Refalco Handia the Painter
Fragments of a biography reconstructed by A. von Stauffenberg
-I-
Refalco Handia’s journals are filled with drawings, watercolors, notations, equations, and dreams written in mirror script with iron-gall ink and sharpened reeds and goose quills in homage to Leonardo. Best known for his translations of hieroglyphs and languages thought indiscernible, and his theories of underground magnetism, Refalco (or RH, his taken name for anonymity’s sake) is considered by scholars to be a false pundit at best, or a conman at worst.
RH’s family were immigrants who kept their origins and culture secret. The working-class neighborhood people were wary, and at times openly antagonistic due to the Handias’ odd name and secretive nature. They lived, or more truthfully, barely made ends meet, adjacent to a lens factory and a dense forest. The factory discarded its toxic rouge used to polish lenses into the forest and stream below. Why not murder oak, hemlock, and birch, fungi and bacteria? Why not pollute fish and frogs that swim and reproduce in water filled with factory chemicals? In the fall, the wind from the west brought the factory smoke into the forest and overpowered even the pungent fruit of female ginkgo trees.
The frog with two heads and other deformed animals that RH found could not survive here, but he memorialized them with drawings and notes. Only red ants—perhaps fire ants—could thrive in this forest. Though the factory was there to craft and polish eyeglasses RH was not immune to its poison: blindness took away his sight in his left eye and, for the rest of his life he scratched at recurring pustules. At age four, RH found his neighbor dead in the forest from factory poison, ants crawling into his mouth, nose and ears. His father was called home from the factory and stood in the driveway, nervously passing his metal thermos and lunch pail from hand to hand, watching along with his wife and oldest sons as ambulances and fire trucks filled their driveway and took their neighbor away. RH hid from fear and irrational guilt.
As only a four-year-old could, RH became obsessed with his neighbor’s death and broke into the vacant house. Everything in entropy. Moldy grime covered the walls and windows. The toilet, the sink, used paper plates, plastic spoons, and partially eaten cat food made a nauseating smell. There was no telephone. Haphazardly stacked books topped with wilted newspapers stood like crazy marionettes, staring at their reflections in the broken glass of framed photographs on the walls. Other stacks leaned like drunkards headed home from a bar.
Years passed, and at midnight during what would be RH’s last visit, the tallest stack fell. RH watched the domino effect travel around the room, stacks heading straight toward him. He looked for an escape route, and as luck would have it the floor seemed to hear RH’s thoughts. It too wanted a way out and gave way, making a terrific crash, and taking RH and all the dominoes with it.
Everything from above vanished. Picking himself up and squinting, the room below was the antithesis of everything above. For one thing, the room itself glowed. Pinned to white walls were maps, drawings, equations. Aggregated into polished cabinets were arrowheads of flint, chert from North Carolina (or so the notes read), and obsidian of unknown origin. Animal eyes looked up at RH from three cabinets. Fur, bones, indigenous arrowheads and knapping tools, fossils, knives, and broken crockery filled others. RH studied a hooded robe folded in a drawer. He couldn’t try it on; it was as brittle as bark. His neighbor had been a Capuchin monk attached to the monastery just outside of town, likely excommunicated for his research. Like Capuchins everywhere this monk had arranged baroque wall pieces of human skulls and bones in his underground room, even bone chandeliers.
He found his neighbor’s journals hidden behind the cabinets. Like transcendental sermons, the bound books contained exhaustive notes on liminal thresholds between the rotating heavens and underground worlds, all with corresponding reverse mathematic equations.
In one manuscript RH found the name of Pavel Florensky, who lived and died in the Soviet Union, martyred for his beliefs. His Virgilian neighbor’s writings mirrored those of the Russian Orthodox mystic, though they had never corresponded. (This synchronicity of two or more unknowns arriving at the same conclusions is common throughout history, such as Kandinsky’s and Dove’s manifestoes.) Encoded to elude prying Soviet eyes Florensky’s writings could only be deciphered by using magic squares. Obviously Florensky’s manuscript was a treasured item, for its cover was gilt gold leaf on cherry wood. Inside most pages were faded, now illegible to the naked eye but RH’s deceased Capuchin had a high-powered microscope to zero in on Florensky’s passages. One was underscored: … we experience moments…when…two worlds grow so very near in us that we can see their intimate touching… [where] the veil of visibility is torn apart, and through that tear… we can sense that the invisible world (still unearthly, still invisible) is breathing: and that both this and another world are dissolving into each other.
Hiding among the detritus from the crash, was a tiny wrapped box that gave off a foreign odor and pulsated in his hand with rapid beats, like his heart. Then the package dissolved in his hands revealing one wooden match and a concise note, or rather a command. It read: One of my Capuchin brothers, a savant, has chosen to live and pray in monastic solitude embracing silence and absolute darkness underground in la catacomba dei Giordani with its five levels of unexplored regions. Whomsoever reads this should burn this sacred note into psychic nothingness and go to that same underground world and find him. RH struck the match, burned the note. For the first time here in this basement, he felt alive, and somehow weightless. As the burning note scorched his hands RH found his life’s purpose.
-II –
How RH makes his way to Rome is a mystery. He is a grown man now, bearing a striking resemblance to his dead Capuchin neighbor, and draws, paints, and annotates his prophetic dreams which affirm that the tales were true: inside this catacomb is the hermit priest devoted to darkness and prayer; a savant who makes only queries, for there are no answers. So with equal parts excitement and fear RH determines to find this hermit. First he needs equipment. Loaded in his rucksack are hardbound drawing books, watercolor trays, ink and pens, charcoal pencils, a knife, hooded sweaters, three Bic lighters and a cardboard box filled with candles.
