His Signature and the Moon is an original piece of fiction that’s inspired by a true story. Verse alternates between fiction and commentary each week. Make sure that you’re subscribed, so you don’t miss a sentence.
In 1610, Galileo Galilei published Sidereus Nuncius. In 2005, a replica was created and sold as an authenticate first edition for half a million dollars. This story is inspired by that process of replication and what it means to be an artist.
His Signature and the Moon
De Russo hired her because he was a fan. Not of her, he quickly corrected, but of Galileo. He wanted her because he needed someone to replicate an image that Galileo had made. He had acquired a digital copy of the original Sidereus Nuncius, and said that he didn’t like the way it was so fake. She tried to explain that she was no longer at the Museum and that she was currently living in Argentina, but De Russo hushed her protests.
‘My dear, my dear, you do not need to worry. We will come to you.’
He told her that they had arrived in Buenos Aires that morning and would come by after lunch. And even though she hadn’t given him her address, with a bright see you soon, De Russo hung up the phone.
She cleaned her apartment as if they were arriving within the hour, throwing clothes into her bedroom and closing the door. She hid dirty dishes in cupboards in the kitchen and cleaned her desk of old papers. She swept the floors and arranged the pillows on the couch. The photos on the walls she swapped for copies of the Waterhouse paintings that she had re-drawn, and then she dug out her thesis and casually placed it on the coffee table in a way that said: oh that? That’s just my PhD.
Then she waited.
She tried to resist the urge to call her parents and tell them she had found another job. She didn’t think she could play it cool enough and besides, she didn’t want to jinx anything just yet. She knew that she had become a constant disappointment to them. They didn’t see the potential for what she could do, they only saw the illustrations for unpublished children’s books and the drawings for greeting cards. She knew that she was more. She knew that she could create something worthwhile.
De Russo didn’t simply arrive; he made an entrance. He stepped through the door and took off his jacket in a single flourish, like a Matador preparing for the charge. He flung his jacket over one arm and pulled her close with the other, kissing each cheek as he declared hello.
Over his shoulder, she noticed someone else standing by the door. A man she recognised as Antonio Giovanni.
She had only met Antonio once before, although to say they had met, was an overstatement. She had been told by an assistant of one of his friends that he had admired her work and wanted to talk to her about the conservation process. She was guided over to him at an exhibition, where she became so nervous that she had talked for nearly twenty minutes uninterrupted until he ended the conversation with the statement: you are quite good.
That was three months ago, before she lost her job.
He crept into the room and closed the door, giving her a simple nod of recognition while De Russo prowled further into her home.
‘I like it,’ he said, admiring her living room that they were crammed into. ‘It is quaint. I love it.’
‘It’s only temporary,’ she said, ‘just ‘till I find my feet.’
‘Exactly why we are here.’ He motioned to Antonio, who silently removed a book from his satchel. De Russo took it and set himself up on the couch, placing his book in the centre of the table. He picked up her thesis and with a casual, excuse me, he dumped it on the floor. Then he motioned her over with a wave of his hand.
‘There are only a few of these in the world. But we made more,’ he flashed his brightest smile. ‘For the fans.”
It looked like an old manuscript, well most of it did. Towards the top of the manuscript the pages were still white, rather than the rusted brown of the rest. He took a white page and held it out to her. It was a printed copy of Galileo’s Moon.
‘Do you see?’ He said, shaking the page. ‘Do you see how it’s just flat? It’s not a copy, it’s fake - it’s rubbish. I want to feel the image. I want the real thing.’
‘A real... fake?’ She asked.
‘Si,’ he said, eyeing her carefully. He pointed to Antonio behind her, presenting him to her like a magician on a stage. ‘Antonio tells me you can do this.’ Antonio’s smile barely past the edge of his nose.
‘I normally conserve paintings,’ she said. ‘And I’ve never worked with books.’
‘But it is a painting! This is a piece of history, it’s a work of art and we need an artist to complete it.’ She took the page from his hands and inspected the paper closely. The Moon was drawn in the corner, surrounded by the text of Galileo’s findings. It was drawn in watercolour that was now a rusted brown, but still, the detail of the drawing was incredibly accurate. She knew that Galileo had sketched it while he observed the moon, but the original was drawn in the seventeenth century. This looked like a drawing that was recently made.
De Russo was right. It was a work of art.
