South of the Border

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

South of the Border is a three-part page-turner that starts in February
1972—the era of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—with Arlene and
Sheila, two university dropouts, on holiday hitchhiking in Mexico. After
the introductory scene-setting first part in Palenque, there is a
flashback to Vera Cruz a few weeks earlier, when the two girls meet up
with other young searchers. Arlene teams up with a Canadian boy name
Murdoch, while Sheila goes off to the jungle with a young Mexican Marika
and disappears. The plot is complicated by the disappearance of another
North American girl named Shelley Stewart—hence the confusion about
Sheila’s fate. The narrative is coloured by their picaresque
adventures and meetings with crooked Mexican police, European hippies,
and the problem of returning the ashes of the American girl to her
family in Arizona.

Part 3, set in Mazatlбn in 2002, sees Arlene visiting again from
Canada with Murdoch and her 13-year-old son, and recovering from failed
marriages. She recounts the events of the past 30 years, including
Sheila’s broken marriages and eventual death from a heart attack. In a
much-changed, modernized Palenque, with the archeological ruins, the
Temple of the Sun, the Day of Death celebrations, Arlene must confront
the past. The memories of blood and death and human sacrifice remind her
not only of her dead friend Sheila, but also of the American girl
Shelley, whose ashes evoke both the pleasure of youth and the tragic
inevitability of her own mortality.

Despite the sloppy editing of the Spanish-language renderings, South of
the Border is an entertaining read that captures the spirit of the time
(1972) and the colour of the place (Mexico). Although love and sex and
drugs are the main activities of the young protagonists, death is never
far from the surface.