THE OWL HOUSE

The house of the artist Helen Martins, her life, her works. Helen Martins, born in Nieu-Bethesda in 1898, died in the same place in 1976. After caring for her elderly parents, and trying out two husbands, this schoolteacher had shut herself away in her riverside house to create. She read Blake and Khayyam a lot. She had passed alive to the other side of reality, actress of her fantasies, victim of her wildest dreams. For seventeen years, alone and then assisted by Koos Malgas, her arm, her hand (her double who remained on earth?), Helen Martins broke thousands of glass bottles, blue, green, red, and then glued the sparkling shards on the walls of her house. Then, with Koos, she imagined a crazy camel ride in her garden. Working sometimes day and night, by candlelight, the creative couple - she, an old white woman, he, a mixed-race man in his forties - created a bestiary of cement and glass, a pagan crib in motion. So enter this Owl House, smell the soda and death, then step out into the court of miracles to discover the giraffe heads, the winged horses, the snake-eating men, the blue-glass-capped Buddhas, and these two creatures hanging from a bell tower clock, hoping to hold the hours. Helen Martins, perhaps seeing the hourglass running too fast, killed herself at 78 by swallowing caustic soda. "Her real name was Mona Lisa," Breytenbach writes. "Some nights she would light all the lamps and the glowing schooner filled with a cargo of dreams and celestial globes of every color would sail into the darkness of the Karoo, reflecting in a sea of stars." The owl house has not finished stirring the imagination of the growing number of artists in Nieu-Bethesda. The great South African playwright Athol Fugard has written a play based on the life of Helen Martins. The play, The Road to Mecca (Faber and Faber, London), has been adapted into a film. A film, with Athol Fugard himself, Yvonne Bryceland and Kathy Bates, shot here in 1991. You either love or hate the owl house. In any case, this place is in keeping with the climate of the valley, both intimidating and serene. The writer David Robbins wanted to wait for the night in Helen's garden. Under the navy blue sky, he saw the stone arch come to life, the camels begin to walk toward the desert. In Helen's room, a statue lies at the foot of the bed.