Summary
All three boys narrate together, explaining that All Souls’ Day is the biggest festival of the year—bigger than Christmas and Easter combined. People light millions of candles, ghosts rise to walk around, and people go to visit them. They get out of the taxi and push through the crowds. It is a festival atmosphere, and people are buying candles to bring to their loved ones’ graves. The boys figure they ought to look for the family grave of the Angelicos. After a day wasted looking on the rich side of the cemetery, they see “the brightest light”—the glow of candles coming from the other side of the wall, where the poor are buried and their relatives have come with candles after work.
They move through the poor graveyard, where people live in shanties behind the grave boxes. Some boxes have been broken open. Raphael explains that the graves are rented for five years at a time, and if the rent stops, the grave landlords break the boxes open with a sledgehammer and throw the corpses on a pile. They find B24/8, coordinates for José’s wife, son, and daughter. They are saddened to know Pia is also dead, and that José Angelico had no family left in the end. They sit and discuss whether to break open one of the graves, meanwhile doubting that José Angelico would hide the money with a dead family member.
A little girl asks what they are looking for. The boys look up. She is sitting on graves, higher than them. She says she is waiting for her father, José Angelico. Her name is Pia Dante. She says she doesn’t know where she lives. She has been waiting for her father to come here for a week now. They feel like they’re talking to a ghost, but Pia is alive. She is weak and small, though. They decide to take her to eat something with the last of their cash. Rat, who knows starvation personally, feeds her slowly, like she is a baby. They rent her a room in the back of the eating house for a night. Rat puts her to bed and promises to come back for her. He is crying.
The boys buy brandy and drink it for courage. They get an iron spike and rope from the boat area where the graveyard shanty town meets the shoreline. Rat finds a rope and a plastic sheet. They return to Pia’s grave. Everyone has left the graveyard because of the winds and the candles have blown out. They crack open the grave with the spike and pull out a new white coffin. They feel the eyes of the dead upon them, watching from all around. They open the coffin and it is full of cash. To them, it looks like food and drink, and getting out of the city forever.
Jun narrates—no longer Rat. He is Jun-Jun. He says the last part of the plan is his idea. They know that there is no way they’ll be able to keep the money for long, so they pile the cash into the two plastic sheets and tie them up with ropes to carry on their backs. They climb a wall and go pick up Pia, who is so sleepy Rat carries her on his back. They find trash boys scavenging with a cart and pay them to take them as passengers. They even wave at a police car they pass, having blended in with the trash boys. Rat breaks in to the Mission School again and puts a stack of cash on Father Juilliard’s desk. Rat sees fresh school uniforms and backpacks that have been donated, so he takes them for everyone to change into. They move the cash into the backpacks.
They take the bundles of money out of the paper bands so the bills are loose. They go to Rat’s old home, the broken belt crane that sticks out into the sky. Typhoon Terese’s winds are racing in from south China. They walk to the top of belt and release handfuls of cash into the wind, letting it blow over the Behala dumpsite. The boys let something like five and a half million dollars go, finding another letter from José Angelico at the bottom of a bag. They keep it and walk down to catch a train.
The book’s final chapter is narrated by Raphael, Gardo, Jun, and Pia together. They thank Father Juilliard, Olivia, Grace, and Mr. Gonz for helping tell the story. They get on the train, blending in with other kids dressed in uniforms on their way to school. Instead of books, their backpacks are stuffed with cash. It is a long train ride to Sampalo, and it takes all night to reach the ferry port. Another nine hours on a boat and they cross the sea. They take a cycle rickshaw and then another small boat across a jetty until they get to a paradise where the water is like turquoise. They say they have since bought boats and have learned to fish. They can tell the truth, for the lying is finished. They will fish forever and live happy lives. They say: “That is our plan, and nothing will stop us.”
