A
headless body was found inside a suitcase near Harlem. Two days later the
husband was arrested. He killed the wife in a jealous rage, he confessed. Both
victim and perpetrator, undocumented immigrants, had lived in New York for
eight years. She was 29 and he 37. That was the extent of The Post’s report. Intrigued, Paul Ormaza picked up a
Spanish-language tabloid. The headline blasted across the front page Brutal Murder in the Big Apple withthe subtitle Body Found in Blue Suitcase, but offered no further specifics.
Ormaza called the precinct but was
transferred to the answering machine of the detective in charge of the case. Ormaza
will not wait, that same afternoon he visits Ricker Island Jail.
What is he expecting to find? A Monster—only
a monster was capable such butchery? A disfigured psychopath—the image TV has
engraved on people? No, Ormaza is not
given to speculation, not that early in the game. Let fact guide him, he tells
himself, and turns to the file, the squalid file he put together in the two
hours previous to the visit. He pauses. He took a taxi to the Island prison
east of Manhattan. It’s not a ride for tourists: it’s hot, humid, and cloudy, fortunately
he taxi driver is discreet and a fan of Bach. Ormaza recalls some lines from ta contemporary
of Bach, the Venetian Casanova: The
reaction to deceit is contempt; to contempt, hate; to hate, murder.
The murderer widower awaits in the visiting
room, enigmatically contained, like a puma, Quechua for mountain lion. He
appears taller than his five feet, an optical illusion his long barrel torso
creates. It’s typical to mountain folk; another characteristic is their
physical strength. A former boss at the meatpacking plant where he once worked,
a tall a very think Ukrainian remembered him carrying on his back 250-pound carcasses
without breaking a sweat. “Fucking Indian was a Samson. Hard-worker, quiet, honest…
People steal left and right. Everyday I catch some asshole slipping meet under his
pants… Chiluisa never stole a sausage. I was sorry to see him go. He got a job in
a Mexican restaurant, working twelve and sixteen hours, and then he cleaned
offices in Queens. I knew he had a wife, never met her. He also had children
back in his country.”
The couple, Jacinto and Rosa Chiluisa, rented
a one-room basement apartment off Roosevelt Avenue. He left at five every
morning and returned past one the following morning. She was up at three cooking
tamales, empanadas and the bread she sold out of a garbage can they painted
yellow, blue and red, the colors of the Ecuadorian flag. She had a spot near
the subway. Compatriots on their way to work breakfasted on her products. “Come,
have a piece of the old country before you go face this cold land,” one
recalled her calling out in her Quechua contaminated Spanish. At ten she was
back preparing the popsicles and sweet turnovers she sold to schoolchildren and
their grandparents—mostly grandparents collected students at her parochial school.
“Grandparents are more indulgent,” says
Jacinto Chiluisa, and he clarifies: “My wife didn’t learn Spanish until she was
ten, but she was bilingual when she married me at age 14. It might sound
absurd, but American evangelicals taught her to speak Spanish.”
Chiluisa looks up, as if he kept his
memories hanging from the ceiling. Ormaza also looks up, imagining banana bunches
hanging at the stores of his childhood, and a bunch of candles hanging, a multitude
of moths surrounding a naked lightbulb.
“Did she learn English?” Ormaza asks.
Chiluisa laughs.
Jacinto Chiluisa struck his wife
twenty-seven times. Ironically the bronze sculpture he used she had found in
the street. And then, pulling the wife close to the sink, he proceeded to cut
off her head. He placed the severed head in a shopping bag and the body in the
blue suitcase. The Chiluisas kept the suitcase under the bed filled with gifts
for the kids left in the old country, and valuables, passports, the savings
book, and photos that showed the kids as children.
Chances were, Chiluisa laments, if he ran
into his children turning a corner, he will not recognize them.
“The oldest was nine years old when we
left, now she is pregnant with her second child.”
It was a crime of passion, but, Ormaza thinks,
finding the lover will not be easy.
