Summary
Narrated from the first-person perspective by multiple narrators, Trash opens in the voice of one of the book’s protagonists, fourteen-year-old Raphael Fernández. Along with his friend Gardo, Raphael is a “dumpsite boy.” He has spent the past eleven years sifting through trash in a dump in a shantytown called Behala. He, like everyone else, hopes to find something valuable, but mostly what they find is “stupp,” their word for human excrement wrapped in paper, since most of the people in his impoverished city don’t have toilets or running water in the boxes they live in. The boys search for plastic, paper, metal, glass, cloth, rubber—anything they can either sell or reuse.
One day, Raphael’s and Gardo’s world turns upside down when Raphael finds a “special” bag of trash, meaning an unbroken bag from a rich area. Out of it falls a small leather bag covered in coffee grounds. Inside the bag is a wallet, a folded map, and a key. The fat wallet contains eleven hundred pesos—“good money” in a place where a chicken costs one hundred and eighty pesos. Raphael and Gardo celebrate as Raphael gives his friend 500 pesos. There is an ID card for a thirty-three-year-old houseboy named José Angelico. Also, two photos of a girl in a school uniform. The key has a yellow plastic tag and the number 101. Raphael pockets the items and returns to work to avoid drawing attention to himself.
After dark, five police officers arrive—a rare occurrence in a shantytown, where locals sort out their own problems. Thirty people are gathered around a fire where Raphael’s aunt is boiling rice and roasting a chicken purchased with some of Raphael’s found money. The police explain they are looking for a bag that was thrown away. There is something in it that will help them solve a crime. They offer to give ten thousand pesos to whoever finds it, with an additional thousand to every family in the town. Raphael doesn’t come forward, thinking there’s a chance they might drive off without the reward. He figures he can wait until morning and it will be no different; the reward might even go up. His aunt tells the police Raphael found something, but Raphael lies and says he found only a lady’s shoe. His aunt goes along with the lie.
One of the cops holds Raphael’s chin and asks his name and age. He offers to pay him and anyone else one hundred pesos a day to look for the bag. Raphael feigns cuteness and cooperation, as does Gardo, who asks what’s in the bag but receives no straight answer. When the police drive off down the pothole-filled road, Raphael’s aunt asks him privately why he lied about what he found. Raphael insists he didn’t find any bag, only the wallet and the money he gave her. She warns him against fooling around with the police. After eating, Gardo stays over at Raphael’s, a shelter built on an old pallet stacked above three other families. Before bed they discuss how the cop might have suspected something about Raphael. They decide it is too dangerous to keep the ID, map, and key with them. They agree to get their friend Rat (real name Jun-Jun) to hold the stuff for them.
Holding candles, Raphael and Gardo head off through the piles of trash to find Rat, a younger boy who has no family. They find him where he lives, at the bottom of a disused garbage conveyor belt machine. Rat sits on cardboard among piles of trash he is sorting through while rats scurry around. Raphael regrets not bringing the starving boy any food. Rat agrees to hide the items from the bag behind a brick in his home.
Raphael explains his plan to let the police pay everyone to hunt for it for a week before turning the bag in for the reward money. He promises to pay Rat fifty pesos. Raphael speculates about what door the key opens, and Rat is pleased to know what it’s for. After negotiating for a one-hundred peso fee, Rat tells Raphael that the key is for a luggage locker at Central Station, where Rat lived for nearly a year. He says the man from the ID picture has left something there.
The narrative shifts to Gardo’s first-person voice saying he and Raphael agreed to split the story because Raphael forgets some things. Raphael wants to go straight to the locker, but Gardo tempers his excitement by reminding him that the police will suspect something if he isn’t there in the morning to look for the bag with everyone else. At dawn, the police and an increasing number of official-looking people show up to watch as the entire town of Behala sorts through the trash mounds. Raphael and Gardo are sure to stay in the middle of the chaos so as to avoid suspicion. The more officials that show up, the more Gardo worries about the seriousness of what they’re involved in.
At nightfall, the cops pay out the trash sorters. Raphael looks smug about his plan, but his aunt confronts him and Gardo, asking if they are safe. She knows they went out the night before, and she just wants to know there is nothing in the house, which she is sure the police will tear apart if they suspect anything. She also encourages Raphael to turn it in for the money, but Raphael doesn’t believe the cops will actually pay him ten thousand; and if they did, he doesn’t believe the money would stay in his possession long. That night, Gardo stays awake, trying to reassure himself that what they are doing is smart.
Raphael narrates again. He and Gardo and Rat go to the station the next day. They walk by the train tracks, waiting for a train to hop on so they can travel to Central. Gardo is paranoid they are being watched. He also says he heard the police raised the reward to twenty thousand. Raphael insists they won’t actually pay the reward.
At the station, Rat talks to the station boys who live there. They sweep the platforms and beg. Rat has to pay them seventy pesos for permission to enter the station to reach the locker. Moving calmly, Rat leads the boys past the lockers, which have not been busted open, meaning the police don’t know about the key. Rat deftly opens 101, removing a brown envelope. The boys run once they have left the station. Inside the envelope is a stamped letter waiting to be posted. It is for Gabriel Olondriz, a prisoner at Colva Prison. The boys don’t understand the one-page letter, or the slip of paper attached to it, which simply shows a code-like list of numbers, dots, and slashes.
Analysis
The short opening chapters of Trash establish the extreme poverty in which Raphael and Gardo live. Both have lived and worked at the dump ever since they can remember, helping contribute to the family finances by sifting trash for valuables since they were old enough to crawl. Instead of attending school, they work every day to survive. Immersed in this reality since birth, the boys never question the systemic oppression that keeps them desperately poor. But the discovery of José Angelico’s wallet will broaden the boys’ understanding of the forces that have held them down.
Although he is still a child himself, Raphael needs any money and anything he finds to support his aunt and younger cousins. But despite his need, Raphael immediately divides up the eleven hundred pesos he finds, giving nearly half of it to his best friend, Gardo. With Raphael’s kind gesture, done without hesitation, Mulligan introduces the major theme of solidarity. Rather than hoard the money to himself, Raphael’s impulse is to share with others, knowing implicitly the value of mutual support, particularly among people whose well-being most of society disregards.
The theme of duplicity arises when the police arrive in Behala and Raphael doesn’t give them the bag they are searching for. Instead, Raphael feigns cuteness and innocence to cover for his aunt, who nearly exposes him. In this scene, Raphael’s cunning and street smarts are on display. He does not lie for the sake of lying: he understands that whatever he has must be of great value if the police have bothered to come to the dumpsite. It is in his best interests to keep it to himself to see how much the reward money goes up.
While Raphael and Gardo are desperately poor and live in homes made of old pallets and plastic sheeting, their lifestyles seem luxurious compared to Rat’s. An outsider in a community of outsiders, Rat lives alone at the bottom of a broken machine with no relatives or support network, surrounded by rats that make the other boys flinch. Gardo doesn’t trust him, but Raphael is less skeptical. Raphael’s trust bears out, because with outsider status comes outsider knowledge. Without Rat, the boys wouldn’t know the key found with the wallet is for one of the luggage lockers at the train station in town. In this way, Raphael’s implicit trust in Rat proves vital.
Rat continues to showcase his value when he demonstrates how to gain access to the train station, which a group of other street kids patrols as their begging territory. Rat once lived at the station himself, and so has a history of goodwill he can draw on when they need access. Having paid their way in, Rat quickly locates the locker and removes the letter to Gabriel Olondriz without arousing any suspicion. With the discovery of an intricate series of numbers and symbols, the boys find themselves deep within a mystery they have only just begun to untangle.
