Afterword
Where
exactly is Pueblo Blanco? Where are all the other places I
have described? Why haven’t I named them? Did all the events that I
have described happen? The answer to the last question is: Yes, but
not necessarily exactly where I set them, and certainly not to people
with the names I have used.
Anyone
who has lived in the south of Spain, or perhaps only visited the
area, will, I hope, recognize Pueblo Blanco. But it will be
that person’s own Pueblo Blanco.
If
one person is adamant that Pueblo Blanco is one specific
place, while another insists that it is located in a completely
different spot – and this applies equally to everywhere else I have
described – then I will have achieved what I set out to do.
Clive
James, in the preface to his book Unreliable Memoirs, about
his childhood and youth in Sydney, says that while most first novels
are disguised autobiographies, his autobiography is a disguised
novel. I suspect that this is true of many books, even though their
authors are not usually so candid as Clive James. In the preface to
his sequel, Falling Towards England, he says that Unreliable
Memoirs is a true story, in the sense that he was brought up in
Sydney, and not in a Tibetan monastery or a castle on the Danube.
A
very short preface to Howard Spring’s novel Shabby Tiger,
quite clearly set in Manchester in the 1930s, simply states that both
the author and all the characters in his book are fictitious, and
ends, ‘There is no such city as Manchester.’ I agree that there
is nowhere like Manchester.
Equally,
there is no such place as Pueblo Blanco.
