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I didn't see him again for over a year and soon forgot about him. Though Bessada is a village of only about 3,000 people, my daily habits kept me on a tight circuit. So did my status as an honored guest. I mixed mainly with the chiefs and functionaries and missionaries, the people who controlled things, or tried to, in this nation of civil wars, famine and constant strikes. Because I'm American, I was included in men's meetings where women kneeled to serve us tea. I wore long skirts, avoided the bars that line the road and the dance parties that follow church each Sunday. Nights, I lit my kerosene lamp and wrote in my journal or read old magazines, listening to the drumming in the distance. When I wanted to carouse, I flagged down a truck and went to stay with other Peace Corps volunteers in the city of Sarh, 100 rugged kilometers away.

By my second year, I'd had enough quiet evenings. One Sunday afternoon, I asked Zam-Zam, my best friend and the wife of the village doctor, to take me to a pari-vente. These are elaborate all-day fund-raising parties for which women prepare vats of billi-billi, a fermented millet beer, import cases of warm Gala beer and soda and sell the drinks at inflated prices. In exchange, participants get free food -- delicacies like rice and spicy fish meatballs called kanda -- and drumming and dancing under the mango trees.

People marveled to see me there. A village chief bought me a calabash of billi-billi. It was warm and foamy, bittersweet and heavy as a malted milkshake. Zam-Zam made them give me a glass -- I was a nassara (European) after all, and nassaras don't drink from calabashes -- and then we sat down on a straw mat with other women. Settling in, I looked up at the dancers and then my heart jolted.

Yamingue was directly in front of me. He was dancing, swaying slowly to a Zairian song, smiling slightly, holding his arms out to me. To me.

He extended his hands. I stared and the year of prim skirts and careful acquaintances ripped away. Yamingue, if only you knew who I really am. Back in the cities of America, I am a buccaneer girl who has never denied herself a beautiful man. I splash in their pools of sweat and swing from their limbs. I tear off their shirts in nightclubs and dare them to out-dance me. You have no idea, sultry boy, what you're calling forth.

"Get out of here!" a chief's wife scolded him away from me. "Little vaut-rien, little good-for-nothing." He retreated a few steps, back to his friends, who were watching me. No one in Bessada had ever flirted with me, no one had ever treated me as anything but a missionary, a colleague, a rich outsider with ghostly skin. Yamingue held out his arms to me again, laughing now. Was it mockery or invitation? A young girl with high breasts and tight braids entered his embrace. The circle closed and he was gone to me.

Next page | I entreated Yamingue to come after dark