PODJANI, AN EXCERPT FROM GIRL PRODIGIES
by SABINA URRACA, TRANS. BY ALLANA LIEBERMAN
Sometimes, in moments of darkness, I would repeat his name to myself:
Podjani Stanko Iereslava.
There was once a time when I saw that fruity little boy, with a roll on the back of his neck indicative of a life of future fatness, as the most beautiful, gifted person in the whole world. Podjani was a glimmer of hope.
I was nine and watching Bravo Bravísimo on TV when the host, Bertín Osborne, announced:
“And at just ten years old, hailing deep from the Ural Mountains of Kazakhstan, Podjani Stanko Iereslava!”
In that segment, “deep from the Ural Mountains,” lay the makings of a brutal childhood: hands blue with cold squeezing chapped udders at five in the morning, cows dying from Uralese Chupacabra attacks, evil eye curses souring the milk.
Podjani appeared on stage in the traditional dress of his country. A black velvet garment embroidered with colored thread over tights.
Eskimo eyes.
He did his folk dance. The crowd fell silent.
It was totally absurd, full of acrobatics inscrutable to the average Spanish viewer. A dance with no future whatsoever in the world of show business. But it was impressive.
What I felt inside reminded me of a documentary I’d watched around that time through the gaps between my fingers. In the documentary, an orca whale tossed a seal in the air again and again until killing it. It was so beautiful, so sad and astonishing, just like watching Podjani’s dance.
At the end of each number, Bertín Osborne would look at the child who’d just performed with that same teasing son-of-a-bitch-smile of his, treating him like the orca treated the seal, but with none of the majesty. During Podjani’s song, an editor inserted a fleeting shot of Bertín watching from his box seat. It was a split-second error, but you could see on his face that watching Podjani’s routine had hacked Osborne’s wall of boorish cynicism to pieces. His spirit, starved and worn thin from all the cocaine and four-wheeling through Spanish olive groves, desperately soaked up the magic from that whirlwind of black velvet and rainbow ribbon.
Podjani didn’t know how to smile. When Bravo Bravísimo’s live audience gave a roaring, standing ovation and it was time for him to say “hola” and “gracias” in his strange accent, his smile came out diabolical. Happiness was so foreign to him that when it appeared on his face, his features distorted it.
The following day he’d return to the frozen roads of his hometown to live for weeks on end with his pajamas underneath his clothes, eating cabbage soup next to his silent, alcoholic father.
But in that moment, on his leathery, neckless, turtleboy face, his smile broke through, shining a bit of sunlight on the farm, the cows, the pot of boiling milk with the skin floating on top, his drunk father’s dead weight falling down at the farm’s gate and freezing to death.
I was smitten. My plan was to find him hell or high water. I wrote in my diary:
I’M GOING TO FIND HIM.
And below, in a different color:
GOTTA GET MY ACT TOGETHER.
Looking back I’m not sure what I meant by this or how getting my act together was going to lead me to Podjani.
I imagined myself walking down the drawbridge of a docked ship like in another time, a little hat cocked to one side and a valise slung over my shoulder. I’m in Kazakhstan. Then, I, who couldn’t even muster up the courage to say thank you at the bakery, would open my mouth and say: “Good day, sir. Do you know where I might find the Ural Mountains? And the Iereslava farm?”
Some ruddy-cheeked stranger would pat his horse and answer: “I’ll take you, Miss. Please, climb into the carriage.”
But when I did find him, would I be good enough? We didn’t even speak the same language. At first, I was confident that just by virtue of having traveled like a stowaway in order to shield him with my love, that would be enough to convince him of my worthiness, but at night I had trouble sleeping. There needed to be something more than just my proclamation to connect us.
The question answered itself really. Tap. I’d seen Annie and Daddy Warbucks’ jaw-dropping garden finale twenty times, and each time experienced a strange sensation in my feet, as if they were touched by divine inspiration.
I wrote in my diary, “I’m going to practice every day and sooner or later my parents will have to notice.”
Notice, that is, that I was gifted. That when my feet made contact with the earth, the result was pure magic.
We lived on the second floor, but the garage was below us, so there was no impediment for my newfound calling. I could tap with all the fervor my secret talent demanded of me.
