Night of the Toads

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I’d never have remembered the girl if Ricardo Vega had been another man. He wasn’t. He was ‘Rey’ Vega to anyone who claimed to know him well-El Rey, the King.

We don’t admit it, but we consider a successful man a better man. A prince of success, an inevitable winner. Maybe it’s only that we never lost our need for princes, and if we don’t have an aristocracy, we make one. An aristocracy is comforting. It takes us off the hook-we never really had a chance to make it big. At the same time of course, since an aristocracy of success isn’t really closed to us, we can all dream. A contradiction, sure, but logic has never bothered people’s attitudes much.

The trouble is that the successful man himself has a way of coming to believe he is better. From there it’s an almost automatic step to believing he was always better-born better, a different breed of man. A man who should have rights and privileges ordinary men don’t have. A special man, superior, a king. That was Vega. I didn’t know him well enough to call him Rey, and he made me remember the girl.

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