People you seem to have known all your life die and then you learn about incredible episodes. I became fond of María Jiménez thanks to La Cabra Mecánica’s Lichis. This refrain is his: “You, who were so beautiful and an artist / you, who deserve a prince, a dentist / you stay by my side / and the world seems to me more kind, more humane, less rare”. He wrote it for María Jiménez when not many people remembered her. And she accepted the duet because, as she said, she could not refuse the proposal of an author who had previously composed a theme entitled Que te follen. Lichis and Jiménez were equally well spoken. Few people like María could pronounce the ñ in the word cuño so well, doing whatever she wanted.
The song La lista de la compra was María Jiménez’s artistic renaissance. Then he dressed as a peacock in one of the best album covers that can be remembered and was embroidered singing by Sabina. It was then that I learned about his hit Se acabó, which became a feminist anthem. I’ve seen friends singing it at the crack of dawn at the top of their lungs, as revenge, after being cheated on by their partner. I assure you it is therapeutic.
“It’s over / because I proposed it to me and I suffered / as no one had suffered and my skin / I was left empty and alone / evicted in oblivion and after / fighting death, I started / to recover a little and I forgot / everything que te quería y ahora ya / mi mundo es otro”. I thought that Jiménez had released it at the end of the nineties, after breaking up with Pepe Sancho, convicted of abuse. But no. These days I found out that it is a song from 1978 written by José Ruiz Venegas, the same author who wrote to Manolo Escobar the Sevillana No me gusta que a los toros te pongas la minifalda. She didn’t always have a feminist streak.
It’s not even ten days since the
María Jiménez did not have an easy life: abused by her mother, she offered to clean the floor for the neighbors in exchange for hearing her sing. At 15 she went alone to work in Barcelona, ??where she discovered freedom, went from brunette to blonde and lived life to the fullest. Jiménez was a single mother of a girl. He explains that during the painful birth, “a nun said to me: ‘while you were carding, it didn’t hurt, did it?’ After 15 days of giving birth, she was already on stage. In the middle of the performance, “I would put on my milk and put on the dress as a gift, I would explain it to the audience and they would laugh so hard”.
Before Pepe Sancho, María Jiménez had countless relationships. Men could do it and women couldn’t?, he asks in a special that premieres tomorrow on La Sexta. “I was very advanced for the time. Men didn’t dare with women like me. They preferred inferior ones. But if I proposed ‘this cave’, it would fall. I threw away everything that moved”. Genius, figure, transgression, bravery, sensuality, wisdom, art. That’s why she was dismissed like that yesterday.
In some archive images we could see how María Teresa Campos presented her in her program on the day she reappeared after three months in a coma. It is not clear to me that during their lives we have treated these two great women as they deserve. Successful, popular, ahead of their time, they connected with a multitude of women to whom they were shown that a woman could also do whatever she wanted.