Osmin Maibeth
Osmin Maibeth, apart from rubbing shoulders with marine life, motoring on trails that only he knows, loading gallons of fuel, speaking little, and smiling frequently...rescues fish skins and transports them to the big house built on stilts on the shores of the main lagoon of Kaukira. The one painted in tender green with a square-shaped corridor. The one that houses a laboratory of high alchemist rigor, and is the retail home for bass, jellyfish, sea cucumber, grouper, corvina, lobster, shrimp, ice, charamuscas, and as if that were not enough, solar power for cell phones.
Years before, piled up in heaps of rubbish, those same skins, far from their fillets and lost in their sorrows, were thrown into the water to rot, never to live again. By midmorning, there were tables in the corridor, and about twenty-five pounds of skin in brine. Perhaps, the only drawback was their languid pallid countenance and their oh-so-distinctive penetrating odor. Alejandra, Esmelia, Noriela, Ralda, and Karla, with keen eye and determined humor, cross waters, docks, and corridors with the urge to thrive...to delicately take the skins, shake off their scales, bathe them standing up in white buckets, caressing to clean, and then immersing them with brightly colored flowers, in all pomp and rhythm of ceremonial music to mitigate their smell.
Our formula to transform skins is exquisitely simple, as they say that most of the great inventions are. No denatured chemicals, not a gram of contaminating ingredients, absent from complicated industrialized processes. Beyond an amplifying, preserving and invigorating protein fiber recipe, its procedural technique is merely artisan hands in circular movements...very close to a healing, transformative and regenerative spiritual rite.
With his brown face and his curls in disarray, Osmin walked the room where bits of sky and mangrove branches slip through. He approached the girls. He watched them, fascinated by their neatness, and attracted by how they amused themselves by meticulously cleaning meat with four spoons. Stealthy, he got closer and closer. Suddenly he found himself standing next to Alejandra trying to understand her chores.
Alejandra, has a delicate spirit and soft features, a simplicity that is natural to her, and a joy that filters through her lips. She wiped the first sea bass skin with great care. As if transforming skins were the prize for the efforts of the day, or rather, the door to freedom. Many afternoons I spent in the green house and during that time many things changed there. She talked to me about it, without making any unfounded fuss. Esmelia, was burning with desire to retire to her moraban obligations, despite the fact that her peaceful countenance defined her love and fun for the job. Esmelia had started tanning from the beginning. I felt deep appreciation for her since. With her, I learned to exchange Miskito words for another knowledge. Ralda, treated her skins as experiments, and continued to catch them as if they were live fish, with tenderness and enthusiasm, morosely dreaming of forming her own aquifer museum. Karla had to remove the last scale from the huge grouper. She delicately brushed the tail with salt, revealing an exuberant brilliance, whispering newly invented words, and wiping away the moisture with her hand. Her skill, dexterity and dedication suggested the fluffy and succulent marzipan cake that her mother sent me as an appreciated welcome upon my arrival.
Equipped with ingenuity and tools, Osmin advanced with precise gestures and a gentle trot towards an infinite surprise. He disappeared to return a few minutes later with a tray of tree bark that gave off a resinous aroma that pleasantly filled not only the vast stage, but also brought dreams to the minds, creativity, and spirit of the tanners. The feeling premonition of finding itself under the prodigious liquid between unsuspected crusts in its glass aquarium, ignited even the ardor of the skins themselves.
With fervor and without hesitation, Noriela took one of the unknown chunks and gave it two smooth and accurate hammer blows. Ralda followed her, then Karla, and finally Alejandra. They intuited that inside, below, in the bark, there are natural tannins of exquisite colors. It seemed natural to Osmin. Thanks to his labor and his place of birth, he knew all the species. He could identify each tree by its name and the color of its interior. At first glance, one bark does not differ from another at all, the same shell covers a chestnut, a mangrove, a quebracho, a tara, or a nance. In a deep and secret satisfaction, he turned his gaze with the curiosity of a scientist to contemplate the tanning work that the young women were doing bended over the steel tables. Even the light on the scales shone differently. While they came and went, building hides, the air was filled with the eternal aromas of nature, powerful astringents, and words in sweet local dialect.
At the glimpse of those skins inflating, moving, taking on life, color and texture, the night slipped endlessly between the limits of the jungle and the room. Where on the longest table, laying in stillness for the first time, a bewitching and translucent batch of leathers, in shades of yellow, honey and caramel, exhaled a nance fragrance. The Lagoon and the hammocks swayed to their tedium, and the moths continued their dusty flight around a lab of transforming leathers amidst Miskitu conversation.
A pleasant discovery came to light the next morning. The leathers bloomed with summer vitality. Versatile and ruddy, exhibiting the color of the sun, the essence and presence of nature, the energy and creativity of Osmin, Alejandra, Esmelia, Karla, Ralda, and Noriela…trapped and retained in the soul of its translucent material.
