NIGHTTIME. THE VEIL of darkness has fallen. A pall of deep silence. There he lurks. In the shadowy, sinister corner. He rises. Then he begins to move, walking stealthily, with premeditated steps. He sees her. There she is, lying on her back. In peaceful quiescence. Perfect. As soon as he gets near, he swiftly sits astride her belly and covers her mouth, his hand firm, steellike, stiffly holding her head down. The sudden force shakes her from slumber. Her eyes abruptly stricken with fear, she tries to rise. But her effort is in vain. For he has already clamped her: his knees have cuffed her arms. The weight bearing down on her is simply too much. He says something in a soft voice. She turns her head on one side. He suddenly grimaces. Her teeth have sunk on his hand. He swings back his other arm and brings down a clench fist, which crashes savagely on her abdomen. She goes limp, the massive pain numbing her body. She is groaning. He quickly stands up and drops down his trousers. She doubles her body in an embryonic position. He goes down again and grabs her arms that are shielding her chest. Another fierce blow to her belly. She is now in near-lifeless form. His frenzied arms rip her upper clothes. He grabs them, the two mounds of exposed flesh, mashing them hard, viciously. He half-rises, grips her lower clothes and hurriedly pulls them off, revealing the delicate, triangular area. The sight of lush hairy growth lets loose from the bonds of sanity his raw hunger. Animalistic. Beastly. Brutish. No time to waste, his bestial instincts tell him. He rapidly obeys. The dark dastardly deed now over, he quickly leaves, his wicked shadow trailing him.
THE FACES. THE crowd. He sees them again. It has been more than a year when he first set foot in the courtroom. He has come back: he is there again, but this time, it will be the last. After a tiring, protracted trial. His trial. The rape case. It’ll be over, he tells himself. From the start, he has maintained his innocence. His steadfast stance. That he did not commit the crime; he never raped the girl. He swore he never raped her. It was a set up. The police. “Those bastards,” he has referred to them. “They framed me up. They just couldn’t get the real rapist. They bungled their job. In desperation, they just went on to grab anyone to save their asses,” he has cried to his lawyer.
But then, the lawyer, his own lawyer, has expressed a different belief. He has seen the evidence, has read the victim’s statement. She has positively identified him, the one who ravished her mercilessly. It was near impossible to rebut the accusation. The offered alibi is simply too weak a defense, based on existing legal principles, as to shield the accused from the charge. He has given his client his assurance that he would do his best. But he never assured him that he will be exonerated in light of the evidence. It is a losing case.
“I’m sorry, Rolly,” the lawyer says as he rubs his eyes. He puts a hand on his client’s sagging shoulders.
Rolly is silent. His head bowed, he does not say anything, he does not move. Seated on the wooden bench ranged against the wall, he has not moved at all from the time he has sat there half an hour ago. Both of them know what is at hand. It will take a miracle to get an acquittal. But miracles can never take place, that he is quite sure.
The lawyer slowly rises, his hand now tapping lightly Rolly’s limped shoulders.
From somewhere in the pews across, a lady stands up. She strides forward and sits beside Rolly, her arm snaking around Rolly’s. She presses her head on his shoulder. He angles his head toward hers; he can hear her silent cry. Gently, her hand caresses his arm, running her fingers on letters SPUTNIK GANG that have been crudely tattooed on his forearm.
“When did you have this?” she asks softly.
He looks at her. “Yesterday. A cellmate, he’s a tattoo artist. He did that for free.”
“You joined them?”
He nods.
She raises her crumpled handkerchief to her eyes, dabbing off the tears. “Why did this happen to us?”
He slowly shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He half-raises his hands, but brings them down again on his lap. The handcuffs are hurting his wrists. He raises his head, conscious of the biting stare of those around him. He ignores them and looks around and sees something. Someone. His body turning tight and taut, he feels a surging rage. Boiling rage. Liar! You will burn in hell for lying, for making this false accusation! May God have mercy on you! He suddenly becomes conscious of the tightening arms of the lady beside him.
From the pew that stands near the opposite wall, there sit two ladies. One of them is middle-aged, her hands draped around the shoulders of her companion whose head is cuddled near her neck. The companion, who is in her late teens, is not moving. They, too, are being stabbed by curious, merciless stares. They have been there at about the same time when Rolly arrived. Rolly could have walked in the courtroom simultaneously with them, could have bumped them, could have stood face-to-face with them, could have stared at them in the eye, could have spat in their faces, but he was held back by his guard, the jail guard that accompanied him; they had to make way; they stood in the distance. The two women were allowed to get in first. And silently they walked in and sat on one of the pews. Once they got settled, the middle-aged lady wrapped a large shawl around her companion. The spectators could see the teen companion having some jittery fit of sorts; she was trembling despite the comforting arms around her. Right now, her tremor appears to have subsided, though she is still wrapped in the arms of the elder lady.
There is a shuffling of feet. A man dressed in starched beige barong tagalog is marching toward the counsel table, the table that fronts the judge’s upraised varnished desk. He slams the folders on the counsel table and looks around.
“Good morning, Fiscal Braso. The judge’s already here?” a voice asks.
“Yes, Attorney Rendo. He just arrived. Ready with your appeal, pañero?” Fiscal Braso says this with a smirk. He takes off his eyeglasses, mopping the lens with a crumpled tissue.
Rendo responds with his own sneer. “Always ready, Fiscal.” He is already used to this kind of teasing by Braso, the public prosecutor, though at times he gets irritated if the ribbing goes beyond the bounds of decency.