Where is the entrance? The worst luck: it is a manhole cover in the middle of the busy Via Nomentana. RH chooses 3:00 am to avoid the most traffic, rushes to the manhole, pries it open with a tire iron, climbs in, pulls the manhole over him, lights his first candle and slips on the moist stone, his candle gone. He descends by gripping tiny empty tombs that once held children. As precarious as this is, he thinks, how can anyone survive in these catacombs? What does he eat? Drink? Does his God exist?
With each step the blackness and shivering cold increases. He lights another candle. Everywhere are bones, hair, teeth, dead rats. Lured by the warmth of his body, blind translucent spiders the size of his hand make clicking sounds as they approach. Foot high mantises of phosphorescent green stand as if guarding loculi while seemingly infinite glowing aphids skitter madly from fractured oil lamps. Tree roots drip their nectar, a reminder of the outside world. Tunnels and graves made of volcanic tufa, wet and easy to carve in ancient times, are now rock hard. Bouquets of green moss are sugared with a palette of raw sienna, cerulean, ultramarine and cadmium. Together they snake down walls in glowing color. The odor, a soup made of the aforementioned, is strong but not unpleasant. He thinks it will be easy to find the priest but it isn’t. He travels for miles searching for the priest. Unsuccessful, RH questions the truth of the tale.
Is this akin to the Minotaur’s labyrinth? Am I some naive Theseus, to never find the priest’s hermitage? If only I had Ariadne’s thread to guide me through this endless maze, but bringing string never crossed my mind. Perhaps I should gather spider webs and weave my own thread. RH never weaves anything for it would take years and he doesn’t know how to do it anyway. Instead he goes on and on.
Before searching for his priest underground, RH meditates on the rituals he had made long ago: going high up before he could go deep down into this catacomb. Defying gravity while acquiring enough magnetism and gamma brain frequency he traveled with his dreams as his guide: climbing up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling; up to Piero’s “Story of the True Cross”; up and up inside the Pantheon with its hidden rooms filled with old maps and manuscripts, the hands of Raphael, and cobwebs everywhere, deserted by spiders long dead; the wintry cold atop the Parthenon. He stands atop Mesoamerican ziggurats and studies their bio-geometry. In China and Japan he draws Taoist scrolls and late Tang scholars’ rocks.
In Messiaen, Gubaidulina, Bourgeois, Salgado, Beuys, Darger, even the alcoholic Ted Serios, who may or may not make thoughtography, RH finds sympathetic guides for more of his dreams. But the crudely painted catacomb frescoes are hypnotic and indomitable. Crumbling images tell of Shadrach-Meshach-Abednego, unharmed in the furnace in which they are thrown. Immanuel takes orant poses surrounded by bestiaries. The Virgin suckles. Other frescoes serialize: Jonah is swallowed by the serpent-like whale; out comes Jonah with whale vomit; Jonah stands triumphant. Marble reliefs, sculptures, texts memorialize saint-tombs, Sant’Agnese-SantaCecilia-SanSebastiano, now vandalized. Incised supplications of crude graffiti overlap one another in an attempt to be as close as possible to each saint’s tomb. Amalgams of Greek and Latin have grammatical errors.
Certain tunnels are more spiritually potent than others. In one, RH hears loud marching feet, hundreds of them. In another, he feels a presence behind him and keeps looking back. One time he catches a glimpse, not of the priest, but of a drifting girl. Sant’ Agnese? Santa Cecilia?
Miles in, transparent walls levitate, proving the theories that so intrigued RH years ago when reading J. Udvardy’s “Spirits and Daemons: Hermetic Practices of Catacomb Rituals” (Wilson Press, UK, 1891, second edition). Further on, fresh and aromatic tributaries of potable water are sweet to the tongue. RH makes ablutions. Food? He sucks the juice from marine arthropods in the class Trilobita, eats greasy centipedes, eels, and boneless fish with multiple eyes who lay delicious eggs. Thanks to phosphorescent mantises and shining aphids RH no longer needs candlelight. Darkness and fog give way to dripping stalactites which envelop loculi and cubiculi forming stalagmite obelisks whose porcelain slippery radiance blinds RH.
Was I mad looking for this hermetic place? Was the priest even alive? Did he ever leave the tunnels? Did he become blind like the spiders? Why did this savant live in silence, hearing only his breathing and his heartbeat? Was he a troglodyte?
Unboundtime gives RH vertigo; he repeatedly throws up. In this spinning, a threshold of invisibility makes an impassable barrier, or so he thinks. He prostrates himself before the barrier by holding 108 fish eggs and performing Raihai. Painful blood-bruises scar his forehead from the contemplative rhythm of crawling then bowing his head to the tufa floor. Spinning halts and he passes through.
After timenotime his priest savant is here.
The astrological Mithraic symbols on the ceiling of his hand-carved cubiculum mirror in sympathy with the heavens. He finds all the telltale signs: bundles of hair and bones for paintbrushes, chewed mosses, mantises of innumerable colors packed in handmade vessels for paint, cracked glass lamps filled with aphids for light.
His clothes, now rags, are soaked in sweat. Refalco Handia climbs into his cubiculum and retrieves his brushes to paint.
Then he sleeps, content.