Alligators

Alligators are among the Magdalena River’s most vivid and consequential creatures: at first they embody the river’s dangerous abundance, but later their disappearance registers the destruction of the world that once made the voyage seem wild and alive. Their appearances connect comic bravado, remembered adventure, and ecological loss, until the river’s remembered grandeur becomes an illusion measured against the empty banks.

Creatures of the River at Night

On a voyage near Gamarra, Uncle Leo XII wagered that he could awaken the jungle creatures by singing a Neapolitan romanza from the Captain’s balustrade. The night supplied its own answering chorus: cranes beat their wings in the marshes, alligator tails thudded in the darkness, and shad tried to leap onto dry land. As Uncle Leo held the song’s final note, his false teeth fell into the water. The spectacle turns an extravagant performance into an encounter with a living river whose darkness contains sounds and movements beyond the boat’s lights.

The mishap did not end the wager’s comic logic. Three days later, while the boat waited at Tenerife for a replacement set of teeth, Uncle Leo again sang at the alligators as they sunbathed and watched the vessel pass. His new teeth sank into the current too. The animals are not simply scenery in this story: their presence makes the river a responsive, unruly stage on which human confidence can be undone by the very force it tries to command.

A Threat and an Attraction

Much later, Fermina Daza considers a river cruise with a different set of expectations. She wants to see alligators sunning themselves on sandy banks, alongside other animals she has imagined encountering on the journey. Yet the river also carries its old reputation for danger. Fermina has heard that riverboats can be menaced by sandbars and bandits, and Florentino Ariza counters that such accounts belong to another time. The remembered alligator belongs to the same imaginative geography as the risky, arduous journey: a reason to be drawn toward the river and a sign of its capacity to resist easy passage.

The contrast between that expectation and the actual voyage is stark. Captain Samaritano explains that hunters supplying New Orleans tanneries exterminated the alligators. The creatures that had once lain apparently dead in shore gullies, waiting with open jaws for butterflies, are no longer there for Fermina to see. Their absence makes the river’s degradation something more specific than a change in scenery: a once-familiar animal encounter has been erased.

Extinction and the Broken River

The alligators’ disappearance belongs to a wider devastation. Fifty years of uncontrolled deforestation, driven in part by the riverboats’ consumption of the forest’s great trees as boiler fuel, have altered the Magdalena. As foliage vanished, parrots and monkeys also disappeared; manatees were killed by hunters. When the narrative later gathers up what is gone—the alligators, the last butterfly, the manatees, the birds, the monkeys, and the villages—the river journey’s former hardship returns in a changed form. The old account of an almost impossibly miserable pilgrimage becomes true again, not because the wild river remains intact, but because the living world that once accompanied it has been destroyed.

Alligators thus mark a movement from abundance to absence. In the earlier episode, their tails sound in the dark and their bodies watch a passing boat; in the later account, hunting has removed them from the banks. The gap between those scenes turns recollection into a measure of ecological change. The river remains a route for travel, but the animals that gave its dangers and wonders substance have largely vanished, leaving memory to carry what the present can no longer show.