By Irina Podgorny (*)
With that phrase, very impertinent, short hair, curlers and with her hands on her waist, the undersigned responded to "Baby, what's your name?", a question with which adults of the 1970s used to bother children.
What did they think? What would María del Carmen, Rosario or María Gabriela answer? Not then: “Irina Podgorny, Russian name and surname”.A pride in the origin of my name that, no matter how hard I try, it is difficult for me to determine how it began. Perhaps it has arisen from the sonority of those syllables. Or the love for my grandfather. A grandfather who adored us and who, while we drank the milk with a straw, entertained us with the bullet marks on the muscles of his arm. A Jewish renegade, parsimonious, atheist and anarchist, a survivor of the Great War who settled on these shores sometime in the 1920s.But my name did not come from him, who never told us about the ways of his town or in his native language, the one that my father tried to study and I wanted to learn as soon as I finished Normal. Six years going to SARCU, six years with the best grades that, despite the approval of the teachers, did not prevent me from getting tired of the heroine mother and the language lessons in a moral-socialist tone. When I finished, the USSR was about to disintegrate, but the Saturday catechism had tired me at the same rate that Moscow was fading from my future. In 1986, I had begun to share my days with the French Alliance of Bernal, which rent prices housed in front of the maternity hospital where I was born and next to my grandmother's house. In 1987, when I finished the Soviet Russian school, the options were for an academic life in Spanish complemented by French and English but, finally, I turned to German. And because of this, my dad, for a few weeks, looked at me as a traitor to war crimes: he didn't tell me, but every once in a while he reminded me of the victory and the entry of the Soviets into Berlin. I didn't care, or rather, I understood that, due to his age, he lived in another universe, with another vocabulary and other protagonists. He, noblesse oblige, ended his days in love with the BVG. (1)If there was an origin of why I sign as I do, it would have to be found on a whim of my mother, the lawyer granddaughter and great-granddaughter of northern Italians. A name that she had found in one of the many books that she devoured in the years of the Cuban Revolution and that she chose for her daughter. Without hesitation, she wrote a summary information to be accepted in the Civil Registry of the Province of Buenos Aires, Quilmes section, because in those years "Irina" was not in the saints of permitted names.
Irina, a character in this novel, was the origin of her name. Image of the copy that her mother read in the '60s.
My mom took out her Lettera and she, who never lies, invented a story by which a character from Ilya Ehrenburg's The ninth wave became a tradition with which the daughters of her father-in-law's family were baptized and now, a marriage of Argentines, wanted to perpetuate on American soil. My mom, that day, lied. And since she writes well and speaks better, the Russian name and surname ended up being entered in the registry of those born in 1963 and with the full force of the law.
In short, everything was the result of a maternal whim and a fictional lawyer, her legal and literary skills combined with the surname of that gentleman who had come from Gomel, from a region today ravaged by wars and the Chernobyl accident, from the city where one of the many meetings called these days was held and about which he, José, never told us anything. My grandfather, the one my dad cried his eyes out for because there would no longer be a father like him in this world.Both lived without nostalgia for what was left behind but without forgetting the things of history. The future - where death awaits - was his only guide. The past was always worse and, therefore, the longing was never marked on their faces. Thanks to them we knew that going forward was much more than a slogan.What would they have said, my dad and yours, if they had known that, through the female line, the surname would end up passing to an old woman with petrified water? What would they say if they knew that this last name, wrongly or correctly transcribed from Cyrillic to Spanish, would be anchored in the remotest past, in the Upper Miocene of the Barrancas del Paraná in Entre Ríos? Right now, when no one dares to proclaim loudly that one has a Russian surname because, to tell the truth, the oven is not for threats of any kind.But if, despite this, someone were to celebrate the Russian side of our surname, they could not either because the borders of the 20th century are not those of today and the nationalities of then no longer exist. If someone stopped on the sidewalk and asked a girl sitting on the fence what her name is, she would not only go to jail: the girl would have to answer “Belarussian surname”. Knowing her, most likely, he didn't like her and she preferred to keep quiet. Too many syllables; she - the granddaughter of a grandfather of few words - opts for short sounds.As for my dad and my grandfather, I don't know what they would have said either. Impossible, however, not to rejoice, not to laugh knowing that we share the last name with a fossil that is rather ugly and that is close to 10 million years old. This is the only known specimen of a currently very diverse group called loricarinos, or "glasschucks", "cleaners" and "old water" and that, in this case, is in the repositories of the vertebrate collections of the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences "Bernardino Rivadavia", located in the Centennial Park of the City of Buenos Aires.These fish, related to the catfish, characteristic of South America and part of Central America, have adaptations to a great diversity of basins: beards, mustaches, the strangest fins, external dermal plates. Little is known about its evolution in part because there are very few fossils that help understand the past of this lineage. One of them, the species described in 2022 by Sergio Bogan and Federico Agnolin, was named Sturisomatichthys podgornyi.We are all very happy, an “everyone” that includes the authors, Dr. Dalla Valle and the Podgornys as a whole: this fish, like my brother, who -summary information through- is called Flavio, has a Latin name and a Russian surname. To great honor, that better times will come when we will all be crushed by the weight of history.March 14, 2022, for my father, my mother and the sworn information that gave me the name.The description of Sturisomatichthys podgornyi can be read at: SEENote:
1. BVG: Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe is today the largest public transport company in Germany.
We appreciate the kindness of Dr. Sergio Bogan, curator of the Scientific Collections of the Azara Foundation, and the artist Gustavo Righelatto.
(*) Museum of La Plata, CONICET.