An appendix follows. It is the letter from José Angelico that came with the money. José Angelico acknowledges he is either dead or soon to die. He appeals to the reader of the letter to make Pia safe and to help her. He tells Pia that he wants her to know that Gabriel set a fire inside him from a young age when he told him about Zapanta’s crimes. The money he stole meant other countries wouldn’t donate to their country and help the poor. He explains that he got impatient, but he served the man many years before he seized the opportunity.
José Angelico explains that Zapanta trusted only cash because of business deals that went wrong. It took years for José Angelico to gain the man’s trust, but he did so through dutiful service. The vice-president kept his money in a vault and moved it upstairs to a smaller safe with a key he entrusted to José Angelico. He kept six million in the vault because it fit tidily on the shelves. Excess went to the bank or was spent. Zapanta assumed the key couldn’t be copied if it never left the premises, but José Angelico drew a picture of it and got a locksmith to recreate it. He tested it and made modifications when it didn’t quite match.
José Angelico says he moved the money out in the fridge while Zapanta was in Europe for three months on vacation and the house was being renovated. José Angelico tampered with the fridge and then replaced it with his own money so the expense wouldn’t have to be cleared by Zapanta. The other people who worked in the house trusted him—he had worked there eight years by then. He moved the money in trash bags on garbage day, then sailed out of the gate without being searched because he was trusted. He says to whoever has found the money that it belongs to the poor. He tells his daughter they will meet again, but in the brightest light. He ends with the statement: “It is accomplished.”
Analysis
The theme of poverty arises once again when the boys realize the cemetery is divided into a rich side and a poor side. The wall that separates the sections is a symbol of how the injustices and humiliations perpetuated by wealth inequality continue well into the afterlife. While rich people have the luxury of buying grave plots to bury loved ones, the poor rent coffin-sized concrete boxes stacked in space-saving arrangements. The owners of the graves will throw the corpses in a pile if the rent stops coming in, a desecration that rivals the prejudice poor members of society are confronted with while alive.
In an instance of situational irony, the boys meet Pia Dante at a crucial moment in the story. Unsure whether José Angelico would really hide the money with the body of one of his dead family members, the boys know that if Pia Dante is alive, the money must be hidden in her coffin. However, their concern for the confused and emaciated girl takes precedent over their desire to put the mystery to rest: before breaking open the grave, the boys show their compassionate nature by bringing Pia Dante back to health. Once again, Rat’s experience on the streets proves invaluable, as he knows from starving himself that it would be a shock to the girl’s system if she ate too much too quickly.
Feeling as though they are being watched over by the souls who have risen on All Souls’ Day, the boys crack open Pia Dante’s grave and find a coffin stuffed with six million dollars. Knowing the money will not stay with them long, they put the last part of their plan into action: sharing it out. In a gesture that shows their sustained solidarity with other poor people, the boys keep just enough money to take care of Pia and buy themselves fishing boats so they can set up new lives in Sampalo. The rest they let fly into the wind above Behala, leaving their community of waste pickers to discover five and a half million dollars when they begin the day.
Although the cryptic tone of the boys’ narration has suggested throughout the novel that they ran into trouble, they manage to escape from the police in the end. In another act of cunning, the boys blend in with the schoolchildren by donning uniforms found at the Mission School. They sneak out of the city and travel to Sampalo, where new lives in paradise await them. Ultimately, cooperation with each other allows them to escape the poverty and systemic oppression of Behala.
The novel ends with the letter the boys included in the pile of money José Angelico left in the coffin. The mystery of how José Angelico took so much money without being caught is explained through a years-long effort to build trust with Zapanta and other staff. A steadfast determination to achieve his ambition and right the wrong Gabriel told him about inspired José Angelico to carry out a great and moral act of duplicity.
With the letter, Mulligan also emphasizes José Angelico’s connection to Jesus Christ. Like Christ, Angelico was thirty-three when he died. He also sees his own death as a sacrifice in service of countless others who need to be saved. In carrying out the last stage of José Angelico’s plan to redistribute the stolen money among the poor, the boys act as José Angelico’s apostles. It is significant that José Angelico ends his letter with the words “It is accomplished”—the same phrase Christ is said to have uttered on the cross.
