People you seem to know your whole life die and then you hear about incredible episodes. I became fond of María Jiménez thanks to La Cabra Mecánica’s Lichis. Hers is this chorus: “You, who are so beautiful and artist?/?you, who deserve a prince, a dentist?/?you stay by my side?/?and the world seems kinder to me, more human, less strange.” She wrote it for María Jiménez when not many people remembered her. And she accepted the duet because, as she said, she could not reject the proposal of an author who had previously composed a song titled Que te follen. Lichis and Jiménez were equally well spoken. Few people like María pronounced the ñ of the word pussy so well, doing what she could.
The song The Shopping List was the artistic rebirth of María Jiménez. She then dressed as a peacock on one of the best album covers in memory and she rocked it singing by Sabina. It was then when I discovered her hit Se fin, which had become a feminist anthem. I have seen friends singing it at the top of their voices, as a way of getting even, after being cheated on by their partner. I assure you it is therapeutic.
“It’s over?/?because I set out to do it and I suffered / like no one had suffered and my skin / It was left empty and alone / hopeless in oblivion and after / fighting against death, I began / to recover a little and I forgot / everything that I loved you and now / my world is another.” I thought Jiménez had released it at the end of the nineties, after breaking up with Pepe Sancho, convicted of abuse. But not. These days I have learned that it is a song from 1978 written by José Ruiz Venegas, the same author who wrote to Manolo Escobar the Sevillian I don’t like it when you wear your miniskirt to the bulls. The feminist streak didn’t always come out.
It’s not even ten days since he
María Jiménez did not have an easy life: mistreated by her mother, she offered to clean the floors for her neighbors in exchange for them listening to her sing. At 15 she went to work alone in Barcelona, ??where she discovered freedom, she went from brunette to blonde and lived life to the fullest. Jiménez was a single mother of a girl. She recounts that during the painful labor, “a nun son of a bitch told me: ‘while you were fucking it didn’t hurt, huh?'”. 15 days after giving birth, she was already on stage. In the middle of the performance she “she would raise my milk and put on the dripping suit, she would tell the audience and they would laugh.”
Before Pepe Sancho, María Jiménez had countless relationships. Men could do it and women couldn’t? She asks herself in a special that La Sexta premieres tomorrow. “I was very ahead of my time. Men didn’t dare with women like me. They preferred them inferior. But if I proposed ‘this one falls’, she fell. “I have thrown everything that moved.” Genius, figure, transgression, bravery, sensuality, wisdom, art. That’s why yesterday she said goodbye like that.
In some archive images we have been able to see how María Teresa Campos presented her on her program the day she reappeared after three months in a coma. I am not sure 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 showed that a woman could also do whatever she wanted.