chapter 5a
(The First Born)
Moïse Berri
and the Reconstruction of the Haitian
Space Agency
by Jude Jarda
5a
The First Born
Ulysses Hercules Dondedieu Legitime wakes up with a stiff neck. He spent most of the night doing trade and business, using his laptop and juggling with five mobile phones at finger's reach. His alarm clock was set for seven, but he started working long before that. As he was falling asleep, Ulysses Hercules kept adding and subtracting large amounts of money, sometimes even mumbling the results to himself. U.H.D. Legitime, like he loves to be called by the financial journalists who are constantly investigating him, is a very powerful and rich businessman who owns half a dozen lucrative companies in and around Chicago. Cash is the least of his problems. At 52, the first born son of Sixte-Osmer Legitime could choose to live a life of ease, doing absolutely nothing, but the idea of spending an entire day with his wife drives him to overwork himself until he gets mentally and physically sick. The situation has been like this for the last two decades; since the spouses came back from Curaçao, where they spent their entire honeymoon trip, jailed by mistake for drug smuggling. Ulysses Hercules profoundly detests his other half, Edmondine Belhumeur, to the point of regularly wishing her harm. He doesn't want Edmondine gone for good with the passion needed to whack her himself, but he has accumulated and canalized enough acrimony towards her to enjoy picturing her suffocating slowly, while filling herself with the daily bucket of fried chicken she daily ingests during her afternoon Mexican soaps. Ulysses Hercules came very close to crossing the point of no return, following a stormy quarrel triggered by a soiled toilet seat. U.H.D. went as far as to meet with Domingo Gran Cuchillo, a notorious gangster and official member of Chicago's South Side Filthy Cobras. Different methods for slaying Edmondine Belhumeur were discussed on that day around multiple pints of dry stout. Luckily for his wife, Ulysses Hercules choked at the last minute and backed off, mesmerized and deeply intimidated by the coldness of the gang member, who labeled himself a part-time contract killer and permanent fugitive. In the end, Ulysses Hercules told Domingo the only joke he knew; the nonsensical story of a turtle no one would hire because it was faster then a snail, but much slower then a leopard. Right after the nonexistent punch line, both men exploded in laughter, yelling and screaming like two teenage dingbats. U.H.D. and Domingo finally pretended they were both joking and lying about their respective day jobs. They had one last drink and each went their way. The thug took a cab home and went reading her favorite book to his daughter; Ulysses Hercules drove back to his mansion with his suitcase, still fully loaded with the money he had brought to the awkward rendezvous.
Ulysses Hercules Dondedieu Legitime owns a huge house in Lincoln Park. His sumptuous residence might be the utmost when it comes down to luxury and functionality, but U.H.D. despises the damn place. He never really felt comfortable in this upscale neighborhood. The neighbors are fully aware that he is not an established member of the local elite, the source of his fortune being from a private, unknown and alien source. Therefore, they all agree behind his back that U.H.D.'s wealth is of dubious origin. Ulysses Hercules knows that they treat and speak of him differently, as soon as he leaves the room. He does get invited to their social gatherings now and then, but the enduring poverty of Haiti, the chaotic political situation, the social unrest, the perpetual economic instability in his country of birth and his resident status in America, are the only subjects his hosts seem to be interested in. Ulysses Hercules can of course brag to everyone about teeing on a weekly basis with people from the entourage of the Republican Senator of the State of Illinois, but that doesn't make him an Ivy League graduate or a peer of some kind of closed society, with the secret handshakes and the covert Latin chants. Everyone knows that Ulysses Hercules will forever be an outsider.
The eldest son of Sixte-Osmer Legitime feels a strong antipathy for all the residents in his immediate surroundings. He did try for a while to socialize with his next door neighbor, a voracious reader he caught reading Sun Tzu, Simone de Beauvoir, Lord Byron and Pushkin in the same week. Ulysses Hercules showed some interest in that fellow’s talents as a gardener and sincere curiosity for his profession as a musical show producer. He slowly began to get acquainted with Walter. Ulysses Hercules was very impressed, when he learned, from an editorial in the Bloomberg Business Week, that Walt My Man, has he liked to call him, a discreet, shy and very modest individual, was in fact the mastermind behind a great number of major global benefit concerts. Walter was the ideal fundraiser to call up for any humanitarian telethon or to make a charity event a great success. That humble mate was in fact the most resourceful middleman anyone could find, to bridge Hollywood and your backyard stage, the perfect intermediary between Washington and your tax refund representative. The two buddies became so familiar with each other, that Walter finally introduced his Finnish male lover to Ulysses Hercules during a brunch at the local country club. Their relationship became cosmic cold since that windy morning.
