THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.1 Shoes and Mirrors: Images of Doubling The Avatar in Panamameus sapatos? Eu joguei fora, ela disse. Você jogou fora os meussapatos? [...] Saí de lá descalço” (91). 30O Matador highlights Máiquel’s commercial success, hisbetrayal and the consequences which include cocaine and alcoholabuse. After his surrender to authorities which leads to hisincarceration, his second life is further represented as a dream stateinto which he seeks sanctuary and which is contrasted with his wakingstate. At times there is a fusion of the two. Máiquel’s dreamingtechnique consists of willing himself to dream of a person bycompulsively repeating their name. He claims it has evolved to such anextent that what he experiences with closed eyes are not dreams as hebelieved, but his own thoughts being incorporated. He would becomeso deeply introspective that it was as if he were dreaming. Plainly hisdouble life is itself doubled; it exists in both the dream and the realworld; in prison and awake. 31 Máiquel realises “[e]u não era mais omesmo cara. Mudei. Eles me mudaram”, and there remains confusionbetween what is reality and what is not. 32 As dreams and nightmaresforeshadow his impending death by various methods, Máiquel gets atattoo as protection and on the instructions of a local pai-do-santo. 33After entertaining thoughts of suicide, he hears a voice telling him tosurrender to the authorities which is an auditory hallucination comingfrom inside his head. He fails to realise that these voices originatewithin him; his perception is that they originate from the outside. 34Consequently his sense of subjectivity becomes fractured in that hedoes not distinguish between what happens within him and without. He30 “‘Take these shoes’, I said, I threw them in her face, ‘I want my old shoes, where aremy old ones?’ ‘I threw them out’, she said [...] ‘you threw out my shoes!’ I leftbarefoot”.31 “Minha técnica de sonhos tinha evoluído tanto, na verdade não eram sonhos, era aminha mente, eu fechava os olhos e entrava ali [...] tão fundo que era como se euestivesse sonhando. De modo que eu passei a ter uma vida dupla. Uma com Érica,quando eu dormia. E outra, quando eu acordava na prisão.” (201).32 “I was no longer the same guy. I’d changed. They’d changed me” (211).33 “Eu andava com um pressentimento ruim, alguma coisa iria acontecer. Resolviprocurar um pai-de-santo. Ele mandou tatuar uma estrela de sete pontas no meu pau”(171) “I had a terrible feeling that something was about to happen. I decided to look fora pai-de-santo. He sent me to get a seven-pointed star tattooed onto my dick”. A paide-santo(literally, ‘father of the saint’) is the male head of a cult house in whichCandomblé (a popular Afro-Brazilian religious cult) is practised. The pai-de-santopersuades spirits to descend into the bodies of worshippers who communicate withand make offerings to them.34 Hearing oneself speak is different from hearing another speak because theperception of one’s own speech comes via bone conduction and spatial location ofsound in relation to the perceiver. So, hallucinatory voices sound more like hearinganother talk than hearing oneself. Lynn G. Stephens and George Graham, When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts (Cambridge(Massachusetts): MIT, 2000) 39.152