A person's aura is a mysterious thing.
Indescribable, intangible, yet it exists so genuinely.
Mrs. Sakai remembers.
For her fifteenth birthday, she wanted a beautiful ballroom dress, the kind with sleeves adorned with blue velvet floral embroidery and a pearl brooch, handmade.
Even as a little girl, Mrs. Cruz hoped to make a stunning entrance at her first high school dance with it.
A custom-made dress from a private tailor like this one cost over fifty thousand pesetas, equivalent to half a month's salary for a working-class person.
Such luxury clothing, as a birthday gift for a girl student, might seem overly extravagant. Nonetheless, her father was a Mercedes-Benz dealer in the Les Corts District of Barcelona, so given the family income, this little wish wasn't too excessive.
She had been anticipating it for months, hinting to her mother for ages, yet on her birthday, she only received a novel by Margaret, "Gone with the Wind," worth less than a hundred pesetas.
