Bono (35 page)

This last conversation happened in August 2004, in the villa owned by Bono near Nice. After nearly two years, we had to draw a line somewhere. As I am writing this, I don't seem to remember exactly what happened there, or in what order. Disconnected images flash through my head. Bono orders his sons Elijah and John to attack me in the pool . . . It's 8:15 A.M., the sun's already scorching, the house is silent, Bono and I are reading through the manuscript on my computer screen, bursting into laughter from time to time . . . Invisible Italian fans lying on the narrow beach down below are giving out a surreally sparse applause between numbers of the new U2 album played on the house CD system as the sun sets . . . White wine again . . . Ali closing the doors, not to hear the album again . . . More wine . . . A reading session ending way past midnight, Bono hardly raising an eyebrow when I say we have to go through one more chapter . . . The endless rattle of cicadas threatening to drown Bono's voice on my MiniDisc recorder . . . The two of us, at dawn, sitting side by side across the street in a nondescript café, in the midst of
indifferent regulars, reading through more chapters, trying to get the language right, adding new lines . . . Bono pedaling and sweating in the gym downstairs, sitting on a machine thought up by the Devil himself . . . and finally waving good-bye with a broad smile.

I think there is something we need to make clear for this last time. Last year, you wrote and delivered long speeches in front of German bigwigs, students at the University of Pennsylvania, and not least the U.S. Congress. You turned your hand to writing a few screenplays, and your friend Wim Wenders even filmed one of them,
The Million Dollar Hotel.
Bob Dylan is about to publish the first volume of his
Chronicles.
*
So, I mean, you would not be the least qualified person to write a memoir. I'm sure a lot of people will see this book and say: “Why the hell did he need that French guy with a strange name
[Bono laughs]
to tell us what matters the most to him in his life? Why didn't he do it by himself?”

It's like playing handball. I need a good hard head to be the wall. The speed of the ball is going to set the mood of the game. You're really slow.

Thank you very much.

Of course, I could have written this book, but it wouldn't have been this book. And it would have taken a year.

Or ten . . . Anyway, I presume the results would not have been the same.

That's right. The results would not have been the same. It would be more interesting in some ways, because it would be even more personal. But it
would be less interesting in the sense that it would not have an argument up against it. I like to be pushed, I'm familiar with being pushed. And I think, at this point in time, I have some explaining to do.

Explaining? But who's asking?

I suppose I'm talking about our audience, the ones who gave me this incredible life. The nature of magazine interviews is such that they often have to condense things into some easy quotes and explanations.

I still don't know why you need to explain yourself to anyone.

Maybe I'm trying to explain myself to myself.

So that's what you need my hard head for.

I told you, at the beginning of this, the past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up a few things in my mind before I can move forward. I normally wouldn't give time to such thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.

That's why you never thought of psychoanalysis. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe you actually did.

As I told you, this is as close as I'm going to get to introspection.

So I've become a part-time celebrity shrink. I should be ashamed.

Shrink or priest—you choose.

A cross-examining cop, while you're at it. How about bartender? I mean, I supply the booze [which I actually do each time I visit], you tell me the stories.

Perfect. Though wine can be cloudy. What we need here is probably plain ol' still water, cold and clear.

I guess a head can get too full. Maybe yours was about to burst.

I have a room, which is my brain, and it's very, very, very . . . untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to some very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine that was opened five years ago, and there is a lunch I haven't eaten from last summer. There are faces of children who are going to die but don't have to. There's my father's face telling me to tidy up my room. So that's what I'm doing—tidying my room.

And you really think talking helps you do that?

I could write it, I could paint it. I usually sing it. I usually talk my way out of things—not into them.

I know that the painter Louis Le Brocquy is an important figure for you. Also, the presence of that big Basquiat canvas in your house in Dublin makes a statement. Your best friend Guggi went on to become a painter. You do sketches yourself. You told me once that one of the most important people you've met in your life was Balthus. It seems to me that he was as important to you, in a way, as Johnny Cash.

Very similar.

Do you regret not becoming a painter?

They are two very different actions that you can do completely at the same time. You can paint and listen to music, and be in complete discipline, which is interesting. Painting strikes me as just a way of getting to those feelings that are from somewhere way off. And rather like writing songs, rather like talking to you, painting helps me clarify my mind, which is an untidy mind, and pick up the stuff off the floor. I feel better after I painted.

Would you go so far as to use the word
remorse
?

You mean a sadness that I'm not doing it? No. As I get older, I'm doing it more and more.

I didn't expect you to surrender unconditionally when I compared the importance of Louis Le Brocquy to the importance of Johnny Cash in your life.

They're both men that left me with the most important clues on how we should live. Both had incredible dignity, incredible honesty. Louis's still alive. I'm always looking for clues. Some people have them, and some people don't have any. When people don't have any clues, I'm less likely to stick around. I don't in any way consider myself to be above anybody else, but I'm just excited when I'm in the company of older people, because they have so much more to offer. Sitting there with some punk rocker who's just figured how to look good in the mirror is not really on to keep me up, nowadays.
[laughs]

I don't know much about that relationship with Balthus.

