The Green Chair
by Emily Abrera
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In the mid-50s, we took up residence in Bacolod City, after we had roamed like nomads through half a dozen cities and provinces from southern Luzon to the Visayas. Here, finally, my father returned to his first love, photography. He had a portrait studio that carried his name, Franco’s. Two or three blocks away on Luzuriaga Street, in a corner apartment block, was where we lived.

We had a second-floor flat; our living room windows faced Luzuriaga, while our bedroom windows faced another street which name I can no longer recall, beyond which was the sea. From the bedroom we could see the Christian Center, a nursery school and mission house behind which Pastor Nealy and his family lived. They were an American missionary family, and Shirley, eldest of three children, was a playmate.

It was what was considered an ideal location: walking distance from the studio, the plaza, the church, the market and our school.

Buildings in those days were constructed with high ceilings, so our apartment ceiling was quite high, and for this reason, always airy. Our entrance was from an inner common court, up two flights of stairs that took you to a landing that overlooked the courtyard. To the right was the main door to our place. We had a large living room and dining area. A swing door with a glass porthole led to the kitchen. There was a second staircase, much narrower, from the kitchen, but we were not allowed to use it. Our helpers did, since their room was next to it, toward the back of the kitchen.

We had two bedrooms; the four of us children occupied the large one and my parents the small. My mother’s sewing machine held court in the rounded corner of our bedroom, her sewing chair strategically placed so that she could look out and see both streets, as well as our comings and goings.

My sister’s bed and mine occupied one side of the room. A writing desk and a bookshelf partially divided the space and on the other side were the boys’ beds. We all had wall lamps above our pillows, installed by my father when we first moved in.

It was a large, breezy room, with big windows on both sides that let in a lot of light. On the windows were curtains that my mother had sewed--drapes with large green and magenta pastel flower prints. My parents’ room had the same, but their room always seemed cooler and darker than ours.

On sunny afternoons, my mother opened the windows and door of their bedroom, and worked at a small easel, coloring the black and white portraits taken by my father in his studio. Often, she would have several sepia-toned prints spread out in front of her as she studied the different faces and moods of the pictures, deciding which to work on first.

My mother was an intuitive colorist, maybe even brilliant, considering that she would try to get my father to describe to her his clients so that she could approximate their skin tone in the colors she mixed. Was this lady more Chinese than Spanish? And the gentleman with the glasses on…he was moreno, was he not? This one seemed pale, and this other one fair but ruddy, and so on.

She set off their skin tones with the colors she chose to tint the backgrounds, and it was her decision to create texture there if she felt it was needed. My father admired her handiwork, and I think she must have felt quite fulfilled to be able to contribute to his work in this way.

There were no color prints yet back then, but my mother could make them. Sometimes she moved to the living room, or our bedroom, trailing the daylight. We were not allowed to touch her tubes of Grumbacher oil paints, but often my brother and I sat and watched her mix the pigments. Soon the room would smell of linseed oil, and the pictures would be transformed!

Our home was simple, yet comfortable. In the living room were some narra pieces from two different furniture sets. My mother had sewn the same cushion covers for all the chairs, tiny heart-shaped leaves against a pale green; except for the long reclining chair in the corner beside the floor lamp. It was made of rattan, with a long curving silhouette, and a matching footrest that could be pulled out from under the front. It had fat sectioned cushions, like a caterpillar, and it was the only one encased in plain fabric.

This was the green chair, my father’s favorite chair.

This was where he deposited himself when he arrived home at the end of each day. He would untie his shoelaces, take off his shoes, put up his feet and let out a loud sigh, as though he was expelling all the parts of that day that weren’t worth keeping. He would close his eyes for a minute or two; then restored, he would get up and pad contentedly to his bedroom carrying his shoes with him, to wash up and change for dinner.

The green chair was where he spent all sorts of odd hours reading. None of us were surprised to find him there at midnight or at 2 or 3 in the morning.

From the green chair, he listened to his Italian opera, or Mario Lanza, or Beethoven’s Ninth or the Hungarian Rhapsody. Sometimes the music beckoned me back from sleep and I was allowed to sit beside him as he tried to translate into English the anguish in the lyrics of the great arias. We wept together as Madame Butterfly knelt to bring the blade to her belly, or as Enrico Caruso sang "Una Furtiva Lachrima" ("A Furtive Tear") from the bottom of his broken heart.

My sister and I, at 10 and 8, were too old to be cuddled any more, but our brothers got to be patted to sleep on his lap as he sat on the green chair, especially if they were not feeling well. I remember being allowed to eat my supper on the green chair during the first two days after I was bitten by a neighbor’s dog and had to have stitches on my left leg and anti-rabies shots in my back.

The green chair smelled of my father. We ran to it sobbing, if we got smacked for disobeying or making our younger siblings cry.

