Namorada - 1497
Mona learned that she had a father a few weeks before her fifth birthday. It was a strange revelation, for the child had sincerely believed that she, out of millions, had been the product of her mother and her mother alone. It was silly to believe such a thing, but neither her mother Yael, nor her grandfather Nechimiah had thought to tell her otherwise. Both had seemed content to foster the little girl's strange whimsies.
Once.
The weeks leading up to the discovery had left no room for either adult to participate in little Ramona Oliveira's flights of fancy. Something had happened, something bad, and whatever it was had clipped the wings of the adults and mired them in reality. Yael and Nechimiah had grown secretive, their conversations hushed but rambling. Sometimes they didn't go to bed until the morning sun was up. Sometimes they didn't go to bed at all. Nechimiah was better at hiding his worry than his daughter, who regarded every odd noise, every unannounced knock at the door with fear, as if some monster was coming for her.
Mona asked often about the thing that had made them so fretful, or at least she had tried, but Yael ignored her daughter's questions time and time again and always directed the conversation to the little girl's prodigal father. Just the mention of the man was enough to put Nechimiah in a sour mood.
"He is named Joao da Silva, Almonda," her mother would say in robotic tones, and without fail Nechimiah would snort his disdain. Though the little girl was the apple of his eye, he cared not for the gentile who had deflowered her mother and left her with child. But since That Silva Man wasn't there to collect his wrath, the old man lent it to Mona's accursed nickname instead.
"Feh! The girl is not a nut, Vavrum!"
Usually the conversation ended there, but there was something different about that hot, sticky night that lent an imagined chill to the air. It was during that time that her father became more human to her, and that left her miserable.
"He works the fields," Yael continued, nonplussed by her father's earlier interruption. Yael was not beautiful, but she was pretty, with almond shaped eyes so pale they resembled amber and her face was made of sharp, high features. But now she looked old, far older than her twenty one years. "He..you have sisters." Her fingers traced the baby soft curls at the nape of her young daughter's neck. "He is a good man."
Across the room, Nechimiah looked up from the small chunk of wood he was working with his knife. His eyes were cold, his mouth hard and straight. "Do not lie to her. A good man. Feh! He is a drunk and would bed a donkey if it winked an eye at him."
Mona, her head resting upon her mother's breast and her thumb in her mouth, just stared at her grandfather, but she could hear Yael's heart racing and could feel the her tense up. She heard her mutter something, barely above a whisper; "Please father. Not this. Not now."
There was no way that Nechimiah had heard her, but something changed. His wrinkled face softened and his wet eyes were apologetic; ashamed. Mona's chest rose and fell with the force of a sigh and Yael rubbed her back. Whatever her mother had meant to tell her, her resolve had weakened.
But the days that followed were suffocating. Nechimiah would return with more bad news, which lead to longer, louder conversations. At some point they had stopped trying to keep them from Mona. Monsters were after them, after all of them. Mona was terrified at first. She refused to go outside alone, checked the doors even after her mother and grandfather had deemed them barred, and more often than not she went to sleep with her head beneath the covers.
Nechimiah noticed before Yael, and tried to calm her fear with stories, but they were halfhearted affairs that left the little girl wanting. Then one night he pulled his granddaughter onto his knee, as he had done since Mona could remember remembering, and she looked into his face with her large eyes and placed two small hands against his cheeks.
"Kontar un maas??"
Nechimiah smiled when she asked for a story and, as he had done a million times before, he removed Mona's hands gently from his face and nodded his head. "A story you shall have. Have I told you of your Nonna??"
Mona knew little of the woman, only that that Ramona had been just as loved but had died before she was born, and that she was named after her. So immediately the idea of hearing more about her drew the child's interest, and she shook her head. The old man nodded once, took a deep breath and began the tale.
"When your Nonna was a child of only four her family was taken by the Black Death. She wandered the streets of Beja barefooted, filthy and starving. A wandering doctor discovered her and took her into his home, but upon finding her burning with fever, he and his wife sought only to make her inevitable passing a comfortable one.
Still they prayed over her, morning to evenfall, and eventually she awoke to discover the doctor looming over her. Terrified of the stranger, and though still weak with sickness, she kicked him in the shin. For the rest of his days he bore the scar that her foot had gifted him. Yet he and his wife had grown to love her and over time, once her grief was not so fresh, she saw in them not the family that had been taken from her, but the one that had chosen her.
The doctor and his wife fought over what to name the little girl, for in her sickness she had forgotten even that, and eventually they settled upon Ramona. Surprisingly Catholic for a pair of Sephardim, but they found it appropriate to name the girl after Raymond Nonnatus, the patron of children.
Ramona thrived and grew, but sickness hounded her. Some days she would not remember her new name, or would recall her old family with no recollection of the new. Sometimes she would be given to tempers that vexed her parents. She never doubted their love for her, even after they married her off to a skinny, big eared boy from Evora."
Mona looked to his ears and went wide-eyed at the connection she had suddenly made. "You, Nonno?"
Nechimiah laughed. "I should hope so. Granted, I did not have much to offer. I was still an apprentice then, but my parents knew her own, and the dowry helped a great deal. She was..." he paused and sighed, his eyes distant as if he were chasing a fond memory, one that lent the bittersweet tilt to his smile, "..she was something. A force of nature. We were both ten and four when we were married, younger than your mother was when she birthed you, and within a year we were blessed with two boys, and," a frown then, "within a year they died. I was devastated, but your grandmother..I believe grief had grown fearful of her. 'Life is for the living, not the dead.' The next year came and went and Yael was born at the end of it. She was our last, but to have one child is a blessing, Little Mona.
At ten and six, your mother became pregnant with you, and I was none too happy. Ramona though, she balked at convention at every turn, and would not use our faith to chastise the girl. I know now that she was right, but at the time..well, we will leave that for when you are older. Anyone who dared say anything untoward, your grandmother was quick to correct them. Hurricane Ramona," and he was laughing again. It had been so long since he had laughed so much. But it was there and gone too quickly. "A few months before your birth, a fever took her away from us. We thought you would be joining her, you were so small and pitiful. Your mother was terrified to name you because we were so sure that you would die."
Little Mona sat up as prim as any lady might and pulled her hair around to cover her face, to remind her grandfather just how painfully young she was. "I lived though."
"You did. You were by no means a fussy babe, but very serious at times. It only seemed wise to name you Ramona."
"Will I die one day?"
The question startled Nechimiah, but the girl was nothing if not precocious, and after he had placed a kiss upon her forehead, an answer arose that seemed, at the time, suitable. "Everything dies, sweet girl. But you do not have to worry about that for a very, very long time."
Later that night, long after her grandfather had retreated to bed and her mother was asleep at her side, Mona lay awake. Yael whimpered in her sleep, tossed and turned and marked her cheeks with tears, and instead of hiding beneath her blanket as she had so often done, Mona wrapped her arms tightly around her mother and held on for dear life. She wasn't seeking comfort. She was trying to provide it; to battle the beasts that so plagued her Yael's dreams. Even after Yael had settled, Mona fought sleep for as long as she could, her little face twisted with resolve.
Grandmother Ramona wouldn't have been afraid of monsters, this Ramona knew, and she would have no doubt protected her family at all costs. That night and for nights afterward the spitfire's namesake stared into the darkness, silently daring the beasts in the shadows to try something.