The world of Perfect
The idea of perfection leads us straight to the iconic Giotto. A few months earlier, we could have asked Grouès. The latter, more ambiguous than bigoted, declared between two pinches of ass: “You shouldn't wait to be perfect before starting something good”. In the midst of all this, Favier, accustomed to playing hooky and untroubled by perfection, will seek out the Perfect where there's no point in shining.
Memories - in art and in cooking - invade the discourse, whether as an unavoidable passage or as an imaginary flemish, they seem to confer on the present a kind of immunity, even impunity, that a debatable legitimacy in fact grants them.
So let's get to it...
My grandmother didn't like my mother; she would so much have preferred her son to marry the daughter of the hardware merchant he'd knocked up between two tours*. My father dreamed of another world where only the earth was round, far from all these villages and stifled dreams. Years later, I was forced to spend an entire summer with these grandparents, and I was able to measure just how tenacious the absence of love was.
I was accommodated in a space that had nothing in common with a bedroom, a place that had never known tenderness, except perhaps a little onanism. It served as a pantry, and it was quite possible to hide either a hostage or a grandson in it.
Before this full boarding house, we'd come every year as a family to celebrate something; nobody seemed to know what, the festive side escaping everyone, the unspoken distilling a fair boredom. In Auvergne, misfortune never comes alone, so after a slightly dry saucisson-brioché and garden beans, my mother, tipsy after her two Clairettes, would intone a Nooooon...rienderien heartrending; I was rather embarrassed to see so much of her glottis.
I had to wait fourteen years - that's 5.40 metres of sausages - before I discovered that this dry, surly grandmother was secretly whipping up voluptuous jams... made from apricots! The idea of offering me one never seemed to cross her mind, and it was only through petty theft that I gained access to these delights of the high places. At the same time, I made another, even more moving and lasting discovery. Over the course of these nights of climbing, I found myself watching, heart pounding, for the little flowery fart that would inevitably escape when I managed, with my slightly clumsy fingers, to pinch and pull the thick orange rubber that temporarily welded these jars together. Voluptuousness was just around the corner, and as I dipped my index finger into the confiote, I squeezed the precious jar so tightly between my legs that a fleeting “LE PARFAIT” was printed in reverse on one of my thighs.
St Sigolène, July 14, 2025
Philippe Favier
*My father was an errand boy who travelled the countryside...