Braso and Rendo are, respectively, the public prosecutor and public defender assigned to the court. Around four days a week, the days designated as the “criminal cases days”, they face each other, tangling, trading verbal jabs, warring on some fine points of courtroom procedure. Off court, however, they seem to have struck up some kind of friendship, despite the fact that Rendo has just gotten his job less than a year ago.
Rendo got his job not because he is qualified in terms of experience in law practice. On the contrary, he lacks trial experience; in fact, he lacks any experience at all. Just out of law school, just passed the bar exams. A greenhorn. He got his job simply because of a shortage of public defenders. (Nobody wants to become a public defender. Nobody’s interested. Low pay, and most find the work somewhat stressing, handling hordes of cases: those dealing with crimes committed by drug pushers, robbers, thieves, muggers, killers, murderers, rapists who cannot afford to get their own private lawyers. Only the adventurous lot---and they are quite few---get to become public defenders. Rendo happens to be one of them. At times, though, he finds himself dealing with his clients at a distance, keeping literally an arm’s length when he finds them stinking, their mouths foul-smelling or their skin stained with some scaly disease. “I still need time to get used to it,” he has told the court stenographer.) Rendo got accepted the minute he applied for the job. No questions asked. Eager to become a trial lawyer, and armed only with his law school “moot court” training, he plunged right away in courtroom work, accepting with vigor and enthusiasm every case the court has assigned to him. And he is getting by. Right now, he is enjoying his work, an “on-the-job” training, “trial-and-error” vocation that will, after some years, ripen into a “rich trial experience”. He tells himself that, given his daily courtroom chore of handling a dozen or so cases, getting appointed as the lawyer of pauper litigants every minute of every hearing, he sure is destined to “enrich” his courtroom prowess. He aspires to be a great trial lawyer someday, to be another Antonio Coronel or Dakila Castro, the local equivalents of Clarence Darrow and Earl Rogers, the great American trial lawyers. This will, in time, be his passport in finding the elusive pot of gold in every lawyer’s rainbow. He knows, though, that it will still take an eternity for that day to come. No matter; he is willing to wait. Patience has its virtues and rewards. Thus, he does not mind at all being beaten black and blue by Braso in their daily courtroom fisticuffs. The travails of the inexperienced. Just charge them all to experience. He vows he will get even with Braso someday. Just wait.
Another creature. The public prosecutor.
Attention-hungry. Attention-grabber. Credit-hungry. Credit-grabber. Name whatever form of “hunger” or “grabber” there can be, it may just be the public prosecutor. From the way he looks, he has been in his work for more than two decades. It makes one wonder why he still has not become a judge, though. “I just don’t have the right connections,” he has repeatedly told his colleagues. His voice gruff, his demeanor menacing, he can just be a perfect judge himself. With his courtroom skills, he can readily swallow his adversary, especially if the poor fellow is a newbie. And thus he has done so in the rape case. He was merciless. He reached deep down in his treasure chest of experience and unloaded it. The newbie public defender--Rendo--could not match it. He has no experience. He has nothing to keep. He has no treasure, his chest was simply empty; what could he unload? Nothing. Braso gobbled him up. In just one swallow. The court stenographer thought she heard the public prosecutor give out a loud burp.
“You need to do better next time, pañero. The score now is 5-0.” Braso gives Rendo a wink. “This rape case is the sixth conviction you will have since you got in here.” He is talking a notch louder than their usual courtroom talk, purposely to let others overhear them. He is rolling with laughter.
Rendo ignores Braso, trying to appear busy skimming through his case folders. “Oh, you’re saying something, Fiscal?” He throws another sneer at Braso.
“You still need a lot of practice,” Braso retorts back.
There is a sound. The creaking of the door. From it bursts out a bespectacled chubby man, mustachioed, clad in polo barong. He stops just beside the judge’s desk. He inhales, and then shouts: “All rise please! The Honorable Judge Robert Senye presiding. Silence is enjoined!”
From behind, a black-robed stocky man with graying hair appears. After banging the wooden mallet on his desk, he barks, “Read the calendar, Attorney Sison.”
Sison flips over the first page of the folder in his hands. “For promulgation. Criminal Case No. 921-08. People vs. Rolando Markinez. For the crime of rape.”
“Appearances?” Senye’s mentholated baritone voice evokes the rumbling sound of thunder. One is reminded of James Earl Jones, the voice behind Darth Vader. His goldfish eyes, thick eyebrows, huge, beaklike nose, sagging jowls, thick, droopy lips and wrinkled facial skin create a ghastly, if not a terrifyingly horrible, countenance that scares the hell out of lawyers appearing before him. Seeing this man, one gets to think that this five-foot stocky man may have just come out straight from a mixture of some Hollywood flicks: Nightmare on Elms Street, Night of the Living Dead and Tales from the Crypt. During court sessions, the scene gets doubly terrifying: the rumbling thunder’s decibel level reaches a higher altitude, the facial countenance attains horrific proportions destined to cause an intense, painful feeling of repugnance, of fear. Rendo oftentimes hears from other lawyers that they have just attended a hearing in the Courthouse of the Undead, presided over by “His Horror.”
[Read the entire story in the forthcoming book TREE AND OTHER STORIES by AMADOR F. BRIOSO, JR., to be available in June, 2011, in selected bookstores in Manila. Another book, LOVE AND DESTINY, a novella written by the same author, will also be available in June, 2011. The author's previous book, "YOU FILIBINI?" Stories And Other Writings, is currently available at all Powerbooks bookstore outlets in Metro Manila.]