Compelled by his annoying wife, Ulysses Hercules accepted to befriend another neighbor. Jake was a Wall Street shark, a Formula One aficionado and a music lover with great taste, capable of grasping the essence of Bach, Brown or Björk with an equivalent ease and understanding. A durable and solid friendship between the two men seemed possible. They got so close that Jake would sometimes inform Ulysses Hercules about extremely well guarded secrets and projects known only to the board of directors at the Boeing Company, where Jake worked as an executive. Jake would once in a while brief Ulysses Hercules on sensitive subjects regarded as national secrets by the Defense Department, where Jake was a technical advisory on many projects and a senior consultant on the United States Senate Armed Services Committee. Then one day, Ulysses Hercules learned that Jake was in fact a diminutive for Jacob, and that Jacob celebrated Hanukkah, not Christmas. The warmth between the two chums died down abruptly.
After a while, Ulysses Hercules decided to break the ice with Ibrahim, another neighbor from across the street, despite the color of his skin. U.H.D. Legitime had zero problems dealing with Black people with a complexion varying from beige to dark brown, like the members of his family, but he feared and avoided any contact with very dark skinned individuals like this jolly Nigerian. In addition to him being homophobic and anti-Semitic, Edmondine Belhumeur discovered that her husband was also a close-minded racist, a short-sighted xenophobe and a hopeless bigot. According to U.H.D. Legitime, the immense majority of Arabs and Brown people were potential dormant terrorists and active modern slave traders; Europeans and Caucasians, in general, were all child molesters and hard drug users; Russians and Slavs, fascists and neurotics with ethnic cleansing tendencies; North-Americans, a bunch of serial killers and warmongers ready to do anything just to be on television for a minute or two; South-Americans, drug farmers and traffickers, all of them; Chinese, Mongols and East Asians, human organ smugglers; First Nations and every Aboriginal, a brotherhood of wife beaters and alcoholics; Hindu Indians, unclean idolaters; Saharan Africans, inbred psychopaths; and Sub-Saharan Africans, natural born killers with a thirst for dictatorship and self-hating internal warfare. All the other ethnic groups were equally contemptible to U.H.D.'s eyes. In spite of his highly biased beliefs, Ulysses Hercules succeeded for a time to put his prejudiced mind aside. Having full access to Ibrahim's private helicopter and benefiting from outstanding rebates on plane tickets from Ibrahim's travel bureau really helped a lot.
On their way back from a Boxing event in Vegas, Ibrahim chose to confront Ulysses Hercules with the lies he kept on spreading around about Walter and Jake behind their backs. Jake never strangled any blind Palestinian kid during his short stay in Galilee, nor did he steal the pension funds of the Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows Cloistered Sisters. And of course, Walter was not targeting young Afro-American males from universities in the Deep South, with the intention to rape and contaminate them with the HIV virus. In fact, Walter was not even seropositive; and neither was he a Japanese porno gay superstar. Revealed as a senseless fabricator, Ulysses Hercules started to dirty Ibrahim's honor with mean words that he sometimes made up himself. The hateful things that came out of U.H.D.'s mouth were so disgraceful, that Ibrahim felt pity for his soul. Strange as it may seem, the first insolent remarks from Ulysses Hercules targeted the particular body odor of this impeccably clean gentleman. He then attacked Ibrahim's Yoruba ancestors, supposedly still implicated in the Triangular Commerce. Ulysses Hercules also blamed the lack of leadership of Ibrahim's home country, within the OPEP organization, on the presumed drug-addicted delegates sent by Abuja. U.H.D. Legitime furthermore accused Good Luck Jonathan’s party of being the real unsuspected instigator of the recurrent religious clashes in the Plateau State. The first born son of Sixte-Osmer Legitime reached the height of irreverence, when he started barking at the man, and yelling some impolite and gullible comments on the physical attributes of Ibrahim's three wives. To make sure he went too far, Ulysses Hercules even gave is opinion on the smell of their food on certain holidays. He finally turned Ibrahim's spouses into ridicule, laughing about their hairdos and the colors of their everyday dresses. Ulysses Hercules and the Nigerian never spoke to each other again after that regrettable incident.
