In the countryside in those parts, the weather was warm and people, especially young people, liked to take off their clothes and dance naked together, innocent as children. And the thing about it was, the people in those parts had bodies like children. Their skin was smooth, unmarked like a baby's, and usually just very lightly tanned. But occasionally you came across a group of people whose skin was bright orange or even red like a lobster. These people with lobster-red skin didn't seem sunburned, however. Certain groups of people in those parts just seemed to have naturally red skin.
What really made these naked people seem so innocent, though, was that they had no body hair and seemed to have no genitals. Both men and women had a very definite pubic mound, which I found my attention gravitating towards. But there was no pubic hair, and no genitals to be seen. It is possible that these people shaved their pubic region, but it seemed more likely that hair simply didn't grow there. And in the case of the men, one really had to wonder where they hid their genitals. Or maybe they really didn't have any at all. They seemed very asexual people in those parts.
When they did wear clothes, their clothes were often extremely colorful, although usually not very shapely. The people in those parts liked bright colors a whole lot, although their designs were mostly not very sophisticated. I was invited into the dining room of one small house where the whole interior was red -- and all the same shade of red, at that. The red of the tablecloth exactly matched the red walls, so that if you didn't look closely you might not notice where the table ended and the wall began. And both the red table cloth and the red walls were covered with a repetitive blue pattern, large and fairly crude, apparently intended to represent tendrils and leaves of plants. What the people living in that house had done was to take the same cloth and use it both to cover the walls and to cover the table. As a design for wallpaper, it might have been acceptable, although intrusive. But as a tablecloth it was quite strange.
This dining room had a large picture window, and the scene that showed through the window had no red at all -- just a pink house in the distance. Otherwise, what was outside the window was very green: a large, unbroken expanse of green grass, and a green bush that was a slightly darker shade than the grass. There were a few small blue and yellow flowers, and three trees covered over with white blossoms, but other than that the overall impression through the window was completely green. A little bit of sky was visible at the top of the window, and that wasn't green, of course. In fact, the sky was a surprisingly dark blue, with a color not all that much different from the blue design on the wallpaper and table cloth inside.
It was as if the people who lived in that house had said, "We know that the world outside is very green, and that's all well and good. But what's inside is our realm, and we like things red."
In another house, a room being used for an artist's studio was painted in a dark brownish orange. The carpet, the walls, the cloth over a table, even a dresser and a grandfather clock were all the same muddy orange color. The funny thing was, though, that there were numerous paintings in the room, stacked against the walls and hanging up, and these paintings didn't go together with the dark orange color of the walls and carpet at all. Mostly the colors in the paintings were light pastel. The only exception was one oil painting showing a scene at the beach. The three figures in this painting had skin exactly matching the orange-brown color of the studio.
I think that the artist who worked in this studio must have had a very powerful imagination to be able to paint pastels like that while surrounded by so much sombre orange.
The women in those parts wore colorful clothes, but were mostly not very beautiful, especially the ones in their thirties and forties. (I never saw any older than that.) You almost never encountered one smiling. At best, you might see a woman whose face showed a tranquil repose, but more often the expressions were either on the grim side or sometimes just a vacant stare.
One woman in particular was especially remarkable because of the coloration of her face. She was in her early forties, I suppose. Her blue-black hair was piled on top of her head in a bun, giving her a typical French bourgeois look. A narrow green streak ran exactly down the center line of her forehead and continued down to the tip of her nose. The left side of her face was of a fairly ordinary flesh color, but the right side had a noticeably yellow tinge, giving a suggestion of jaundice. She wore red lipstick, somewhat in contrast to the bourgeois look of the hair, but her lips were completely unsmiling. She made no response to my greeting, but instead continued to stare past me at some point in the distance. Although her expression was typical of many of the women in those parts, I couldn't help but think that it represented some deep cynicism and bitterness. This woman, I felt, had in her youth had a passionate dream that had resulted in intense disappointment. Now she looked at the whole world with the anger of a woman who has been cheated.
It was a rather pleasant place to travel through. These people were very picturesque in their unsophisticated clothes and their houses decorated with bold primary colors. They seemed charmingly simple. It was difficult to imagine that they could have any sort of complex inner life or that their relationships with each other could be very complex.
When one looked closely, though, these people did not seem to be on the whole very happy. Even the younger ones dancing outdoors naked had a serious look on their faces.