MENS REA
Lakambini Sitoy
1 Steve became a feminist in his sophomore year at law school, the year the Supreme Court stripped a judge of his robe. The judge had ordered the youngest and prettiest of his clerks to massage his back, and then his buttocks. Clad only in his briefs, he’d then flopped over into a supine position and pulled her head down…
2 “I am innocent!” he sputtered to the reporters when it was all over. “I merely wished to compliment her beauty! I had no criminal intent…”
3 Lecherous old goat, Steve scribbled to the girl who had sat next to him since the first day of freshman year. Her name was Helen and she was cute and it was mostly to wipe that expression of amused tolerance off her face that he’d decided to embrace the women’s cause. That was how he thought of it: The Women’s Cause, although none of the women in his family ever mentioned it.
4 Helen was useful at recitations, discreetly fanning out notes and case digests so that Steve, standing flustered beneath the barrage of insults from the professors, had only to glance down a microsecond before rattling off the right answer.
5 Thus he had earned his first good mark in Criminal Law.
6 “Mens rea?” Professor Sadueste thundered one afternoon a week into the term. “You’ve never heard of mens rea? Well, for your information, Mr. Prieto…” and here the old man paused, with a wicked twinkle in the eye,”…mens rea is monthly offering to the Goddess of Fertility—a discharge of blood nobly endured by women, but suffered even more nobly by their husbands!”
7 For one wretched moment Steve thought he was serious. And then the class laughed, even the girls (no one dared step out of line in their freshman year). He felt his face burn. Sadueste strode triumphantly back to his record book to write in the inevitable 5.00; Steve’s eyes dropped to where Helen was frantically rapping upon the textbook page; he saw the light and called out in one last tenacious effort to save his ass: “It means ‘criminal mind,’ sir! It is the evil intent that turns a simple act into a crime!”
8 STEVE had never been in love, but he knew the symptoms from brief interludes in college that he had filed away with care, to be savored in moments when life had proved itself a joke and him a miserable loser. Helen, he knew, was in love with him. Long, helpless moments she spen gazing into his eyes. Oh, she had mens rea for him, all right. Undoubtedly no one of his caliber had ever challenged her opinions in her small provincial alma mater.
9 They argued all the time, oblivious to the stares and titters of classmates as they passed: Helen pinned to the railing of one of the college’s numerous hallways, Steve pacing excitedly back and fourth. He loved debate: it honed his lawyerly talents. “You’re terrible!” he would taunt her.
10 “When you’ve painted yourself into a corner you always pick the same convenient escape hatch: that I’m a man and you’re a woman and I wouldn’t have the faintest notion how things work from your perspective so I might as well back down since I’ve already lost. Right? Right.”
11 They talked about human-rights lawyering, of going corporate, of where the best jobs were: in Congress or in an NGO, in Makati or on campus, and so on. Whenever he found himself mired in the morass of Abortion, or Rape, or Wife Beating, he knew he could steer her by the nose to safer ground. But with each argument he found himself genuinely having a good time. On her turf, at that. Gender Issues. The words made him tingle al over, as though he and she were working their way, side by side, through a clutch of pornographic magazines. It gratified him to draw Helen out—or turn her on. It made the helpless rage that lit her face at his taunts all the more delicious.
12 “What would you do if I came to class tomorrow morning a feminist?” he chuckled one day.
13 “Marry you,” Helen replied without batting an eyelash. Steve was amazed at her boldness. It was to get her goat that he thought of finding work at the feminist NGO she had been raving about the whole of last year, the same place she was now applying to. There were a couple of part-time jobs available: one researcher, and one for a maintenance person of sorts. He figured he had a chance: surely he’d picked up enough womenspeak from her. Besides, when they saw his grades, they saw his grades, they’d have no choice but to hire him. He had weathered his freshman year well: Sadueste had given him a 1.75. Helen had gotten a 2.00. She had steadfastly refused to laugh at the old man’s jokes.