I tried a few nights in front of the mirror, and that was enough to see I wasn’t tapping with the reckless abandon I’d envisioned. There was the basic heel-toe technique I needed to learn in order to start dancing out the frenetic energy I felt stored in my legs. I asked my dance academy about lessons, but tap was on Thursday nights and ended at ten pm, too late for me. As a nine-year-old, the only night I was allowed to stay up late was on Friday, when I also had permission to eat pizza and drink grape juice while watching Melrose Place. There was an edge of danger to those nights, runny cheese and blue light glowing in the darkness. I’d watch it alone with the door closed, jumping at every sound I heard in the hallway. I was worried my parents would come in and see the perversion of Melrose Place unfolding before the eyes of their nine-year-old daughter. I don’t know why they let me watch it, but I did so with a feeling of utter terror. The sex scenes disturbed me so much that I’d be in a sort of daze for the next three scenes. Like when the evil Kimberly tried to seduce her brother-in-law by saying she had a tattoo, a butterfly “somewhere between my shoulders and my ankles.”
She lingered on the last few words, leaning in close to her brother-in-law’s face. “Somewhere between my shoulders and my ankles.” I was shocked when, later in the series, a bikini-clad Kimberly showed off a tiny, tattoo-free bellybutton.
Wasn’t that the point exactly between her shoulders and ankles?
I always hear people say, “Now with the internet, you can find everything.” Not true. Podjani Stanko Iereslava isn’t there. There also isn’t anything about a movie I remember seeing as a kid about a teenager named Laurette. Laurette took care of her little sister because they were both orphans. I only remember her name, that she was pretty with very full, red lips, and in one scene, her sister, with her dirty nose and tattered stuffed animal, sang a little tune on the staircase’s landing.
In the state of Nebraska
there’s a cat who smells like caca
I’ve scoured the internet:
In the state of Nebraska there’s a cat who smells like caca
laurette Nebraska
laurette orphans cat caca
podjani stanko iereslava
Kazakhstan boy bravo bravísimo
One day while riding the metro I suddenly collapsed, just like Podjani’s father on their frozen farmland. Before losing consciousness, I remembered snippets of my weekend. I’d had a good time, I think. A friend fell into a rose bush. I was into a very pretty punk girl who kept offering me speed. Little pebbles of it wriggled up my nose, eroding my septum from the inside. I told the punk that I once took so much speed that the next morning, little cones of coagulated blood had plugged my nostrils. That made her laugh. It wasn’t true, but I liked to show that I was on her level in terms of my lust for life. I collected refry cigarettes off the ground and gave them to her, for which she kissed me, gratefully. That night I ingested everything that was handed to me with the same mindless intensity that’s made me gnaw at my cuticles ever since I was four years old, in a compulsive state of total, hypnotic surrender. And then came the mental fragmentation, the dissolution of meaning, the fall in the metro, constant panic attacks. Even the psychologist said it was odd. I didn’t find it very empathetic or professional of her when she said: “I’ve met people who walk hunched over, but not people who flop over to the side.”
For months I walked that way, leaning over until I’d end up running into the wall. When I closed my eyes, I’d fall down instantly, as if pushed by some invisible force.
I called a psychiatrist friend who had tagged along to a few of Father Fortea’s exorcisms. I wracked my brain trying to come up with some way to get him to see me, but he never answered my emails.
For months, the only way I could manage to cross my doorway’s metaphorical ring of fire was by repeating to myself: “And hailing deep from the Ural Mountains of Kazakhstan, Podjani Stanko Iereslava!”
I’d cautiously step into the outside world, holding my breath as if emerging from an icy and hostile mountain terrain, exposed to the heat of public life for the first time.
I rise from the dark recesses of the Ural Mountains and head toward the applause. I have to force it. Even though the smile screws up my face, I have to keep going. The sidewalk narrows, and I feel as if I’m about to pass out from the anxiety, and that’s when the other one enters my mind:
In the state of Nebraska there’s a cat that smells like caca.
These were the mantras I believed in. One foot in front of the other, each time a little faster. The state of Nebraska. The cat. The caca. Nebraska. Cat. Caca.
In an attempt to save me, my dad came to the city for a visit. I remember him looking at me helplessly and saying, “You have to learn to relax.”
We went to a yoga class together, just to try it out.
The studio was full of gold buddhas and liquid trickling through mini waterfalls. We each ended up on opposite sides of the room. While doing his first sun salutation, my father let out a thunderous fart. The class maintained a monastic silence. I think it would’ve been preferable if someone laughed. A laugh just as thundering as the fart to neutralize its effect. But no. When the class was over, my father went to the front desk and bought me six months of classes in an attempt to save himself through financial recompense.
With a show of superhuman resolve, I kept going to the classes every Thursday. In the locker room afterward, a few girls would talk about “that old guy who came to the intro class and farted.” All three of them were publicists and needed to tear others to pieces in order to release endorphins.
Over time, they ratcheted up their cruelty. They said the fart man “seemed crazy.” Another day they suggested that maybe he was homeless and took advantage of the intro class to “enjoy the studio’s heating.” My desire to seamlessly integrate into the group led me to start laughing at the fart man, too. If I wasn’t accepted into the fold, I would keep being forced to use the filthiest yoga mat in the worst spot in the room, a corner where no matter what kind of stretch I was doing, my arms or legs bumped into someone or something.