We had a very unusual relationship. It was very intense. He lived very privately, some would say reclusively, in a place called Rossinière, in Switzerland, in this extraordinary-looking “grand chalet.” I had met him through
Louis Le Brocquy, who was very aware of Balthus when he was the head for the Villa Medicis [from 1961 to 1976]. He was just in his eighties then. Louis told me to bring a bottle of Irish whiskey. With his wife, Setsuko, they lived a formal nineteenth-century life, really. I just adore this woman. When I first met her, she was in traditional Japanese garb. Harumi, their daughter, has become a very good friend—she's a jewelery-maker, a very gifted girl. I also knew Stash and Theo, who were from an earlier marriage. I think I just got on with the whole family. I remember Balthus showing me a room that he had in honor of Harumi, called “the room full of toys.” He made this room full of all her toys as a child, collected as art objects. Then they had another room full of birds, with these beautiful birds just flying around. It was a magical place. So whenever I was there, he wanted to say hello, and so did I. We would meet up and talk about everything: God, death, sex, painting, music. And it became ongoing, this discussion. He asked me to his eighty-fifth birthday [i.e., 1993]
*
. I arrived, and the room was full of friends and family, some famous faces, some down-to-earth locals, some of what you might call . . . the noble rot.
[laughs]
Old European families. It was very interesting. I felt honored to be there. There was a moment when Setsuko explained this was a costume ball. I said: “I didn't know. I don't do costume balls.” She came to my room and said: “Balthus has chosen something for you. He's the only other person that's going to be wearing this.” And it was a . . . samurai costume!
[laughs]
So, OK. So I put on the samurai costume. In the end, myself and Balthus ate together on our own, dressed as samurais. Because he wanted to talk. I don't know what it was with Ireland, or what it was with musicians, but I think he wanted to talk more about art and music. So we just spent a lot of time together. At one point, he took me into his studio. He was staring at what must have been one of his last paintings. I asked him if he was finding it difficult to paint. He said: “No, I can paint.” He said: “The thing that I miss the most is drawing. I was a very good draftsman, he said, now I
can't draw. It makes me feel afraid for the future.” And in that moment the great man looked bereft, abandoned by the future. This man, accused of arrogance all his life, humbled himself in front of a musician. I asked him: did he pray? He looked around at all the unfinished work in the studio: “These are my prayers.” And he wept. I have no words to describe to you how that moment changed me as an artist. This old dignified painter—the only painter Picasso ever spoke enviously of, however much he loved Matisse—one of the great masters of the twentieth century, wept in front of me, about how he could only paint now and couldn't draw.

I guess you didn't dare to mention your own drawing or painting to him.

No, it wasn't the right moment to hit him with my demos.
[laughs]
Mind you, I've been drawing a lot recently.

Which one do you prefer, by the way, drawing or painting?

I guess, drawing would be my answer. It's where you make the breakthroughs. Painting is where you execute what you learned in the breakthroughs. The thing about Balthus that struck me was his attempt to turn his life into art as well as his work . . . even his death. His funeral was extraordinary. Most incredible thing.

What was extraordinary about it?

It was in Rossinière, with those twenty-foot Alphorns being blown, and a horse-drawn hearse driven by an undertaker in a black top hat. The night before, his gorgeous daughter Harumi picked me up at the train station. We went to the “grand chalet.” He was lying in his bed, windows open, snow blowing through. We spent some quiet time with him, and I thought: I haven't spent a lot of time with him. Why do I feel so close to this man, to this family? Then Balthus's wife Setsuko came in, and asked me the most
disarming and unexpected question. She explained to me that she was a Buddhist, but wanted to become a Catholic. She said: “The cardinal's coming down from Rome. I want to be made a Catholic. Will you be my godfather?,” which is really one of the most moving moments for me. Now I have a Japanese godchild in her sixties who, I might add, is getting younger by the year. I'm not a great godparent. I forget to send the Christmas cards, but she always remembers to send me. She is the angel at the top of my tree.

Did he ever say anything about music to you: your own, or music in general?

[pause]
He didn't really. He didn't speak a lot about music. He didn't know our music. He knew my conversation. That's all that he knew.

He knew you were a musician.

Conversation to him was music. I don't think he had ever listened to a U2 song as well. It was the conversation we were having. Somebody told me that at one particular event he was eating with twenty or thirty of the “litterati glitterati.” He banged the table and just said: “Has anyone here got anything at all interesting to say?”
[laughs]
Look, I'm not sure if I had. But maybe it was just a different accent, a different point of view. His work was obsessed with the concept of youth . . . and innocence, and the moment of losing it.

Rotting innocence. That's the subject of the Beach Boys'
Pet Sounds.
And of course U2's
Boy
as well. Even on
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,
you've been back there again.

Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought of that, but that is exactly right. I think he had what some of us share—a certain Tourette's syndrome. The Tourette's syndrome is where you say the words you're not supposed to say. The best example of it I know was in a church in Dublin. The vicar's wife, as people
were leaving the church in the morning, would be saying: “Good-bye, Mrs. Andrews!
Fuck you, Bitch!
,” “Hello! What a nice little
fucker bastard cow!
” And it's the most amazing syndrome. I think myself and Balthus had it in terms of subject matter. In his era, the only subject you couldn't approach with any curiosity was puberty. You weren't allowed to go there, so he had to go there. For me and rock 'n' roll, it was spirituality. You just can't go there, so I went there. There's a little bit of Tourette's syndrome involved, I think.

So what did Balthus leave you with?

He left me with the idea, best said by the Dalai Lama, which is: “If you want to meditate on life, you start with death.” That's what the beginning is. I've always held older people to be more interesting, as I say, right through from Frank Sinatra to Willie Nelson, to Johnny Cash, to Balthus. In this sense, I have more in common with Hindu societies than with Judeo-Christian, where we are obsessed with youth.

You quoted your late friend Michael Hutchence, who said: “Stars are the worst starfuckers.” But it seems to me—and it's a good thing you'd mention your relationship with Balthus—that you are a bigger fan than a star. I think of you as a superfan as much as a superstar.