Once we overheard our maids talking about an earthquake, and convinced that it would happen that very same evening, all four of us huddled on the green chair, praying anxiously that my father would get home before the ground opened up and swallowed him. So great was our relief when he arrived that we forgave him his laughing at our foolishness, and basking in the safety of his presence, we let him call the boys "stronzi" and us girls "silli-lonas" for letting our imaginations run wild.

And also from the green chair, on certain nights and especially when the moon was big, and if we had all eaten our dinner without a fuss… my father would tell us stories.

There was a ritual to it. After complimenting my mother on the delicious meal, he would walk over to the buffet, open the wooden box that had his initials, FA, carved on the top, fastidiously select a cigar, and ceremoniously slip off its seal as we frantically figured out whose turn it was to get it as a ring. Then he would peer out the front window and comment on the moon, and this would be our first cue. We would clamor, "Tell us a story, Papa, please. Tell us a story!"

He would light his cigar, rolling it thoughtfully between his fingers as he held one end of it to the flame. A second cue! We would rush to fetch the ashtray and set it beside the green chair, and usually one of the younger ones, John or Charlie, would clamber on to his lap as soon as my father leaned back.

He’d say, "Well, let’s see if there are any stories that want to get told tonight."

This was the final and most promising cue. My little brother would reach up and tap my father’s right temple, then without taking his eyes off his target, his little fingers would begin to turn a make-believe valve. The rest of us would study my father’s expression.

He might say then, "It’s dry tonight, I’m afraid nothing’s flowing. Are you sure you’re turning that the right way, Johnnyboy?" He pronounced all words still with a heavy Italian accent, but we caught the tease in the way he said "jonni-boyye".

A few seconds later, "Aha! I can feel something! Is it a story? Aha… aha! It’s Hing-? … Hinggo-?…"

And we would all exclaim, "Hinggolo! And Honggolo! And Pim-Po! Magus Merlino!" These were the central characters of the stories my father told us.

Hinggolo and Honggolo, brothers who lived with their Uncle Tony in a cottage along the fringe of a forest… their pet rabbit Pim-Po, who could talk to other animals and whose ears would criss-cross to warn them of danger… their unlikely allies who could be relied on to help in a rescue, a panther named Sharp-Claws and an eagle named LongBeak. If they needed anything out of the ordinary, they went to see the wise old Magus Merlino.

Who knows how long we stayed gathered around the green chair on such nights when the stories flowed, rich with the mysterious sounds and scents of the forest, of the cave where the Magus lived, of the magical mists that suddenly descended on our beloved heroes--Hinggolo, thin and thoughtful, and Honggolo, big for his age and tempestuous--as they connived with mute beasts, solved riddles and broke spells, fulfilling the destinies of princes and witches.

Sometimes the stories came in installments of two or three nights. At other times they unfolded in one long session, with a couple of intermissions when my father would stop at a particularly exciting point in the story and get up to stretch or brew some tea, or re-light his cigar, or bring out the bottle of Strega from a high shelf and pour some out in a liqueur glass.

Strega was a strong, sweet, golden-yellow liqueur that came in a taller-than-usual tapered bottle. It came all the way from Italy, and was hard to find, but now and then the Salesian priests would bring him a bottle at Christmastime. We knew that Strega meant "witch" and that it wasn’t a brew meant for us.

But often my father had a bottle of Four Seasons, which we children were quite familiar with because we got to choose which of the four sections he would pour into the miniature cup. Four Seasons was in a fancier-looking bottle with a rounded bottom that sloped upwards to a neck that sported four tiny curved corks. With the corks pointed outwards, the bottle brought to mind a jester’s hat, what with the bright colors of its contents. There were four sections: green was crème de menthe; brown was crème de cacao, the clear one was curacao; and there was a blue-violet section called parfait amour--this was the one my sister and I always managed to pick.

Once poured, we were all allowed to dip the end of a pinky finger in, just to sample. Sometimes my sister and I got a double dip. It was our token participation in a ritual that introduced us gently to more grown-up pleasures.

We all knew that in reality, the intermissions were imposed so that my father could buy time to figure out the next phase of the story, but we never blew his cover. If anything, we waited quietly, eyes wide open, imaginations primed, co-conspirators in adventures yet to be revealed. We knew that the more time we gave him, the more twists and turns the story would take.

Once in a while he would tease us, saying, "It’s getting late! Maybe we should continue tomorrow? The next part may be... too scary for you."

Four voices would harmonize in an exaggerated wail of disappointment; eight hands would push and pull him back to the green chair, and my father, willing captive, would not resist. All of us, he included, were eager to re-enter the fantastical stream of images that now, abetted by cigar and liqueur, gushed, rushing from my father’s rivers like a stampede of stallions.

We drank it all in. His stories were gifts he created purely for our enjoyment; they were dedicated selfishly, completely, to the four of us.

No one else heard the stories… only the children, the night, and the green chair.