In an attempt to steer my dreams of inclusion in another direction entirely, I decided to become number one in the whole class. Trying to be the best was a driving force that had never failed me. It was a dense, sustaining fuel; it could get me places. Since I couldn’t balance on one foot, I poured my heart and soul into the seated positions. Our teacher, a gay guy with a Zen demeanor that masked the viper blood running through his veins, harangued us from the other end of the room.
“Strong legs, arms by your sides, pubic bone to the sky!”
In my corner I flexed my soul, doing just about everything besides yoga, moving my body with the ultimate goal of achieving perfection. I pushed each pose to its limit. I thought about Kimberly, her pubic butterfly taking flight in the blue sky above Melrose Place, and I sent my butterfly sky-high, one, two, three times, each with more determination than the last.
“Your pubic bone should point toward the ceiling. That’s it. Pubic bone to the sky. Pubic bone to the sky. You, in the back, pubic bone to the sky! Not vagina to the sky!”
There was a faint hissing sound; the group’s total silence soon to be followed by the same humiliating locker-room ritual.
I gave up. I couldn’t get the studio to refund me the money, and I went back to complete isolation.
My basement apartment had no natural light and a warped floor. If you put a ball on one end of the room, it would slowly roll to the other side. I had to tape up the wheels of my chair because the slope would pull me away from the notes I was taking on my desk. This imbalance contributed to my overall sense of instability.
I quit cleaning. Quit keeping up with my responsibilities, quit trying to be better, quit dusting. I’d had enough. One day, when faced with the labor of throwing away some leftover salad and washing the bowl, I just shoved the whole thing into the freezer. I, who as a child, had spent my allowance on bleach to scrub the neighbor’s house in secret, couldn’t even bring myself to change my bedsheets.
Friends came to visit with smiling faces and well-meaning remedies: a bottle of honey, a bag of limes. One insisted that what I needed was more protein, and she began to make me pork chops every day. Then one day she stopped, and I went back to eating my childhood-era breakfast of yogurt and muesli.
The most remote expedition my mind would tolerate was a walk to the video rental store.
I rented movies I’d already seen. Typically, I tried to limit myself to strictly those I’d watched before I hit puberty. Sometimes the box of some new kids’ movie would catch my eye, but then I’d put it back on its shelf.
I kept myself in a zone of total comfort tucked inside another comfort zone, which was inside yet another even softer, spongier comfort zone that enveloped everything. But soon the cozy atmosphere of the plush hovel I’d created stopped feeling so easy and pleasant. There came a day when, re-watching Annie, I started fast-forwarding through the tap scenes. The simple sound of the metallic sole clacking on the floor irritated me. I couldn’t stand watching her cover such long distances with that funny little dance of hers, all the while being incapable, at twenty, of walking down the street without careening into a wall.
My comfort zone shrank and shrank until it transformed into a teeny prison.
When Annie is adopted and goes to live in Daddy Warbucks’ mansion, she thinks she’s been hired as a housekeeper. At eight years old, she has spent her whole life on the street or in the orphanage. Forever a member of the proletariat. She is shocked to discover that, thanks to her sparkling personality and pure heart, she’s definitely not a housekeeper, but a rich little girl, the queen of the castle, the beloved ward of Daddy Warbucks. She’s the one who makes the music come from out of nowhere, who inspires the help to enter into a raptured state of ecstatic dance.
One day, while watching the snippets of movie that survived my tap censorship, my blood ran cold. Not only had my dream of becoming a young dance star died, but I couldn’t even aspire to one of the film’s lower rungs. Maybe I could be cast as a maid, I’d do a top-notch job cleaning, obviously, but at the end of the day my nerves were so wrecked from my anxiety and the whirring of my brain a million miles a second that I’d probably collapse crying into some other maid’s shoulder. Then they’d give me the boot. I imagined another maid trying to console me with the cold distance of a new therapist, someone who’s a stranger one minute and then suddenly holding you while you sob in their arms the next. I felt like I was being edged out, little by little,from the movies I’d dreamt of starring in as a child. I wasn’t even fit for a supporting role.
I went to Urgent Care. I explained my situation to two nurses and a doctor, all three very young and very normie. I summed it up this way: “One night I took all the drugs anyone offered me. Two days later I fell down in the metro and now it’s been about a month since I’ve been able to walk down the street. I lean to one side, and if I close my eyes, I fall over.”
They asked me what I’d taken. They weren’t familiar with any of it.
As I spoke, I watched the doctor taking notes in my chart.
“Patient claims she consumed ‘speech.’”