14 The organization was quartered in a two-story house in a peaceful residential district. The paint was grying along the walls; at the far end of the yard was a pile of refuse: a baby’s chair, an old bicycle. There were leafless vines and pots of dying flowers, which no one seemed to have the energy to clean up. Purple crepe paper flapped valiantly in the branches overhead, and there was a purple rug in the doorway, and purple posters in varoios languages, bearing the inevitable woodcuts of twisted female faces. Even the upholstery had an air of faded royalty. There was another aura to the place: one of anger and resignation. As Steve waited nervously for the lawyer who would interviee him (a woman, of cours; they were all women in this place) he felt a twinge of embarrassment. What if he got the job and Helen didn’t? He hadn’t really thought about it. He was in theis thing for some pocket money, she to pay the rent.
15 He was hired. “The official title is administrative assistant,” he told her a couple of days afterwards. “I’m sort of a glamorized clerk. No. An all-around hired hand. I’m even on call to change light bulbs. They haven’t gotten aournd to making me serve the coffee, but that day isn’t too far off.”
16 Helen raised an eyebrow. A phone call from the organization had informed her that they were sorry, her biodata was very good, but another girl had gotten there first. Unperturbed, she’d promptly gotten work at another NGO involved in tribal rights. Steve’s glorious ploy to grab her attention had fizzled out; he felt like a fool.
17 However, he scribbled to her in class, I’m game. Funny, thoug—when the machines start acting up or the plumbing’s on the blink, it’s still the fellow with the penis who has to fix it.
18 Helen giggled: Cute, O.K., but why didn’t you get the researcher post anyway?
19 Researcher’s got to read all the new books from the alternative U.S. presses, and even drafted what, after a long and tedious process, would one day be legislation. That was the greatest kick of all. That, and the legal assistance program. Steve had watched the interviews: women coming in from some provincial backwater, quacking and coverd in bruises, their grief assuaged by speedy rundown of the law.
20 Because I’m wrong shape and size, he wrote. Only women get to be researchers.
21 Helen grinned.
22 All that hype about gender equality, he grped on. That’s a load of bull.
23 She scribbled: Oh, but it’s just a matter of broading your perspective, Mr. Prieto. Picture it. You’re uneducated. Indigent. Nursed on Catholic prudery. And raped so recently that you still bear the stench of masculine effluents on your flesh. In front of you is Steven Prieto, notepad in hand. And you’re to recount to this strange man how others like him spread-eagled and skewered you like a hunk of meat. Come on, Steven, you’re a feminist now.
24 That floored him. She was articulate, all right. But only on paper, he hastily added to himself.
25 Diosa, the new researcher, the girl who had…beaten him, had cropped hair and a cynical smirk and wore baggy khaki trousers with a little belt bag of native design about her hips. Her movements were careless, her laughther loud. Steve was certin she was a lesbian.
26 They would all be lesbians in this place—the woman in charge of publications, the five other researchrs who swept into the office slightly neurotic from Corporate Law or Criminal Procedure or whatever, even the slender sensual girl who came to work draped in tie-dyed cotton. Lesbians, or women nursing some deep dark childhood violation. Purple rage, lilac bliss. He couldn’t imagine any of the sunny scrubbed girls he’d flirted with in college ending up in a place like this. He himself was an intruder. He had penetrated.
27 Each day he went to wrok with a mixture of fear and exhilaration. He’d park his car n the balzining hot street and buckle up for an anfternoon of mindless work. The day’s assignment would be waiting for him on his little desk. Pleadings to be delivered to courtrooms in Makati, Manila, Marikina. A stubborn computer virus that none of the women could eradicate. Each task was accompanied by a couple of lines form the head lawyer, elegantly penned in balck ink. Steve had never been ordered around, and in writing to boot, but within a short while he began to look forward to the notes. He was master and slave in one. Without him the organization would fall apart.
28 Gradually they discovered his other talents. “What the hell was the title of that movie rape star case?” Doris, a researcher, fretted one day.
29 “People v. Jose.” he replied helpfully and, after a moment’s pause, gave the year and most of the citation.
30 Doris went to the shelves to look it up. “You have a very retentive memory, don’t you, Steven,” she said in amazement.” Now give me Article 147 of the Family Code…”
31 It soon became a little game to them. When someone needed a case or a codal provision the researchers went to Steven Prieto. The whole office warmed to him, thumped his shoulder. He knew he had crossed the gender barrier when one afternoon he heard Doris and Yeng discussing comparative masculine anatomy a few feet from where he sat. His maleness had become invisible.
