La Marmite Du Gros Plein De Soupe - Roman autobiographique (manuscrit inachevé)

THE POT OF THE BIG ONE FULL OF SOUP - PROLOGUE

It all started long before the road, before the defeats; long before the time of failed recipes, of improvised destinies; long before tasting the flesh, the guilty pleasure, doubting everything, standing, on one's knees, and cruelly burning one's wings in the fire of one's own impulses.

For the Big Full of Soup, the word "love" was for a long time an imaginary recipe, a cold, phantom dish with perfect ingredients that he mixed without ever allowing himself a sincere tasting.

Without a spoon, a large question mark remained suspended above the tablet maker, serving as the sole feast for his appetite.

It was his rare commodity, a luxury he constantly sought to include in his daily life, but whose recipe always seemed to be written in a foreign language.

Was there even a promised land for him, a kind of homeland of the mind where perfection is not a punishment, but a pure fiction that one seeks to tame from childhood?

How can we know, after all, whether it was the perfect harmony of a French kiss or the fruit of his parents kissing on the back seat, simply creating a joyful road accident, one of those crazy swerves of the heart where life decides to stage an improvisational destiny, a grand theater of the unforeseen embroidered freehand with the thread of carelessness.

It was in this "emotivating" setting that he grew up, carrying his large frame and his doubts around like one wears an apron that is too big for oneself.

At the time, the only strategy a greedy little boy had found to achieve his ends was to help his mother in the kitchen: a very calculated diplomatic smokescreen to be able to plunge his fingers into the bowl and steal the icing long before the cake was ready.

For him, childhood was not a battlefield, but a garden of peace; never a raised voice, never a quarrel between parents to make the dishes tremble, and even less violence to offend innocence.

Until the age of twelve, he was a spoiled child, a little king without a crown who had never lacked anything, and especially not bread on the table, living in such a cozy cocoon that the word "misery" seemed to be an invention for other people's dictionaries.

His father was the figure of authority, a man as straight as an exclamation point, but whose presence nevertheless remained a great question mark as he was so absent even when on site — a silent lighthouse that watched over the open sea without ever going down to the beach.

At the other end of the table, his mother was a true ambassador of *peace and love*, a weaver of gentleness and compassion for whom hospitality was not a politeness, but a second nature; it was from her that he inherited this gene of the open pot, this ability to love the other without asking them for their passport to tenderness.

Yet, in the weave of this silken carpet, a more secret thread had slipped in from the cradle: an adopted sister, his almost twin fifteen months his senior, with whom he had shared the dawn of life.

Upon reaching the age of seven, the age when childhood begins to count its marbles, the fairy tale began to get tangled up: inhabited by the invisible vertigo of her missing roots, she became the little storm of the nest, a disturbing shadow that clawed at the silence to check if the love of home was made of stone or paper.

It was in the face of this older sister in search of a foothold, whose insecurity manifested itself in waves of morning aggression, that he cut his very first teeth as a parlor diplomat.

It was a daily laboratory where he, who only aspired to silence, peace and tranquility to gently awaken his mornings, had to learn to weather the storm without a fuss, initiating despite himself the slow process of hardening his heart — the very beginning of the creation of that protective pebble which he would later conceal there.

However, this cozy cocoon concealed a more complex reality that emerged around the age of ten, a world of taboos that would profoundly mark his relationship with the world.

Without having chosen it, the young boy and his sister were drawn by their parents into the world of nudist camps.

This parental philosophy and this particular way of life fostered a unique dynamic between the brother and sister for the rest of the year.

Deprived of reference points, their secret games turned towards a form of precocious gluttony: a clandestine exploration of the flesh, a desire to bite into the forbidden fruit of sexuality well before its time, tinging the dawn of their adolescence with a disconcerting maturity.

As soon as the long summer holidays returned, the dynamic broke down: his sister left home for the entire season, leaving the boy facing a double void.

Forced outside, he found himself in absolute solitude while his parents indulged in their games.

It was there, in those days stretched out like old elastic under a blazing sun, that he encountered true boredom.

A boredom that was not a childish whim, but possessed the grey colour of overheated sidewalks and the weight of a silence too heavy for his shoulders.

Time became a thick substance, stagnant water where the hours refused to flow.

Left entirely to his own devices, he watched the dust dance in the beams of light, the sole spectacle of a world put on pause.

This immense, vertical boredom was the vertigo of not being expected anywhere, of being the only point on a blank page.

To cheat this great summer desert and fill this void that buzzed in his ears, the little greedy guy had to learn to tame absence.