I explained that I’d also taken MDMA and cocaine.
“MMA? How does one take that?”
I checked my impatience.
“It’s ecstasy.”
They regarded me quizzically at first. Then they became a bit circumspect. It was as if I’d said, “Ecstasy, it’s the bee’s knees!”
“It’s a white powder,” I clarified. “We all licked a finger and dipped it into a pile of it, and then you rub it on your gums.”
They looked at me in horror.
“You know that diseases are transmissible that way?”
They asked if I’d intended to commit suicide. Also if my legs hurt. I said no to both.
“So, why can’t you walk?”
I gritted my teeth. In a voice too loud and unhinged to be acceptable in a health clinic, I shouted something unintelligible.
One of the nurses helped me stand and firmly led me back toward the waiting room. As I walked through the door, I turned and yelled at the doctor again, trying hard to hold back tears.
“And it’s spelled speed! Like, fast!”
She held her notes to her chest and looked back at me, shocked.
From Urgent Care they referred me to my neighborhood mental health clinic. On the wall next to the entrance someone had scrawled in big, red letters, “I’m so cray.”
The psychiatrist was bored with me before I even opened my mouth. He said we had half an hour. I decided to take advantage and squeeze in EVERYTHING. I told him about the drugs, but also about Annie and my inability to watch the tap scenes. That led me to Punky Brewster and how I attributed my precocious puberty to her. I thought for a mental health professional he might at least find the impressionability of my body and mind to be of some interest.
He stood and asked me to wait.
After he shut the door behind him, I heard him go into the next room. I quietly got up and pressed my ear to the wall, thinking maybe he’d gone in search of some psychosomatic disorders specialist. In just a few minutes, someone would show up who’d finally get it, and then they’d give me the miracle pill to dissolve this nightmare.
Instead, I listened as he fixed himself a coffee and complained about his day to a coworker. She asked something I couldn’t quite make out.
The psychiatrist responded in a defeated tone.
“So tiring and long. This one says she always wanted to be Snow White. Another Disney weirdo.”
One day in the middle of the afternoon, and only after a great deal of effort, I managed to make my way down to the metro platform. As best as I could, I forged through the crowds, my chest packed tight with anxiety every time a train approached on the tracks. I overheard the conversation of two women next to me. One was saying to the other in a hopeless tone: “Can you believe we’ve been eating chicken every day for four months, and he hasn’t even noticed?”
It sounded like an ultimatum. Here was a woman reaching her breaking point, the end of a romance. It made me realize just how fucked-up I was. The mental image of this woman getting up every day and being capable of preparing a whole chicken filled me with a dark jealousy. I stepped from the train and the doors slid shut behind me. I staggered to the supermarket. I’d begun a twelve-step program to save my life, and every one of those twelve steps was going to be a chicken roasting in the oven.
The busy Carrefour made me squeeze my eyes shut. Terrified, I stumbled among the shelves, pausing every so often to take a deep breath. I bought a free-range chicken, two onions, and a bottle of oil on sale. I saw myself reflected in the mirrored columns by the check-out and was surprised by how much I looked like my grandmother, one eye a little squintier than the other, the physical manifestation of suffering roiling just below the surface.
At home, I preheated the oven and fried the onion in a skillet. I oiled a pan and set the chicken in the middle. As I was putting the bottle on the shelf, I noticed the label. White letters on a green background that read “Bertín’s Mill” and underneath, a picture of Bertín Osborne smiling at me with that son-of-a-bitch smile of his, as if seeming to say: “I snorted everything under the sun, too, you know, but it worked out for me. I even started my own olive oil mill! Ha!”
I was the seal on the verge of death, being thrown into the air again and again, tossed into the sky by the orca waiting below. Meanwhile the chicken, sitting in its little puddle of oil, began slowly sliding away, surrendering to the slope of the warped floorboards.
Photo credit: Andrea Fernández Plata
Sabina Urraca is a writer and editor. She is the author of Las niñas prodigio which won the Javier Morote Prize, Soñó con la chica que robaba un caballo, Chachachá (Dueto), El celo, which was named the 2024 book of the year by El Cultural, and Escribir antes. Her novels have been translated into French, Portuguese, and Italian. She is a regular contributor for national radio programs Carne Cruda and El Ojo Crítico and has written for El País, El Cultural, and Vice. Her work has been supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship, A BBVA Foundation Leonardo Grant, and the Montserrat Roig Writing Grant. The translation of her novel In Heat is forthcoming from HarperVia in 2027.
Photo credit: riel Sturchio
Allana Lieberman is a literary translator from Reno, Nevada. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference, ALTA and Vermont Studio Center. Her translation of Sabina Urraca’s In Heat is forthcoming from HarperVia in 2027.
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