32 And then somebody’s cousin’s cousin was raped by her boyfriend on the verandah of an abandoned home at midnight. The culprit immediately proposed marriage, but nevertheless they brought the unfortunate girl in, her words a barely audible whisper, a paper bag of blood-staine clothing in hand. Beneath her faded t-shirt and jeans her body was tight and slender.
33 “Jesus, she’s so pretty she breaks my heart,” Steve said.
34 There was silence throughout the office.
35 A black blur, and then the head lawyer, in one of the power suits she wore to court, swept into his line of vision. “Are you saying she asked for it, Steven?”
36 He felt a stab of ice in the region of his belly. “No, ma’am; what I meant was…was…” The words came out of nowhere,”…that a healthy young man with normal impulses couldn’t help but pay homage to her good looks, ma’am.”
37 The lawyer’s eyes looked with his. “Are you saying that the rapist was motivated by the best of intentions, then?”
38 “Well, he asked to marry her, didn’t he?” he mumbled wretchedly, his face the hue of the posters on the wall.
39 “The woman is fanatic,” he said to Helen the next day.
40 She gave a curt nod of assent. She was always in a hurry now, her movements short and quick.
41 “She won’t even let me answer the counseling hotline,” he went on, “Unless there’s absolutely no one else around. And then all I can do is take down their names and numbers. Jesus. All those callers need is someone sound legal advice. I can rattle off the Family Code faster than Diosa can say the First Amendment.”
42 Diosa, with the cropped hair, handled the hotline, and the preliminary client interviews, and a couple of writing projects to boot. Oh God, it ranked like hell.
43 Helen turned to him at last. “It doesn’t just come from up here, Steven,” she said, tapping her temple. “You’ve got to work from here as well,” now she indicated her heart. “It’s tough enough sensitizing a woman. Every day I discover some new contradiction in me that has to
44 be worked out.”
45 “Why, I’m even more of a feminist than you!” he grinned, pleased at the chance to tease her.
46 She merely shook her head, her eyes exhausted. Perplexed, he drew out a pack of cigarettes, watching her. The corners of her mouth deepened. That was the one thing the never forfeited: afternoon cigarette break. It was fast becoming his only link with the old Helen, the girl who could spen hours gazing into his eyes, nodding, smiling.
47 Now he gazed at her appreciatively. She was too dark-two years ago, in college, he’d never have given her a second glance. Her skin was earth brown, with a healthy tinge of red. Terra cotta. She was of almost pure native extraction. She was terrible dresser, but after a month or so among counterculture eccentrics he now realized that there was a deliberateness to her batiks, her woven knapsack, her bronzes and beads—that the riot of colors she spported was not due to poverty, but was her style. He wondered what sort of girl she was underneath; after more than a year of her acquaintance he had come away with nothing but her smile. It was a nice smile; too a trifle hesistant, but that was no doubt the unpolished provinciana in her. Once, on a jeep bound for Taft he’d searched the features of his fellow passengers and was delighted to discover so much of Helen in them. Except for her smile. Winsome. Nah, that was poetry; that was stupid; it conveyed nothing about her.
48 She merely stood against the railing, cigarette burning away forgotten between her fingers, watching him while he talked. At the end of the hour she had barely stirred. But it was time to study. He whipped out a book—the Civil Code—and thrust it into her face. “Property. Easements. I have 20 articles for tomorrow. Prompt me if I make a mistake.”
49 She shoved the book back at him.
50 “Steve, no.”
51 “What’s the matter with you? We always study together after smoking.”
52 “You study. Have you ever considered what a toll these afternoon sessions have taken on my class standing?”
53 It was true; the professors were cutting her to pieces at recitation.
54 “It’s your fault,” he said. “You could have refused!”
55 “I am refusing now.”
56 “Oh, Christ!” His voice rose, all he could think of were those twenty articles on Easements and how he was due to recite tomorrow.
57 “Steve, don’t get me wrong. I like you. Oh, don’t over-react; hasn’t any girl told you that to your face? I like you a whole lot, but that’s no reason for you to demand whole chunks of my time.”
58 “Demand? Who’s demanding? What are you talking about?”