And surely recreating a work of art like that was worthwhile. Maybe even important.
‘Just the Moon?’ She asked.
‘A signature and the Moon.’
‘Sure, I can do that. We can arrange a time over the next few weeks or perhaps...’ Her words began to flounder as De Russo’s eyes shot nervously to Antonio. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘We were just hoping that you were able to do this now.’
‘Now?’
‘Si.’ She was suddenly unsure what to say. She could do the job now but perhaps she should pretend that she was too busy. That the job would have to wait until tomorrow at least. Good artists were always too busy to do anything right away. Yet she saw the way De Russo’s hands itched at the edge of the book, as if he were ready to snap it shut in a second.
If she said no, they were going to leave.
‘We’d pay you very well, of course,’ said De Russo as Antonio dropped a bag on the table.
‘I guess I could do it now,’ she said. ‘Sure.’ De Russo jumped to his feet with his original enthusiasm.
‘Beautiful!’
Antonio quickly began to set up her desk, placing the pages next to a new brush, and a pot of ink while De Russo carried the copy and fixed it in the centre of the table. She watched them from the couch as De Russo pulled back her chair,
‘For you, Señorita.’ She sat down in front of her work, De Russo hovered behind her for a moment before asking: ‘Would you mind if we use your kitchen?’
De Russo and Antonio were talking in the kitchen. In between sentences and spurts of laughter, she heard them switch on the oven. When De Russo returned, he had three glasses and a bottle of wine in hand.
‘When you’ve finished, we can celebrate,’ he said. He placed the bottle and glasses on the table by the page she was supposed to work on.
The page itself was nearly full.
There were lines of text that were a perfect match to the printed copy. Only a three inch square was left blank. She quickly measured the moon in the copy with her fingers, to see whether it would fit in the space – just. There would be a small border surrounding it.
The glass was perfect for the outline. She placed it in the centre of the space and traced around it with expert precision. De Russo was still hovering behind her, watching closely but trying hopelessly not to intrude. The brush paused but never left the page, not until the circle was complete.
She removed the glass and regarded the ring that ran black. De Russo swiped the glass from her hand and began filling it with wine, muttering something about nerves.
She spent nearly an hour on the first drawing, slowly copying the craters with long thoughtful pauses before drawing the mountains of the Moon. When she was finished, De Russo carefully regarded it. He held it at arm’s length, and then he brought it close to his eyes, so that his nose was nearly touching the ink.
‘The ink is black,’ she started. ‘But the original would only be brown because of age. With time, it will change but I’m sure you understand that it will be some time.’
‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘Please, the others.’ De Russo took the first copy, laying it flat upon his open palms, and disappeared into the kitchen. There were four other pages on the desk, each printed with the same text and the small blank square window, waiting for her to draw. She wondered who the other copies were for, these fans of Galileo, but the thought seeped into the back of her mind as she grabbed the second wine glass placed it in the window and set to work.
As she completed each image, De Russo would appear and take the page into the kitchen. When she finished the final Moon, she took it into the kitchen herself, and found De Russo and Antonio standing in front of the oven watching the pages inside. They were huddled together like they were discussing some sort of secret plan. She found herself knocking on her own kitchen door.
It took a moment for De Russo to acknowledge her but then he motioned her closer with a smile. Slowly she approached the oven, which looked like it was filled with smoke.
‘Are you burning them?’ She asked.
‘No, no,’ said De Russo, as Antonio took the final page from her hands. ‘Look.’ She bent down and peered into the oven. She saw that it wasn’t thick enough to be smoke clouding inside; it was almost like fog. One of the pages was on the top tray, with a dish of some liquid on the bottom.
‘See? It’s time.’ Through the fog she saw the ink on the page was no longer black. De Russo drew her eyes to the dish on the bottom shelf. ‘We print the text, you paint the Moon, we put hydrochloric acid on the bottom and heat the oven to two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius, and they oxidize.’
He paused after the word, and then slowly, he revealed the other pages she had drawn sitting on the bench where the Moon’s now stared back at her in rusty hues, matching the pages that she had seen in the rest of the manuscript.
‘Twenty minutes is like four hundred years,’ he said.
Looking at them now, it was hard to imagine that she had painted them. She took one of the aged pages in her hands and like De Russo held it out at arm’s length before bringing it closer to inspect it more carefully. It didn’t look like her work at all. It looked more authentic than the image she had copied. More real.
