In memory of José Clemente Orozco Farías
I first met Clemente in the year 2013 after I opened a used bookstore here in Guadalajara, México. Over the years we became very good friends. The friendship was centered on a mutual love of books. That is an understatement. We were both insane booklovers and book collectors.
The photos of the man with the monarch butterfly on his finger are of José Clemente Orozco Farías. His grandfather was the “José Clemente Orozco”: one of the most respected, powerful and well known artists from the 20th century. These photos were taken on January 15th, 2021.
In the last year of Clemente’s life we grew to be very good friends. When he was alive I never visited his home, however Clemente would visit me at my home about every other week: sometimes more, sometimes less.
Clemente was associated with a group named “Impronta Casa Editora”. Every year they would do a Christmas party (posada). A day or two before that Christmas party, Clemente gave me a personal invitation. I told him that I really didn’t want to go because the crowd that would be at the party were not really my kind of people. Then he did not only ask me to go to that party, but he demanded it. It turned out to be so much fun and so enjoyable because Clemente and I spent over 70% of the time talking with each other.
One of the fascinating things at that Christmas party was when Clemente handed me a book entitled “Catastrophe”. It was a very short book consisting of about 24 pages. I looked at that book for a few minutes then I sat it down. After thinking about it and knowing Clemente like I do, I picked up that book again and really started checking it out and asking him questions about that book. The story he told me went something like this:
Clemente went to an ivy league colleague named Dartmouth, one of the most prestigious schools in the United States. His friend, a professor at Dartmouth, asked him to pick one word, any word; Clemente chose the word “Catastrophe”. There were about 14 students in the class and each student was given two pages to do whatever they wanted to do with them to make a book out of it. They made one copy for the professor, one for Clemente, one copy for each student in the class and then they made one extra copy. The book was incredibly beautiful and the different students made radically different beautiful use of their two pages. That christmas party was incredibly special.
Back to the photos. Clemente loved visiting me at my home because I have thousands of really cool books in my house. Normally I had one or two books that were just so incredibly fucking cool that I knew Clemente would start drooling by looking at them and touching those books.
Clemente and I agreed that he was going to visit me on Tuesday 11th of January. On that particular Tuesday I didn’t have much in a way on super super cool books for Clemente to look at. That Tuesday morning it was cold by Guadalajara standards, and I knew that on cool days the caterpillars just sit and be cold and don’t move. So that fateful day I called up my dear friend Clemente and said that it was too cold and that the caterpillars wont do anything, and asked him if we could wait until Friday. Clemente agreed with me and on Friday about 10 or 11:00 in the morning, he showed up at my house. It was a nice warm day.
On warm days, when there is a lot of caterpillar action on my patios, the caterpillars are everywhere. You just cannot help but step on them.
So I’m standing in my back patio looking at my garden and I saw a butterfly coming out of its cocoon. Of course all I could think of was “wow, this is cool, a monarch butterfly being born in front of my eyes”. Then I looked over about a meter away and there was another butterfly coming out of its cocoon. At that point I became very excited, Clemente had just arrived and he was talking to Juan in the front patio and I started yelling. I was yelling to Clemente to come back and watch this happening, and then I started yelling at my two young workers to get a camera. A minute or two later the 4 of us were watching the monarchs coming out of their cocoons. I have seen that at least 10 times, and when they come out of their cocoon they really don’t know how to fly: they attempt to fly, but they really don’t know how to control their movement. One time I saw one butterfly coming out of its cocoon and that butterfly landed in a bucket of water. That butterfly had a really short life.
About 5 years ago my friend Maria Ochoa took a gardening class and learned about raising monarch butterflies, which are native to parts of western Mexico. The name for the monarch butterfly in Spanish is “mariposa monarca” and they only eat one kind of food: the milkweed, which is “algodoncillo” in Spanish.
Anyway, my friend went to this gardening class and she learned about the monarch butterfly life cycle. It goes something like this: you grow a plant named milkweed (which was very common where I grew up. When I was 5 years old I took milkweeds to “Show and tell”). Once you have the milkweed, the monarch lays its eggs on the plant, if everything goes just right the eggs are born and the little caterpillars (orugas) eat the monarch plant, and if everything keeps going correctly, that caterpillar turns into a cocoon and with even more luck, a butterfly is born.
Over the last 5 years I am sure over hundreds of butterflies have been born on my two outdoor patios. On 5 or 10 different times I actually watched a monarch come out of its cocoon and turn into a butterfly and fly away.
So back in January of 2021… The four of us were watching the butterflies, one did its first flight and flew to Clemente and landed on his finger. It made for some great photos. A few short days later, Clemente died of a heart attack.
In the last year of his life, Clemente and I had decided to open a used bookstore here in Guadalajara. I felt that I had the world by its balls. Clemente and I were gonna open a used bookstore and between that nut and this nut we would create the most incredible bookstore imaginable. Clemente told me that he had a friend who had a three story old-french style house, maybe 80 years old, who said something like: “Wow, I should do something with that house”. The last words that Clemente spoke to me was that he was going to talk to the owner of that house about us renting it for our bookstore.
I was in shock for the next few months and missing my dear friend so so much.
It turns out that I am in those photos of Clemente, actually my reflection is in the photos. Clemente was standing in front of a black door in my patio and in the reflection you can see my white hair and a profile of my shoulder and my head.