59 “What about just now? I stood here listening to your blather for a full hour. Don’t you realize I could have read three whole cases instead?”
60 “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He was pale with outrage. “I ghought you wanted it. I had no intention of—you could have refused. You could have refused!”
61 SO WITHIN a single day he was in deep shit with Helen and at work. School was the only consolation. He loved the law: the mechanical interlocking of its pieces, the infinitesimal details. His books held the building blocks of life: everything, action, emotion, reduced to lowest terms, named and neatly catalogued.
62 But even that was slipping away. The hours each day at the NGO were wreaking havoc on his concentration. It was impossible to be completely alone. Looking up from his work, he inevitably encountered the haunted eyes of some client where she sat on the corner couch, her children crawling over her lap and making a mess of the magazines on the coffee table. Off in a croner the researchers dismembered their respective crushes and shrieked over body parts. The mothers and daughters on the couch listened and tried to reconcile the urbane upprclassmen of their tales with the cops and stevedores who came home drunk to fall on their women with punches and kicks and sex.
63 None of the clients seemed surprised to see him. They took the presence of a man in a law office for granted. He had no great love for them now, only horror. They waited unmoving, for half a day, to rise with sighs of relief when the head lawyer ushered them into an antechamber. Slowly, painfully, their stories came out: bitter grunts and croaks that he, who spoke English at home, could barely undserstand. Lackluster eyes steared at invisible points on the polished glass table. One woman sat for an eternity, shivering, until something gave and she began to weep, hoarse sobs, grief so profound and yet so crude that it was hardly human. The lawyer did not stop her. Steve sat hunched over the computer keyboard, hands over ears, hating the woman for making him feel as he did.
64 Running errands for the head lawyer he encountered them firsthand in the jeepneys: these men who were wellspring of such grief. Their sweat slicked his own pale forearms; they belched the foul odor from their empty bellies into his face. He examine their veined workers’ hands with the dirt under their fingernails, and with a mixture of revulsion an fascination imagined them kneading woman-flesh, thick greasy fingers working their way up thighs, probing intimate folds and crevices. Babae tinuhog ng matanda. Hinoldap na, binarbikyu pa. That was how the Tagalog tabloids put it. Skewerd. Spindled.
65 What did they feel, these women? Did they cry out, close their eyes? Did they bleed? The questions haunted him, running around and around his head with the same desperate speed with which he chased after jeepneys: his face screwed up against the black fumes, he would hoist himself by one hand up into the stifling metal interiors, to leap out at his stop, onto the searing hot pavement, already half-running to his destination, the impact of his landing shooting straight up into his leg to the knee that had been injured in a high school basketball game, the shock running up his calves and thighs, expending its full force on the small of his back.
66 At the end of the day, school and job behind him, he would collapse exhausted on his bed, looking up with disgust at the collection of paperbacks on the shelf, the science fiction and fantasy he’d pored over in high school and college, his old Dungeons and Dragons game sets. How naïve he’d been, and how content. At least there’d been none of this gooddamn guilt. The mirror at the entrance hall showed a pale-faced boy, eyes darkly circle beneath wire-frame glasses, skin breaking out from the pollution, hair and clothes reeking of the thousand and one odors of Manila’s jeepney-riding masses. He was 21 and looked 22.
67 The night shower washed away the dirt, if only from his surfaces. But it was marvelous to hold up his hands and watch the suds drip form them, long fingers clean and white anew. He thought of Helen—would she bleed too?
68 WHEN the midterm grades were announced, he knew he would have to drop Property. The three ugly letters—DRP—would make a huge foreign blot upon his transcript. He looped off, as though he’d lost his virginity.
69 You’re bleeding all over your books, Helen scribbled to him in the library.
70 “What?” he said.
71 She wrote into the margin of his notebook, her head inclined rather carelessly, he thought, as though she were trying to provoke him: Mens Rea=the psychological bleeding experienced by smart young men when they discover they never had the answeres after all.
72 “Jesus shit,” Steve said. His face burned. Helen sat there, smiling.
73 A couple of sophomores from another section sauntered by. “You two again,” one of them said, and the other clucked his tongue knowingly.