‘See?’ said De Russo. ‘It’s so much more than a book. This is art to be cherished.’
She inspected the drawing, trying to find the faults but the ink had blended into the page and it now stood the same as the text, as if time had truly leaped forward. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. There was only one way to describe it: this was Gallileo’s Moon.
She felt that with these images she had done what she used to do, what she had studied and worked to become, she had not only conserved the moon but she had created something new.
It was fake, but a real fake.
De Russo took the page from her hands and carefully placed it back with the others with surgical precision. He led her back to her desk that now felt shamefully new.
‘Almost finished,’ he said. ‘Every drawing needs to be signed, after all.’ He placed a page in front of her, different to the one with her moons. It was un-aged like the others were before, and looked like a title page to an old book.
De Russo pointed to the bottom of the page where she should sign. She breathed slowly trying to calm herself and practiced on a piece of scrap paper several times until it was perfect.
Finally, she put pen to page and with quick strokes signed the signature that would later prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the book they had created was authentic.
Io Galileo Galilei f.
I, Galileo Galilei made this.
The money she was paid meant that she would be fine for at least six months. Maybe more if she stopped drinking. She told her parents that she had a year contract with her new job and mumbled something about bad reception before hanging up. They were asking too many questions.
Then, for a while, there was nothing.
No mention of the two men that appeared at her door. No talk of moons or Galileo. She hadn’t picked up a pen since. Nothing felt as comfortable as the brush she had used to draw the Moon. Everything was just stains on a page.
She moved to New York City, where the money lasted three weeks and she was forced to look for work again. Between half-completed job applications, she would walk around the city and get lost amongst it. No one asked her why she was walking the streets at two in the afternoon; they all assumed that she had somewhere to go.
It was easy to be forgotten and even easier to forget. She began thinking about living there forever with no money and no job, just her and the city and then at night she would welcome the Moon.
She was walking down Park Avenue when she spied Antonio walking on the other side of the road. He was carrying the same satchel he had worn to her home.
She didn’t know what to do.
Wave? Run in the opposite direction?
She was caught between the idea of talking to him to see if they could work together again, and avoiding him altogether. Afraid that he may realise that she wasn’t a real artist and ask for his money back.
Before she could do either of those, she lost him. He had turned down East 55th Street and entered a building. She found herself searching the location on her phone. There were a few businesses but only one that caught her eye: Rhodes and Lane, Fine Antique Maps and Rare Books.
She realised what they were trying to do. They were going to make people believe that their book was the real thing.
They were going to sell it.
She waited for Antonio to leave the building before she went inside and up to the sixth floor. She only wanted to know if she was right, and maybe how much they were selling it for. It was her work after all.
The elevator doors opened onto a gallery of collectibles. The rooms were filled with old maps and books that were carefully placed in cabinets, neatly organised in rows. It was dimly lit and temperature controlled to a cool twenty-two degrees, all of the things that would preserve the treasures inside.
She had barely taken a second step before the man she presumed to be Lane appeared, asking if she needed help.
‘I’m looking for a very rare work,’ she said.
‘Well this is where you’ll find it, although I must warn you, the rarer the work the higher the cost.’ He said while eyeing her clothes, her unwashed hair.
‘I’m buying it on behalf of a collector,’ she said. ‘My Uncle is the collector, although he lives in Berlin and can’t come here himself so he asked if I could enquire on his behalf just enquire of course but it’s very important to him so I thought I’d come straight down myself rather than calling or anything like that just to make sure you have it.’ She forced herself to stop and take a breath. She had always been a nervous liar, but the man hadn’t yet thrown her out of his shop. Instead they just stood staring at one another, waiting for either of them to break.
‘And what was the work?’
‘Galileo,’ she said. ‘Do you, uh, have anything by him?’
‘Yes, we have quite a large collection of his works. That is our specialty after all.’
‘Of course, yes, that’s why my Uncle sent me here,’ she said. ‘I’ll be more specific. I’m looking for the Sidereus Nuncius? Galileo’s Moon?’ She tried not to notice his immediate suspicion. ‘My Uncle heard that someone had found a copy, an earlier draft perhaps. He’s been looking for one since he saw it at the Smithsonian but of course they belong to the library.’ She surprised herself with a laugh that sounded natural, as if this was a common problem like running out of milk in the morning.
