Riviel

Also Known As: El Riviel; plural rivielillos in the Esmeraldas tellings
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: South American Mythology, Latin American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: He carries a small light through the estuaries and the surf at night, makes a canoe too heavy to move, and takes the men who answer him down into the water.
Role in Mythos: He is the restless soul of the drowned, the rule that keeps the Afro-Ecuadorian fishing towns of Esmeraldas from working the water alone after dark.
Relation to Humans: He hunts night fishermen and lone travellers, capsizing them, drowning them, or turning them around so completely that they cannot find the channel until sunrise and remember nothing of the night. He is held off by the tools of the trade, a cast net, a harpoon, a seine, a hook, shouted aloud by name, and by the prayer called La Magnífica.

The light comes down the estuary at an hour when nobody sensible is on the water. It is small and low and yellow, no bigger than a flame behind glass, and it travels at the pace of a man paddling without hurry. Every fisherman on the Esmeraldas coast knows the light. What they know above all is that it must not be followed and must not be answered.

One of them, working off Estero de Plátano under a clear moon, saw it about fifteen metres out and took it for a small bongo with men fishing snapper. He steered for it. The closer he got the further it went, always the same distance, and there was no boat under it that he could see, only a bulk and a candle burning as steadily as a lamp wick. Then a wave stood up in front of him and he ran for open water, because by then he had worked out what he was chasing. He never saw it again in the eighteen years that followed.

He is called the Riviel, and what he is, the coast is fairly clear about. He is an ánima en pena, a soul that has not been allowed to stop. The stories of how he got that way do not agree, which is the ordinary condition of a story kept alive by people who fish for a living.

The version printed by the Casa de la Cultura in Esmeraldas is domestic and squalid and probably the most widely repeated. He was a man with a taste for drink who neglected his household and knocked his family about. One night, drunk, he beat one of his own children almost to death and threw the unconscious boy into the river, where he drowned. Not long afterwards the father went the same way, tipping out of his canoe in the dark and dying in the water, shouting. Another telling makes him a sailor who sat down to drink with a company of dead men, all of them drowned and none of their bodies ever recovered. When the dead turned on him he tore crosses out of the cemetery to fight them off, and at the end of it only one cross was left standing in his hands, running with fire. God, in that version, was not impressed by the sacrilege, and the sentence was the water and the dark and no rest in either.

The oldest women on the coast tell it differently, and their version is stranger and much sadder. There is not one Riviel. There are as many as the sea has taken. Two sisters in Quingue, remembering the river when it was still deep enough to come up as far as the caleta, spoke of watching them from the beach as girls, several at once, moving along the shoreline and then going into the mangrove with a sound like shhh. They called them rivielillos, little rivieles, with something close to affection. The small flat canoe, one of them explained, is the coffin of the drowned, and that is why it has no proper bow. And they are beautiful, she said. You see them there bathing at the edge of the water and they look lovely.

That is not a note western ghost stories usually strike. It sits oddly beside everything else the coast says about him, and both halves are held at once without any apparent difficulty.

Because the rest is not lovely. He likes to be followed. He comes up on a canoe from behind and lays into the paddler with his own cross of a paddle, blow after blow, until the man goes over the side, and then he goes down with him and holds him there, and the whole business is conducted in a running commentary of laughter. On the Colombian side of the border the encounter is more conversational and worse. There he speaks first, and what he says is perfectly ordinary. Friend, how is the fishing. Answer him and the little dugout begins to gain weight under you until it cannot be shifted at all. Refuse to answer and he settles for turning your sense of direction inside out, so that you go round in the estuary all night and only find the channel at dawn with nothing in your head about how you spent the hours. The harder tellings from that side have him carrying men off and returning them a day or two later out of their minds, or emptying their skulls and leaving the rest at sea.

Nobody has got a look at his face. Those who have come closest report a silhouette with a light beside it, and past that the description simply stops, which the women of Quingue thought was no mystery at all, since you do not make out a dead man’s face either. Of the dead, one of them said, you mostly see the back. The written accounts fill the vacancy in three or four incompatible ways: a skull drilled with holes that let out flame, two crossed shinbones with a lit candle standing between them, a coffin drifting the river mouths and out onto open sea with a candle burning on the lid. Along the beaches he is sometimes not in a boat at all but riding a wave on something like a board, upright, silent, the lamp at his side, his run lasting exactly as long as the wave takes to come in. When he has a voice it is an animal one, a hooting that the men who have heard it describe as something like a monkey, uuu, uuu, with no words in it that anyone can pick out.

He is not confined to the water, and this is where the story turns genuinely unpleasant, because it means he can be in the room. He walks into the marimba dances as a charming young man, a good singer, a great one for a party, and he is not identified until somebody notices the small green lights coming out of his ankles as he dances. The music stops after that. He also drinks. He goes into the cantinas the fishermen use and there he says nothing whatsoever. The barman, who has been warned, pours the aguardiente and waits for him to finish and go. There is no other procedure.

What holds him off is the gear. Anyone crossing the water at night carries a cast net, hooks, harpoons, a seine, and the tackle works as an amulet by being there, but it works better shouted. Atarraya. Arpón. Chinchorro. Anzuelo. Call the names of the fishing tools into the dark and he will not come alongside. The prayer known as La Magnífica does the same job. So does simple company, since he is a specialist in the man who went out alone. And he weakens geographically, which is the oddest of his limits: the further south along the coast the sightings run, the milder he becomes, until by Quingue he is barely anything at all, a harmless shadow washing itself at the shoreline in front of children.

He is the drowned, and there are a great many of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Riviel?

The Riviel is a restless soul from the folklore of Esmeraldas province on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, told among Afro-Ecuadorian fishing communities. He travels the rivers, estuaries and surf at night carrying a small light, and drowns the people he catches on the water alone.

What does the Riviel look like?

There is no agreed description beyond a light and a missing face. Some accounts give him a featureless shape upright on what looks like a plank with a lamp beside it; others a blunt-ended canoe shaped like a coffin, a cross used as a paddle and a lamp at the bow; others a punctured skull letting out flame, or two crossed shinbones behind a lit candle.

How do you protect yourself from the Riviel?

Night travellers carry fishing tackle in the canoe as an amulet and shout the names of the tools aloud: atarraya, arpón, chinchorro, anzuelo. The prayer called La Magnífica is also said to drive him off, and travelling in company works, because the Riviel goes after people who are on the water by themselves.

Where did the Riviel come from?

The accounts disagree. One makes him a violent drunk who beat his child, threw him in the river to drown, and shortly afterwards fell out of his own canoe and died the same way. Another makes him a sailor condemned by God after drinking with the drowned dead and fighting them off with crosses taken from a cemetery. The oldest tellers on the coast say instead that there are many rivieles, and that they are simply everyone the water has taken.

Is the Riviel the same as a ghost ship or a will-o’-the-wisp?

No, though he shares the light and the water with both. The Riviel is a specific dead man, or a crowd of specific dead men, with a coffin for a boat and a grudge against anyone fishing alone after dark, and unlike a drifting light he comes ashore, drinks in the cantinas and turns up at marimba dances.