74 Steve leapt up, gathering up his books and making a beeline for the exit. She followed.
75 “Where are we going?” she said. He didn’t reply. They both knew where they were headed—to a spot on the ground floor they had discovered in their freshman year, sheltered from the sun by the thousand tons of stone that rose above it. They had not used it for days.
76 “Mens Rea,” he spat out the moment they were there.
77 “Mens rea indeed! Why don’t you ever write those little notes to yourself, Helen? Come on, write yourself up. You’ve bad mens rea for me since the first day of school.”
78 Her spine stiffened, but she had the grace not to deny it. “Do we really need this?” was what she said. “You’ll have to go work in a few minutes.”
79 Work. He’d forgotten about work.
80 He wrenched out a cigarette form the pack in his breast pocket. And then he knew what he would have to do. “I’m not going.” When she stared at him in surprise he went on, aware that he was losing control, “It was a dumb idea anyway. When I got the job I thought I was the most privileged man on earth. I risked everything, do you get it? Imagine me, Steven Prieto, working in the women’s movement. How must they have laughed when they found out. Enzo, Brian, the whole lot of them. Me putting on a skirt to try and please you, they must have said.”
81 The words were out. But his head still pouned—to the rhythm of the rock music that blared from the jeepnesy tearing through traffic. It was the rhythm of gross abandon, of sex.
82 “Steven,” she said. “What is this?” I don’t know where you’re coming form!”
83 “Stop playing coy,” he snarled at once. “You’re a feminist, aren’t you?”
84 “Hey, feminist doesn’t mean I waltz around to your music!” she shrilled back.
85 “Feminist maens you do anything you want, in any way you want, and nobody has the right to question you because, oh, you’re so dedicated, so holy. Argue any which way. Write any old thing. Order this, order that—“
86 Helen’s mouth dropped open.
87 “Only woman can be researchers. Sit there for hours while some stupid bitch blubs her whole life story out as though only she had problem in the world. What are you anyway, lawyers or shrinks? Oh yes, men do get admitted, but all they do is operate the xerox machine, fix the lights, run the errands! I suppose you can’t stomach the notion of goddamened heat. But oh no, leave the deliver jobs to the man—he’s tough, he can handle it.”
88 “It takes heart, Steven. It takes heart.”
89 “Yes, it does. Heart, perod. Heart, the privileged signifier. Men don’t have hearts. On no. I suppose because I’m a man I can’t emphathize with your freaking uterine cancers, your Cinderella fantasies? You can’t even construct a decent legal argument. Premise, premise, premise, conclusion—simple! But oh no, structure must be over-thrown, structure is masculine. Jesus Christ!
90 She had backed away, without realizing it, against the railing; her hand crept blindly towared the solidity of the pillar behind her. Her eyes were round with amazement. He saw two tiny reflection of his own flushed face.
91 “If you’re talking about my stand on abortion—“
92 “You have no stand on abortion!”
93 “Steve—“
94 “Nor whores. Nor on rape!”
95 “But you’ve never respected my ideas enough to listen—“
96 “You have no ideas!”
97 There was silence. He saw the rapid rise ad fall of her chest. There seemed to be something very very wrong with her face.
98 “Nebolous. You all are. Everything out of the poetry books of your mind. Everything hearsay. Oh pardon me, hersay. I can predict to the letter your every opinion. Listen to me. You’r not listening!” for she had turned away to retrieve her books from the railing. He yanked at her arm. She stood arrested, stockstill and poised for flight.
99 Slowly he released her. She did not move. He advanced, stood over her. Her eyes were welling, indisteinct.
100 “You know what you’ve done?” she whispered.
101 “You’ll never make a good lawyer, Helen.”
102 “You know what those long monologues of yours have done to me?”
103 “Sentiments, emotions all the time. That’s not the law.”
104 “They’ve raped me, Steven,” she cried out, and her head bobbed with the force with which she flung the word at him.
105 “Jesus Christ!”
106 She had pulled the rug from under his feet.
107 “You rape people. You’ve cut me down, forced me back—I’ve spent an entire year talking to you, no, listening, nodding agreement, saying yes, yes to nurse that poor wounded rich-kid ego of yours. And look, I’m on the smoke-up list in Property. I’m flunking Torts. You don’t even care.’”
