María Jiménez, powerful, queen, goddess, wise, immortal, abandons us to our fate. Voice of fire, woman of tears and tears, María Jiménez leaves crowned with her ocellated emerald feathers that all the peacocks of singing display today for her, magician of the copla and the rumba, alto of the flamenco tear. “I don’t know how to kill,” she sang to us, “but I want to learn to dispel all the evil you have done to me.”
I will not forget one morning with María Jiménez flirting with me, playing at jealousy while stretched out on the hotel sofa to conclude that all of us men were afraid of her. “I don’t cry anymore, I laugh and enjoy everything, everything amuses me, I’m ready to eat, with potatoes or bareback,” she let out, with her open smile of fiery lips.
María Jiménez was sensitive, self-sacrificing and stoic: “I no longer suffocate for anything!” Because she had sung “and if I become a murderer for you, you will go straight to hell for this”: she was questioning Pepe Sancho, who mistreated her as her husband. On that day in 2006, she revealed to me that “men kill because of complexes, they are mental dwarfs,” and she advised any abused woman who “does not feel sorry for him, to report him and seek the protection of family members,” as she took refuge in. his sister and friends. I didn’t hear a hint of complaint in her words, just a power rising from the soles of her feet. “There are also bad women who poison their husbands and kill their children, eh? … but men are more animalistic,” she concluded.
María Jiménez told me that she grew up in a corrala in the Triana neighborhood of Seville, with a gypsy grandfather and a very poor family. When she was five years old, she dressed in colorful papers and told her eighty-year-old neighbors: “If you listen to my song, I’ll clean your floor.”
And she cleaned many floors, and also the silver of a family in Barcelona, ??when she was fifteen years old, and she scrubbed and swept and washed and sewed. One night she sang at the Villa Rosa tablao, on Conde del Asalto street (today Nou de la Rambla), and the family said: “you don’t clean anymore!” And she sang with a hard, smoking voice, with ardor and heart, and she sang wanting to die from the abuse, and she sang with the pain of her 16-year-old daughter killed on a road.
