The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Found Objects (II): Some Beauty

310 Tact FoundObjects(II):SomeBeauty Hervé is on the bus one day, and he notices that the young woman sitting opposite him seems particularly agitated, unnerved by his presence. The telltale sign is that she carefully avoids looking at him,“as if she were asking herself about whether she really had the right to undertake the step she was about to make, about whether it would be interpreted as tact [délicatesse] or rudeness, she was trying to find suitable words, picking them carefully, polishing their expression, even if circumstances should prevent her from ever uttering them.”Hervé gets up in preparation for getting off the bus; the woman does the same. Finally, she overcomes her hesitation and speaks out: With a subtle smile, full of graciousness and discretion, she said: “You remind me of a very well-­ known writer. . . .” I replied:“I’m not so sure about the well known. . . .” She:“I’ve made no mistake. I just wanted to tell you that I find you very handsome.”At that moment, without another word, without turning round, she disappeared to the right, and I turned to the left, overwhelmed, grateful, on the brink of tears.Yes, it was necessary to find beauty in the sick, in the dying. Until then I had not accepted such a thing. We notice once more the economy of language that characterizes the interaction (“without another word”) as well as its indirectness. If Hervé is so moved by the encounter it is because he rightfully reads it as an understated gesture of solidarity and kindness. But in the context of a random encounter on a city bus, I was struck by the word “find”—­ the original French text reads: “je vous trouve très beau” and “il fallait trouver de la beauté aux malades, aux mourants.” Hervé had once been baffled, scandalized even, when his lover and best friend Jules told him he found beautiful an extremely frail Robert Mapplethorpe, so young but looking so old, in the photo that a newspaper had published on its front page after the photographer’s death from AIDS. Hervé had erred by remaining within the dominant social viewpoint that equates youth with beauty and beauty with health. The encounter with the young woman on the bus allows him to reconsider this initial reaction and rethink the connection among the three. But how is beauty redefined in a way that Hervé may now embrace? To find beauty, in this passage, doesn’t suggest a discovery,as if beauty had always been there,immutable and ready to be revealed as an inescapable truth—­ quite the contrary. The partitive—­ Tact 311 de la beauté, as opposed to la beauté—­ reinforces the smallness, incompleteness , and contingency of beauty here. Some beauty, or some kind of beauty, results from the contact between an “I” and a “you,” as the speech act the woman uses—­ “I just wanted to tell you”—­ emphasizes. I find you by accident and I find you beautiful; this is the way such things happen in big cities, but the act of telling transforms the encounter into a contact. Sight hardly seems involved at all here. Hervé’s beauty is of the dynamic , not the formal, kind. Like Mapplethorpe in that picture, he is near death and both he and his beauty are passing. His body is not the earthly vessel of an ideal that, as such, must remain inaccessible, but the locus of social relations enacted by means of touch (or in this case something like touch: contact), and Hervé is touched by it. The fact that the participants in the encounter each go their separate ways in the end and will in all likelihood never meet again—­ they meet on a bus and were going somewhere else—­ emphasizes that transitoriness is what it’s all about. What makes the woman’s reaction tactful in a way that doesn’t police and exclude Hervé is that her gesture doesn’t seek to restore any kind of social order or aesthetic harmony—­ the visible form as an expression of an ideal—­ but rather to maintain incongruity, that of a young man near death on a bus and the unexpected encounter between an author and a reader, as an effect of context and relationality. (Given the fact that the scene wasn’t witnessed by a third party, it is true that there was little incentive for the woman to exclude Hervé for the purpose of class-­ based bonding. I believe...