Elsa seemed “cross” (6), something she’d never seen before. Elsa tells Helen that when she was on the long drive from Cape Town, she ended up picking up an African woman who was with her baby walking along the side of the road, trying to find a place to live after the death of her husband. Elsa remarks on the “Great Karoo,” a desolate area of South Africa where she says that “everything else has been all but damned out of existence” (8) and asks how Helen has put up with living there for so long. Helen doesn’t think it’s so bad, having been born there, but Elsa says it’s “as merciless as the religion they preach around here” (9) and judges the Afrikaners who live there, including Helen. 

Elsa then asks Helen about the town gossip, and Helen says Katrina, a local African girl, is the only one who visits her anymore, along with the local pastor, Marius, whom Elsa does not like. Helen says that Katrina’s husband has been drinking a lot, though he no longer hits Katrina, and Elsa asks why Katrina won’t leave him. Helen also says that a woman in town has applied for a license to open a liquor store, though the church is opposing it, believing alcohol is “ruining the health and lives of our Coloured folk” (12). Elsa objects to this and asks whether “anybody bothered to ask the Coloured people what they think about it all,” to which Helen responds, “You know they don’t do that here” (13). Angry, Elsa rails against the area’s racial injustice and asks, “Why do you always stand up and defend this bunch of bigots? Look at the way they’ve treated you” (14). 

Elsa brings up something that Helen wrote in her last letter to Elsa, and Helen gets nervous and tries to change the subject, saying they’ll “talk about it later” (14). Elsa then notices a burn mark on one of the walls and asks Helen about it; Helen says one of the lamps started smoking, then changes the subject. Helen asks Elsa about her life and Elsa divulges that she is in trouble at the “Coloured” school where she teaches for telling her students to write a letter to the State President about racial inequality. She also shares that the man she had been seeing has a wife and child and refused to leave them for her. Elsa says that she’s realized the “really big word” to remember is trust, not love, because it’s “more dangerous,” and having trust broken “hurts like hell” (20). Elsa tells Helen a joke about a father giving his son a business lesson: The father puts his son somewhere up high and tells him to jump, saying, “I’ll catch you.” But the father doesn’t catch him, telling his son, “Your first lesson in business, my son. Don’t trust anybody” (20). Elsa remarks, “That little boy is going to think twice about jumping again, and at this moment the same goes for Elsa Barlow” (20).

The two women share the trust they have in each other and agree how different their relationship is compared to the others in their lives, They then reminisce about the first time they met—Elsa came upon the house, and Helen saw her admiring it and invited her inside—while they start to light the candles around Helen’s room. Elsa says the first time she saw Helen’s “Mecca” (her house), she just “stood there and gaped,” and she says that other people think Helen is “mad as a hatter” (22-23). Helen says that she was shy when Elsa first met her, because “when I lit the candles [in her house] you were finally going to see all of me […)] I mean the real me, because that’s what this room is” (24). She tells Elsa that she “revived [her] life,” and before that she had just felt like “a useless old woman getting on everybody’s nerves” (25).

Helen says that she hasn’t felt inspired to create any new sculptures recently, worrying that she has “reached the end” (27). Elsa again brings up Helen’s letter and insists they discuss it, while Helen says she regrets sending it. Elsa reads the letter aloud. In the letter, Helen asks if Elsa cares about her anymore and says she’s alone and depressed, writing, “I would rather do away with myself than carry on like this” (29). Helen also references losing her house in the letter, and now she tells Elsa that the Church Council is trying to move her into an old age home, as they’re worried about her living there alone, and that Marius, the pastor, is coming over later to pick up her application. Helen insists that she’s doing fine and can live on her own, though she has a burn on her hands that she tells Elsa is from “a little accident at the stove” (31). Elsa gets angry at Marius and tells Helen she must stand up for herself, saying that she’ll arrange doctors’ appointments for Helen to show that she’s trying to improve.

Elsa also lashes out at Helen, telling her that she’s concerned and asks if it’s “because of personal neglect that you’ve stopped caring about yourself or because you aren’t able to?” (36). Helen gets upset and Elsa responds that she’s trying to “deal with” Helen’s letter, which Helen says Elsa is “treating […] like a shopping list” (36). Helen was really writing about “Darkness,” she says, telling Elsa that the Darkness “nearly smothered my life” one night 15 years ago, and a “much worse” sense of Darkness has “got inside me at last” (37). She adds that Marius can see “that his moment has finally come” (38), hence his insistence on moving her to the home. Helen tells her friend, “If my Mecca is finished, Elsa, then so is my life” (38). 

Elsa says that between the woman on the road and Helen, she’s “had it” and she “honestly [doesn’t] know how to handle it,” saying “at this moment, I don’t think I know anything” (38). Elsa does tell Helen once again to think about her decision on the assisted living home, as if she doesn’t “say no tonight, you won’t ever” (39). Elsa goes to fix supper and Marius enters, greeting Helen and Elsa.