Trash

All three of the boys narrate the chapter. As they draw closer to the graveyard, the taxi slows because of the immense crowds. Rat says he believes in ghosts and that on Sampalo, the ghosts of drowned sailors walk out of the ocean and cry on their old doorsteps. They get out and walk slowly with the crowd.

Raphael says he cleaned the blood off his arms—sustained during the jump to the children’s building—and Gardo says they need to make a plan. They wonder if “where we lay” could mean the family grave and decide to look for it.

Rat feels bad because they are now looking for letters, and he can’t read. Around them, parties are starting, and he wonders how they will find a particular grave in such an immense cemetery. There is an office with lists of names. After waiting in line for three hours, Raphael pays a guard to give him the location of the grave of “Mrs. Angelico,” who he claims he is paying his respects to. They walk up a hill, looking for “B24/8,” the location the guard gives them. No one notices them, however: “We were amongst wealthy people in very fancy clothes, and we felt even greyer and dirtier, but there was nothing for it, and still nobody was worrying about us—no one seemed to see us, like we were the ghosts” (197).