Deadly Tasting Read Online Free PDF

stopped when he recognized the familiar voice of Rudolph Martinez. Benjamin had been invited to the France Bleu Gironde radio studio each time a new edition of his guide was released. He had come to know this mysterious young man with elegant hands and a dark, seductive gaze beneath long eyelashes. Benjamin appreciated the interviewer’s pertinent and carefully researched questions. The engaging dialogue always made for a successful show.
    Benjamin slowed down and turned up the volume; he loved the incisive clarity of Martinez’s commentaries. This one was mischievously titled “Bobo of Bordeaux”:
    Bordeaux suffers from a pernicious type of modesty that keeps us from proclaiming our superiority. Let me explain: on the radio or television, how many times have you heard people say, “No, Bordeaux is not cold” or “No, Bordeaux is not dreary”? In print, how many times have you seen Bordeaux described as a sleeping beauty—a young woman who’s hardly even alive? Even our mayor has gone on the defensive, saying that Bordeaux is not the stiff and stuffy city that certain people say it is. Why are we always denying our vibrancy and flagellating ourselves? In truth, under Bordeaux’s gray eye shadow, there’s a passionate young woman who’s just waiting. She’s wearing red lip gloss and a lacy thong. She’s funny, festive, and sexy. She just needs to be stirred a bit.
    Benjamin parked on a grassy embankment and turned off the engine. Martinez’s slightly naughty and understated humor put him in a good mood. He turned up the volume, unable to suppress a gleeful smile that made his reflection look a bit silly in the rearview mirror.
    We all know that Bordeaux is not fond of change. When she’s not described as a sleeping beauty, she’s considered aloof, her bosom held firmly in a corset. That makes her safe and respectable. But safe and respectable are for other cities, not our fine and bedazzling Bordeaux. The young woman from the Garonne is ready to toss away her chastity belt and be emancipated! Enough of the sad and disturbing stuff of the past. Today’s Bordeaux is a rare beauty ready to seduce both those who live here and those fortunate enough to visit.
    A Spanish truck whizzed by. It brushed dangerously close to the convertible, and the displaced air shook the car. Benjamin turned the volume up even more.
    The people of Bordeaux must go off the defensive and take charge of the future. Our city, this sleeping beauty, just needs to be kissed by the prince. And voilà . We have the city we dreamed of. Those who write and talk about this city need to get with it. Continuing to call Bordeaux cold, boring, lethargic, nostalgic, distant, aloof, and sleepy just makes me grumpy and sleepy. I realize I’m mixing my fairy tales, but you understand what I’m saying.
    “Well said, kid!” Benjamin exclaimed as he restarted the engine.
    It was, in fact, time to put those clichés to rest. The city had changed considerably since the time, now ancient, when the writer Francois Mauriac had fled the sorrows of his childhood, the suffocating secrets of his family, the Sunday rituals, and the Jansenist smell of the Grand-Lebrun high school to be reborn in the lights of Paris. Benjamin remembered a little book written in the nineteen twenties in which Mauriac had described Bordeaux as “endlessly organized in a hierarchy.” The road a resident lived on, the type of wine he sold, and other more subtle distinctions classified him as ship owner or merchant, wine trader or fishmonger.
    Still, Benjamin realized that some of those observations were still relevant, especially if you spent any time in the Chartrons neighborhood: “In Bordeaux, the gap between pretense and reality shocks you at first. Then it makes you laugh”; “Bordeaux is the port city that makes you dream of the ocean, but the ocean is never seen or heard.”
    Benjamin continued on his way, savoring Martinez’s iconoclastic—to say the least—program,