When he became the owner of that small castle, Ulysses Hercules didn't have the financial means to afford it or pay for its maintenance. His wife forced him to sign the deal with a real estate agent he didn't even trust. Ulysses-Hercules would have been satisfied with a cabin a modest cabin in the woods, far from the noise of the city, the pollution and most importantly, far from people in general. He was back then just a novice engineer in the firm of his father, and his allowance was openly controlled by his mother, who did not cared for the fact that Ulysses Hercules was thirty one years old at the time. Unfortunately for U.H.D., arguing with Edmondine Belhumeur and trying to convince her that a childless couple did not really need seven bathrooms on four stories to get by was, by experience, like plunging into an abyss of irrationality, bickering with one illogical hypothesis after another and risking, primarily, a physical exhaustion, followed closely by a mental breakdown. Expecting to win any argument over his wife or even hope to make her listen to his point of view, generally entailed the danger to increase his blood pressure just enough to provoke a fatal stroke. Finally, persuading Edmondine Belhumeur that any idea, other then her own, could be worth hearing, was like entering an imaginary ring, with a vortex in its center, leading to a parallel dimension governed, not by the laws of gravity, but solely by the rules of insanity. “Better go chase caimans with my bare hands than try winning an argument against that old skank,” Ulysses Hercules often repeated to his employees. The first born son of Sixte-Osmer Legitime has considered divorcing almost daily for the last twenty years, but the concept of matrimonial division always put a stop to his quest for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Ulysses Hercules prefers to suffer side by side with Edmondine Belhumeur, instead of having to picture her with a victorious smile, somewhere on a remote island, with half of his money and a titanic portion of his inheritance.
Ulysses Hercules and Edmondine Belhumeur sleep in separate bedrooms since the Barcelona Games. They stopped using the same bathrooms when Edmondine discovered the advantages of Prozac in a dysfunctional couple, eight years later, coming back from a cruise in Crete. Living in different quarters of the house makes it easier for Ulysses Hercules to avoid Edmondine's constant questioning. He takes a first warm shower, thoroughly washes his hands with germicidal soap, rubbing alcohol and acetone, heads back to the shower for a colder one, and then vaporizes his clothes with a powerful industrial pesticide. Ulysses Hercules then contacts his Mayan butler on his pager. Picking an allophone servant, with no legal papers and a family to feed, was a brilliant idea of Alistair Stetson, Ulysses Hercules's lawyer. Guillermo cannot testify against Ulysses Hercules in a court of law in proper English; and pronouncing the words los niños or decapitar petrifies him; also, yelling ¡cuidado! la inmigración! gives the poor man sudden tachycardia and severe chest pains. Guillermo calls his boss back.
“Where is she?” Ulysses Hercules inquires.
“Señora Emontina is in the kitchen, Señor Leyitim.” “Si, si, Señor, no hay problema. Señora Emontina esta ocupada.”
“Listen, Guillermo, in fifteen minutes, I want the Maybach 62 ready before the main entrance. Fix me a strawberry ice cream shake with eggs; add a banana and two drops of vanilla essence in it. And... Guillermo?”
“Si, Señor?”
“Do not skimp on the disinfectant. I would also need some pain killers. Get me some Tylenol, Motrin or anything that hits. Steal a couple of prescription pills from my wife’s secret stash in the attic. Let's say... five. Use sterile gloves to manipulate them and cellophane to wrap each capsule separately. Put everything back in order when you're done. I don't want any trouble with the nut case. Call me back when everything is set.”
“Any other instrucciones, Señor Leyitim?” “I'll be back around eight, Guillermo. So if you can push my dear spouse to drink until she passes out, that would save me from having to listen to her constant complaining and mindless bullshit about her family and her imaginary list of diseases.”
Half and hour later, dressed in a Valentino suit with gold buttons, Ulysses Hercules proceeds to the inspection of his luxurious sedan. He starts by checking the exhaustion pipes to ensure that they are not obstructed by a potato or a squash ball. He then lifts the hood to make sure no cat, squirrel or raccoon settled with its family next to the engine. He also verifies the condition of all the visible cables and makes a quick search under the car, looking for explosives. Ulysses Hercules Dondedieu Legitime is aware of his obsessive-compulsive disorder, but even if he piles up three or more new enemies every week, none of them has ever let their beef escalate to the point of invading his property to assault him directly; at least, not yet.
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