108 They fell back. Steven bunched his fists into the pockets of his trouser. Helen wept, just a couple of tears trickly discreetly down her cheeks. Steve’s old girlfriend had wept in the same way, when he had broken up with her shortly before entering law school. I’ve no time for emotions now, he’d told her astonished face.
109 Helen dried her eyes. “Steve, I’m sorry.” She edged over to thim. “I’ll be joining you in a couple of weeks; they’ve already hired me, over at your NGO. Things might get better then; they could modify assignments if we reasoned—”
110 “In a couple of weeks I’ll be gone,” he said. “My probationary period ends on the 30th.” It was now his turn to edge away.
111 “I was looking forward to working with you!”
112 “No, Helen. You only wanted to change me.” His own accusation made him smile. “If I lopped it off and offered it to you, would you be happy then? Helen?”
113 With a rapid gesture he slashed at his crotch, collected air and emptied his hand into hers. She gazed down at her palm as though a severed member did confront her. When at last she raised her eyes to him he was shocked, for it seemed that her whole countenance was falling apart, all the warmth and strength and secret shared laughter eroding away until what confronted him was a death mask, her death mask, a fading glint of comprehension in the eyes.
114 “So what do you want me to do?” she said in a tiny voice.
115 He shot his last few drops of venom into her: “Leave me alone.”
116 Helen collected her books and began to walk away.
117 God, he thought tiredly. God, it wasn’t enough. He wanted her to bleed. Just a trickle, or perhaps a stream, wetting her pants all down both legs: long strings of russet to speed past her ankles and pool about her shoes. But no, he wanted more; he wanted her blood on the polished floor, surging through the halls of the College, down the streets to flood manholes and turn fluttering scraps of paper into pulp; to leap up in sprays form the whelles of jeepneys, men bringing a mess from the pavements as they hauled themselves in, endeavoring to wipe the indelible stuff off their huge veined workers’ hands; to flow into a thousand and one kitchens, where babies screamed and the reek of cooking poisoned the air and women crouched soundless next to uncleared tables, doubled up to nurse their wounds, their faces hidden in their hands.
118 He raised his head. Helen was gone. He though he saw her, farther down the hall, figure reduced to a series of stick shapes against the haze of light from the main entrance. He wondered if he should call to her. Look, he wanted to say. Look what you did to me. He wanted to run after her and spin her around and yell in her face, Look look look you cut me. He wanted to tear at his own clothes. Se what you made me do, he wanted to say. He wanted to grab her palms and press them to his body. He felt a mad need to smear his own blood on her to take her hand and press it to his crotch and cry out, Look look, feel this, can you feel me bleeding.
(1994)
Meet the Writer
Lakambini A. Sitoy, also known as Bing Sitoy, writes in English. She has published two collections of short stories in the Philippines. Mens Rea and Other Stories was published by Anvil in 1999 and received a Manila Critics Circle National Book Award that same year. Jungle Planet was published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2006 and was shortlisted for the MCC National Book Award for that year.
Sitoy is among 21 authors on the Man Asian Literary Prize's long list for 2008. The novel, Sweet Haven, is her first.
She received the David T.K. Wong fellowship from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom in 2003.
Her short stories have appeared in magazines such as Philippines Free Press, Philippine Graphic and Story Philippines. They have appeared in various anthologies in the Philippines, such as Likhaan Anthology of Poetry and Fiction (published by the University of the Philippines Press) and The Best Philippine Stories, a 2000 anthology published by Tahanan Books and edited by Isagani Cruz.
Other stories have appeared in Manoa, the literary journal of the University of Hawaii; Wake, an anthology of stories, essays and poems about Southeast Asia published in Britain to benefit victims of the 2004 tsunami; and Ansigter, an anthology of Southeast Asian short stories published by Forlaget Hjulet in Copenhagen in 2008.
Sitoy has received writing fellowships from the National Writers' Workshop in Dumaguete (1989) and the University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop (1990). She has also received nine prizes in the annual Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards and a Philippines Free Press Award (1994).
As a journalist, Sitoy also served as a lifestyle and cultural section editor and columnist for the Manila Times.
She was an MA guest student at Roskilde University in Denmark in 2006. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakambini_Sitoy)
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