Chapter Six

Father Enrique’s next bold move was to set about establishing a sewing school for the girls of the town’s poorest families. Once again the project prospered not only because it was his but because it made eminently good sense. The orphanage had flourished and, more importantly, was the envy of visitors from more important towns who returned home and spread the news. Why shouldn’t a sewing school also flourish and increase even further the growing reputation of San Juan Bautista?

This time Father Enrique didn’t need a new building. There were several places standing empty which would serve his purpose. He negotiated the lease at a peppercorn rent of a former store which had closed its doors to trade some two years previously. He made the rounds of the wealthy not in search of money but of ladies who might be interested in supervising the girls. The idea fired the ladies’ imagination once more. This would not be a come and go occasion like the fund-raising fetes had been. This would bestow on the ladies who chose to sacrifice their time and energy the mantle of a supervising committee. They would have to have meetings, take minutes, organise purchases, discharge responsibilities, create timetables, and keep accounts. Moreover, they would be to all intents and purposes doing in their own sphere what their menfolk did in theirs and claimed was so difficult, tiring, and beyond the ability of mere women. Sheer heaven!

In less than a year items from the school were being sold in the town’s market. They were plain and simple but had the advantage of being cheap, practical, and hard-wearing. The girls accepted into the school came from homes where money was always scarce and knew from personal experience what sorts of things people wanted and needed. The school’s supervising committee consisted of the eight wives of the town’s most important men who, though secretly pleased to have some suitable project on which to spend their more-than-ample leisure hours, gained even more satisfaction by being able to counter their husbands’ claims of fatigue at the end of the day by similar claims of their own. These good ladies were so pleased with the success of their school that they persuaded their husbands to hire the services of an excellent and accomplished seamstress, a young widow with a baby daughter, who, on enquiring, had been recommended to them by the nuns of the orphanage. The young woman was duly approached and gladly accepted the residential position as, one year previously, her husband had been arrested, tried, and hanged by the Americans for giving assistance to bandit known to be based in the Dimasalang mountains. The young woman had had a flourishing business among ladies in Pisag who recognised quality when they saw it and would pay that little extra to obtain it. But that clientele dried up overnight after her husband’s arrest. Under the seamstress the girls’ work progressed rapidly. Those less talented still turned out the simple garments but any girl who showed aptitude was encouraged and guided onto more sophisticated work. The ladies continued in their oversight and it was not so very long before small items from the school appeared in public among their own accessories.

The money from all the sales was kept by Father Enrique to be used for some purpose of his own which he resolutely refused to disclose. However, when one of the girls announced she had received a proposal of marriage, the whole school rejoiced as Father Enrique announced that if she accepted the young man she would be given a dowry from the fund he had been saving to present to her husband on her wedding day. Not only that, the whole school set to work to provide all the necessities for a young bride. The wedding, not so very secretly funded from Father Enrique’s own pocket, proved another spectacular success and it seemed that Father Enrique as well as being a saint was something of a miracle worker. His Mass attendance rose significantly not only among the population of San Juan but was swelled by people from the countryside who normally considered the journey from their villages or farms too far to attend Sunday Mass. No one actually brought their sick to be cured by his touch, true, but some said it was only a matter of time. Of course such speculations only circulated among the poor and ignorant whose Catholic faith was more a matter of primitive superstition than Church dogma but, as the ladies of better houses said among themselves, stranger things had happened in the Gospels.

Whatever success he had and no matter how much he was loved and admired, Father Enrique never rested on his laurels. He worked hard, very hard, and for long hours while he waited patiently for the summons back to the bishop in Manila.

His daily routine was simple. He breakfasted after morning Mass then returned to the church to hear Confessions. After that he made his way to the orphanage to talk to the sisters and to meet with the children. The sisters made a fuss of him and afterwards the superior delivered her brief report over coffee. Then he met with the children who ran to him laughing and shouting. The orphanage had been established long enough for most of the children no longer to contain those originally brought in from the poverty and degradation of the streets. Some of those had stayed, prospered, and left to take the jobs Father Enrique made sure were offered to them. Others, unable or unwilling to adjust to the disciplines and routines imposed by the sisters, had run away to their old life. But the orphanage had never had any difficulty in maintaining a full roll-call. Babies were brought by parents who simply could not afford yet another mouth to feed. Children were brought because they had indeed become orphans and their relatives couldn’t afford to take them in and then, of course, there were the children of fallen women: girls who for love or money had sinned and then chosen to leave their child and San Juan rather than live on in shame and destitution. These girls usually went to Manila where the American troops supplied a ready source of custom.

Whatever the reason for their being there, the sisters saw to it that all the children understood that Father Enrique was their benefactor, their priest, and a saint.

At the sewing school, which he visited next, it was the same. He met the seamstress first and discussed business then went to visit the girls who, although less noisy and boisterous in their welcome, were in their own, smiling, giggling way just as enthusiastic. Father Enrique looked at their work, took time to speak to as many as he could, and then spent another quarter of an hour taking coffee with the seamstress whom he knew still grieved for her dead husband and worried about her little girl. She was a quiet, reserved, rather plain woman, who had made no friends in San Juan that he knew of and he thought, quite rightly, that she valued as the highlight of her day his visit, their coffee, and their conversation.

Father Enrique then made a selection from his list of wealthy households whose financial support he solicited to keep his parish running. Each day he would visit three houses, take coffee and cake with three wives and exchange small-talk, gossip, and, when asked, give spiritual advice. Apart from the excess of coffee it was a simple and straight-forward morning’s work and he usually enjoyed it.

But now it had all changed.

One night had destroyed him.

He was no longer the good priest working hard and waiting for the bishop to summon him. Now he was nothing more than an actor playing a part, the part of a simple, holy priest, a man of God whose only concern was the spiritual and physical welfare of his flock.

As he made his rounds it was as if he was carrying some great heavy burden which threatened to crush him. At the last house he visited he suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to stand up and scream out the guilt of his sin and in his mind, as the good lady talked of this and that, he actually saw in his imagination his doing so. But slowly the gentle trickle of inconsequential words that kept coming from her lips dissolved the image. He was a sinner, not a hero, a Judas, not a repentant thief, and he began once more to sip his coffee, nibble his cake, and listen to whatever it was the good woman was saying.

As he left the house and headed homewards he felt the burden lighten and his thoughts take a different direction. Would he see her again? Would she still be in his house?

The crisis had passed.