Numero Uno

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

269 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

"Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screen on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside ..."

These are the first words of The Autumn of the Patriarch, and what a way to begin a novel: the theme is artfully insinuated, an atmosphere instantly evoked like a puff of stage smoke, and all conveyed in language that generates a charge of expectancy. Admirers of Colombian Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez have come to expect such virtuosity. His One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) is a flat-out masterpiece.

With his fictional Colombian town of Macondo, Garcia Marquez created a Latin American Yoknapatawpha in which grubby fact and mythological fantasy mingled into what can loosely be called magic realism. His new novel is a more circumscribed, grimmer and more obscure work. Its setting--mainly the presidential palace of a nameless South American country--shows a little less Faulkner and a little more Kafka. The Castle, with a high temperature-humidity index, comes to mind.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is about despotism, not only as political fact but as a paranoid state of mind. The dictator, known as "the general," has ruled for 100 years. He begins as a popular, benevolent figure. As his power overripens and corrupts, he sells his country's coastal waters, murders his enemies and finally withdraws to his palace to live in regal squalor with his concubines. He still keeps up with public sentiment, however --by reading the graffiti on the walls of his servants' outhouses.

Power of Illusion. The general even finds a perfect double to appear in public for him. When the double is assassinated, the dictator in effect attends his own funeral where, Garcia Marquez writes, "he saw with a hidden uneasiness those who had only come to decipher the enigma of whether it really was or was not he ..." He soon sets them straight and, like Francisco Franco, seems to go on forever, despite rumors of failing health and imminent demise. Even when he really is found dead, the people cannot be sure.

In the general's land, illusion --along with cold steel and bribery--is one of the foundations of absolute power. Even the livestock that eventually overrun the palace cannot tell the real from the fictional. Observes one foreign diplomat: "The hens were pecking at the illusory wheat fields on the tapestries and a cow was pulling down the canvas with the portrait of an archbishop so she could eat it."

As was the case in most of his other novels, Garcia Marquez offers very lit tle chronological plotting. The Autumn of the Patriarch actually begins at the end of the general's life and works back ward and laterally through a national history that somewhat resembles the blur of civil wars and chaos in the au thor's own Colombia. Garcia Marquez writes with what could be called a stream-of-consciousness technique, but the result is much more like a whirl pool. Events, characters and dialogue are all sucked down into a powerful nar rative vortex only to resurface later. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, the debris of despotism phosphoresces with decay, and the vultures in charge of that final palace cleanup are history's ageless witnesses.

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