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 spent 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
women speak 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 interview 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
thesis 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 around 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 bio data 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, though—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 covered 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 griped 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 certain she was a
lesbian.

26
They would all be lesbians in this place—the woman in charge of publications, the five
other researchers 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 work with a mixture of fear and exhilaration. He’d park his car on the
blazoning hot street and buckle up for an afternoon 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 black 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 spent 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 thought 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 corner 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 upperclassmen 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 understand. Lackluster eyes steered 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
answers 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 means 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, period. Heart, the privileged signifier. Men don’t have hearts. On
no. I suppose because I’m a man I can’t empathize 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
towered 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, indistinct.

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 tricky 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)