THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

2.1 The North American Double The Avatar in PanamaPluto the cat belongs to the narrator’s wife yet the animalpursues the narrator who is instilled with an “absolute dread of thebeast” and who wakes up hourly “to find the hot breath of the thing uponmy face, and its vast weight -- an incarnate nightmare that I had nopower to shake off --incumbent eternally upon my heart” (227, 228).There are comparisons here with Maupassant’s “Le horla”. 7 He tires ofthe feline and while drunk, cuts out its eye and hangs the animal. Later,an image of the hanged cat appears on his wall. He substitutes Pluto foranother cat which is also one-eyed and is Pluto’s double, except for awhite mark on its chest which transforms into the figure of the gallows.While now trying to kill this cat that also stalks, smothers and crusheshim, the paranoid protagonist accidentally kills his wife whom he thenburies in the walls of the cellar. Inadvertently the cat is also walled upand its meowing gives the protagonist away in the presence of police:“the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, andwhose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman” (230). 8“The Black Cat” and Jaramillo Levi’s “El olor” share somefundamental elements. 9 The cat in “El olor” belongs to the wife of thenarrator who is also stalked and spied on by the feline; the readerdiscovers the narrator has also killed his wife, and then witnesses thestoryteller’s mirror image double also break the abhorred animal’s neck.As in “The Black Cat”, ironically, the cat’s (and wife’s) murder result inthe narrator’s own death.“El olor” deals with obsession, jealousy, betrayal, and theresulting pain of the protagonist, all of which lead him to inflict therecounted vengeful acts in the most fantastic way. “El olor” comprisestwo narrative perspectives: the text changes from third to first personnarration and then back to third. The perspective of the narrator whichemploys memory and nostalgia to recount past events allows the readerto become privy to his thoughts. Again, the protagonist is disabled: “Y amí sólo sabía darme esas odiosas medicinas, burlándose de mi mal, lafigura del inválido”; bedridden; “Y luego empezó a traer a ese tipo. Sinmayor explicación. Le gustó y ya. Noche a noche tuve que soportardesde esta cama las escenas que se realizaban frente de mí”; andconsequently distanced from everything physically and mentally. Thereis a confusion and an indifference regarding time; it is made to beunimportant: “Había visto esos ojillos fijos en él desde que abrió lossuyos horas atrás. O hace varios segundos, no está seguro […] hanpasado los horas, tal vez los días” (27-28). This idea of timelessness is7See Maupassant’s quote from “Le horla”, footnote 77, 57.8 This quote is a testament to “the ancient popular notion, which regarded all blackcats as witches in disguise” 223. Poe, “The Black Cat”. The feline’s moniker is also ofthe occult: Pluto [a. L. Pluto, Gr. name of the god of the underworld, brother of Jupiterand Neptune] .9Jaramillo Levi, “El olor”, Duplicaciones 27-28.75