El Silbón
Venezuela (the Llanos, Guanarito, Portuguesa State) · Folk tradition, recorded mid-nineteenth century
The story was collected in the parish of Guanarito, in Portuguesa State, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The collectors set it down from informants who had it from informants of their own. The story was old, by their measure, before the parish was old.
The story names a young man. In most tellings he has no name. He is the grandson of a cattleman of the high plain. The grandfather has raised him in the absence of his father, the father having been long upon the trail.
The young man, in the central act of the story, kills his father.
The accounts differ on why. In one telling the father has returned and the young man does not know him. In another the young man has asked the father for the heart of a deer and the father has not brought one. The accounts agree that the killing is done with the hands, that the father is opened across the belly, and that the young man, the act being done, sits upon the trail beside the body for some hours and does not move.
He returns to the household.
He carries with him, in a sack at his shoulder, the heart and the liver of his father, and asks his grandmother to prepare them at the cooking fire. The meat would not cook. It hissed in the pan and would not take heat. The grandmother understood at that point what had been brought into the house.
The grandfather was called.
On the curse
The grandfather, in the central scene of the story, performs the curse.
He calls for the perro nevado, the white dog of the household. He calls for the mandador, the four-knot cattle-whip of the llanero tradition. He calls for the ají, the small fierce chilli of the plain.
He binds the young man to the central post of the corral. He whips him with the four knots until the back is open from the shoulder blades to the small of the back. He rubs the chilli into the wounds. He calls the white dog and the dog bites the wounds. The young man does not lose consciousness, the grandfather having taken care that he should not.
When the punishment is finished, the grandfather empties the sack the young man had brought to the cooking fire. He gathers, in its place, the bones of the father, brought back by the cattle hands from the trail. He hangs the sack at the young man’s shoulder. He tells the young man that he will carry the sack from that day, that he will not set it down, that he will count the bones at the side of every trail upon which he walks, and that the count will not be finished.
He sets the young man out from the household at the close of the day.
The young man walks from that day forward across the plain.
On the whistle
The whistle is the figure’s name.
The whistle is described, in every account that records it, as a sequence of seven notes, ascending then descending in a fixed cadence the llaneros of the parish have taught their children to recognise. The cadence is the same in every telling. The notes are clear. The figure does not vary them.
The figure’s height is given at six metres. The figure walks at the height of the lower branches of the samán tree. The sack on the shoulder is the sack of the father’s bones, and the sack, in the accounts, is full though the bones have been counted many thousands of times.
The cadence of the whistle is the inverse of the figure’s distance. When the whistle is heard far, the figure is near. When the whistle is heard near, the figure is several plains away. The traveller who hears it at a great remove is the traveller most directly under threat. The traveller who hears it close at hand has already passed the moment at which any action could be taken.
The figure, when he arrives, sets the sack down at the side of the trail. He empties the bones onto the ground. He begins, in the cadence of the count, to lay them out in order. If the count is not interrupted, the traveller is found in the morning at the side of the trail with the throat opened and the body dry. If the count is interrupted, the figure must begin the count again from the smallest bone, and the traveller is permitted, in that interval, to reach the next household.
The accounts give three interruptions that have, in living memory, worked. A black dog, kept at the foot of the bed. A four-knot whip, hung at the door. A small measure of chilli, kept on the tongue at the moment of the whistle, and bitten through.
The archive holds no position on whether the count, in the long span of the figure’s walking, will ever be finished. The archive observes only that a grandfather of a household in the western Llanos was recorded, in the mid-nineteenth century, as having performed a curse of a particular form upon his grandson, and that the form of the curse, as recorded, was the form of a tradition older than the parish, and that the parish, to this date, does not whistle that cadence aloud.
- Domínguez, Luis Arturo, and Adolfo Salazar Quijada. *Fiestas y danzas folklóricas de Venezuela*. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1969. The standard reference for the figure within the wider corpus of Llanos folk material, drawing on field collections made through the central and western plains.
- Pineda Giraldo, Roberto, and Hernán Tovar. "El Silbón en la tradición oral del Llano." *Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico*, Banco de la República, Bogotá. Cross-border survey of the figure across the Colombian and Venezuelan Llanos, with transcripts of named informants.