The General in His Labyrinth.

VISITOR once suggested to Gabriel Garcia Marquez that a novel exploring the life of Simon Bolfvar might win him '.he Nobel Prize. I'd like to receive it," he replied, "after I've made enough money to refuse-without economic remorse. The Nobel Prize has become an international lizard hunt."

So now, twenty years later, with the Nobel Prize already his, the Colombian poet-novelist has indeed written his threnody to the immortal Liberator, and what kind of book is it? Dazzling, of course. And with a jacket painting almost as dazzling as the text, showing the great man's hammock (slung between two flowering trees) containing nothing but a few fallen blossoms, and the general's imperial poncho tumbling among the bric-a-brac of his tragic descent into hell. Far in the distance, under a sickle moon, may be seen a snowcapped peak of the Sierra Nevada that this dying 46-year-old with the decayed body of a centenarian could have conquered (and possibly did) in a matter of hours on one of those incredible campaigns from Colombia and Venezuela to Peru and Bolivia that stunned the world.

Garcia Marquez's scenario does not show his hero in the best light, but doubtless it was not intended to. As a way of unfolding Bolfvar's whole life, however, it is brilliant. With the last of the capitals he had conquered (Bogota) in rebellion, the Liberator, sick in body and mind, is beginning the long journey down the Magdalena River to Santa Marta on the Caribbean, where he will die. Along the way there is plenty of time to speculate on the events of his tumultuous life-Caracas to London, Paris, and Madrid and back; the great battles from Boyacd and Carabobo to Junin and Ayacucho; the dozens of women he conquered and the famous vow to his tutor, Robinson," on the Monte Sacro in Rome; the celebrated Jamaica Letter; his freeing of the slaves after meeting and receiving help from President Petion in Haiti; and the news that the great Marshal Sucre, the hero at Ayacucho in the final battle against Spain, had been murdered on a lonely road in Ecuador.

Is this a novel? Perhaps. Definitions have shifted drastically since Ulysses appeared in the Twenties. But since this one is wholly devoted to research quoting Bolivar's last thoughts on everything from life and love to his chronic constipation and dislike of tobacco smoke, it seems only fair to criticize its protagonist for what Garcia Marquez reveals of the political shortcomings that led to the failure of democratic rule in Latin America.

No one will deny that the Liberator was a romantic hero of irresistible charm. But what did he do, or think? Jose Antonio Paez, the half-breed cowboy whom Bolivar left to rule Venezuela while he was installing himself in Bogoti, called him in 1828 "the singular genius of the nineteenth century .. the man who for 18 years has suffered sacrifice after sacrifice for the public happiness." Garcia Marquez himself is a lot more frank about some of his hero's huge flaws. After mentioning the body of song that grew up about Bolivar's ambiguous dictum that his first day of peace would be his last in power, he writes: "In the years that followed, his renunciations were reiterated so many times, and in such dissimilar circumstances, that no one ever knew again which to believe." After the assassination attempt of September 25, 1828, in Bogoti, when his mistress, Manuela, saved him by hiding him under a bridge near the palace, he proclaimed that there would be no investigation, that no one would be prosecuted, and that he himself would leave Colombia forever. Nevertheless," the novelist wryly notes, "the investigation took place, the guilty were judged with an iron hand, and 14 were shot in the main square. The Constituent Congress of January 2 did not meet for another 16 months, and no one spoke again of his resignation."

On one occasion, walking the streets of Bogota by night, Bolivar had had manure flung in his face. But when a soldier assigned to guard him reacted by drawing his sword to pursue the insulter, Bolivar turned on him in a flash of anger. 'And what the hell are you doing here?' he asked. The officer snapped to attention. 'I'm following orders, Excellency.' "I'm not your excellency,' he replied. "He stripped him of his ranks and titles," Garcia Marquez adds, "with so much rage that the officer considered himself fortunate that the general no longer had the strength for a more savage reprisal."

The novelist cites the general's irritation on another occasion with a French diplomat who had dared criticize New Granada. Garcia Marquez has Bolivar say: "During the War to the Death [with Spain], I myself gave the order to execute eight hundred Spanish prisoners in a single day, including the patients in the hospital at La Guayra. Today, under the same circumstances, my voice would not tremble if I gave the order again, and Europeans would not have the moral authority to reproach me, for if any history is drowned in blood, indignity, and injustice, it is the history of Europe." Does Garcia Marquez, with a novelist's appropriate desire to explore every facet of his protagonist's character, exaggerate Bolivar's despotic and anti-democratic tendencies? Consider the seven-hundred-page biography in which a celebrated Spanish historian, Salvador de Madariaga, wrestles with the character of South America's hero. He begins by saying that Bolivar "was too swift, too much of a man of action to have pored over Locke or Hobbes, Rousseau or Helvetius.... In his conscious moods he was a materialist and a rationalist." Five hundred pages later, Madariaga concludes: "[H]e had destroyed that which had worked with the weight and prestige of centuries; but he had proved unable to build up anything instead. . . . His mind saw the aim clearly; but his will was Machiavellian and tortuous. And as he was swift and therefore devoured by impatience, he became easily despotic. . . . I was all my life a slave to my passions. The essence of liberty is precisely that one can liberate oneself."'

By 1830 the floundering government in New Granada (Colombia) was trying to avert civil war by making Bolivar king in all but name. But Bolivar, happily for his own future reputation, was too ill in body and soul to give much heed. He resigned, and began his descent into death.

Garcia Marquez's compassionate novel has little to tell about this unflattering phase of Bolivar's last days in the Colombian capital, except to have him say to his aide, Iturbide, son of Mexico's ill-fated Emperor, "Don't stay with Urdaneta [Bolivar's friend and successor in Bogota] and don't go with your family to the United States. It's omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all." Perhaps the novelist, who now lives in xenophobic Mexico, will deal with this typically Latin American hobgoblin (us) in his next poetic extravaganza.