‘I’m sorry, we don’t have any copies of those,’ he said.
‘I thought that might be the case,’ she said. ‘But at least now I can tell my Uncle I tried. Would you mind if I left my card with you, in case things change?’
He took the card from her and as he did his hand brushed against hers. It was unusually soft. He read her name aloud and didn’t fumble with the pronunciation. She almost thanked him for reading it correctly.
‘Your Uncle is the same name?’
‘Yes,’ she lied.
‘I may have heard of him,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Now that I think of it.’
‘I’m sure you have,’ she said, knowing it was impossible.
‘Well, I don’t want to get your hopes high too soon, but I have received a copy just recently. Today actually.’
‘Really?’
‘But I haven’t yet had it authenticated,’ he said. ‘I have bought from Mr. Giovanni before, and to my eyes it is an original. An early original, definitely, perhaps just a worker’s draft. But it seems like an original to me. But of course, it needs to go through an external process. Just to be certain.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Yes, my Uncle did say to check to see that would be the case.’ She knew of the tests that they would be doing but she couldn’t imagine how her work would pass them. They would ask experts to analyse and compare the work to similar productions. They would test the ink, the paper, the binding. She couldn’t imagine that because they stuck the paper in the oven that it would be considered real.
Then again, she hadn’t recognised her own work hours after she had completed it. Perhaps it would pass the tests.
‘And if it is authentic, which I’m sure it is, what cost shall I tell my Uncle?’
‘Considering the nature of the work and its excellent condition, I would say at least one million.’ She tried not to react, but he began to laugh at the look on her face. ‘I imagine your Uncle has not discussed the potential cost with you before.’
But she wasn’t thinking about her fake Uncle. She realised that she had been underpaid.
‘Not specifically no, but I’ll pass that on. I’m sure he’ll be pleased,’ she said. ‘When can I expect to hear from you?’
When she answered her phone the next day, she wasn’t expecting De Russo to be on the other end.
‘Apparently you are looking to buy your own work,’ he said. She didn’t bother asking how he knew or how he had gotten hold of her new number. She got straight to the point.
‘I was underpaid.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But would you have done it had you known what it was for?’
‘Perhaps,’ she replied.
‘We paid you less because we will keep your name a secret. No one will know you were involved if this... goes wrong.’
‘No one will know?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, as if that was what she wanted to hear. ‘After all, you didn’t paint this work. Galileo did. So please, Señorita, don’t ask any more questions about the work for you or your Uncle.’
‘I don’t have an Uncle.’
‘I’m aware.’ The phone went dead.
She didn’t hear from either of them again. The antiquarian never called and she stopped taking her walks through the city because the streets couldn’t help her forget. She kept track of the Sidereus Nuncius that she helped create. It had been authenticated, and sold for millions.
She had officially created a real fake.
She took a job waiting tables and when customers were rude, or her back hurt more than her feet, she would tell herself that she was a real artist even though no one would remember her name.
She decided to start painting again. She saved and bought nice paper and a nice brush, and before she painted the Moon she switched on the oven. But the paper didn’t brown in the same way and the ink turned grey. She could barely convince herself a child had made it let alone Galileo. But she still hung it on the wall and tried again and again with different paper and different ink but always cooked in hydrochloric fog at two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius for twenty minutes.
None of them were the same.
Perhaps, it wasn’t her work that wasn’t working. Perhaps it was her.
Maybe she needed De Russo hovering behind her, or the wine that they brought. Maybe it was Argentina and her cramped apartment. Maybe it was everything else that she had left behind and now she had no tools to do it again. She continued working tables and making moons until all the walls in her apartment were full. Then at night when she went to sleep, the dark made the moons look like the sky and the white, blank space between them became the stars.
It could have almost been called beautiful. But it wasn’t his moon.
At her parents’ insistence, she soon got a better job at her old university. She didn’t use all her degrees, but she used more of her skills than she did waitressing. After a while she had enough money to get a better apartment, with a large window in the bedroom.
She set her bed to face the window and kept the curtains open so that she could look out at the night sky. Below the window frame, using the last of her ink, she signed her portrait of the moon.
Io Galileo Galilei f.
I, Galileo Galilei made this.
His Signature and the Moon is an original piece of fiction for Verse. A brief literary interlude before the speculative fiction continues. If you enjoyed this piece, consider sharing it.
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