Casimir Antoine’s Jazzy Cancun Vacation

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I met Casimir on a trip to Cancun. He was trying to forget about his wife back in New York, and I was taking my first scuba diving lesson in a cenote near Tulum. I had carried a heavy tank under an unforgiving sun and stopped at the side of a dusty road hemmed in by a few white rocks. The dive site was marked only by a small red card nailed to a tree.

On my very first descent my French dive master held my hand like a child. Ten feet into the clear green water I shot back up, terrified. “What are you doing,” he blurted out. “That was just ten feet. Come on, fifteen more to go,” he reprimanded.

What I saw below was frightening.

I fearfully plunged again, this time ignoring the ominous deep dark crevasses surrounding me, grabbing on a flat slab of rock where a wide-eyed girl and her mother were already waiting in full scuba gear. We rested for a minute, regularized our breathing, and listened to our bubbles. The dive master signaled for me to control my breathing.

Scanning the shallows, we spotted swaying brown grasses, lethargic fishes, and more flat rocks strewn about the bottom. The dive master gave me the okay sign, and reached over to adjust the buoyancy of my orange jacket. Everything seemed fine and my mind was settling and accepting my first time completely under water.

As I mustered enough courage to look through the beams of smoky sunlight, I couldn’t help remembering that in these watery holes called cenotes., the Mayans had sacrificed virgins whose throats were slit with stone blades, and I almost expected to look down to see a partial skull or a jade handle sticking out of the silt. As we all looked about, the mother touched my forearm and pointed behind me where two black oblong holes loomed like giant eyes. She then pointed to a copper plaque with some writing on it. I shrugged my shoulders because I couldn’t read it, but it seemed to warn of some kind of danger. I couldn’t help thinking how the sensation of diving in a cenote was like being in an old cavernous cathedral where columns of light streamed down from stained glass windows. In the cenote depths, the viscosity of the water and the beams of sunlight played the same games with my imagination, although we were actually in a huge bowl of filtered sea water that was only some sixty feet in diameter. Those holes we saw were the openings of tunnels that led to the sea more than a mile away.

A sudden splash disturbed us. Immediately, the dive master looked up and jerked the little girl violently by her waist just as a chunk of rock came straight down and slammed into the spot where she had been leaning her eleven-year-old body, raising a cloud of sediment that blinded all of us. We rushed up. Someone had playfully dislodged a stone from the surface, just to see if it would move, then pushed it, totally oblivious to the possibility that divers could be down below. That person was Casimir Antoine.

After coming close to being pummeled by the stocky dive master who cursed him out in French and Spanish, Casimir walked off in shock and vomited next to his rented jeep. That was his only reaction to the odious outburst of the Frenchman. Mother and daughter stood some distance away, towels around their shoulders, drinking from two straws stuck in a tiny can of pineapple juice. I was sitting by a tree on a smooth round rock, nursing a shin that had a minor scratch, wondering if we were going to go back in the water. The shadows were cool.

“We’ll wait a while,” said the Frenchman, “until that imbecile goes away,” short muscular legs flexing as he squats to gather weight belts, body turning away. Casimir humbly slipped on some pants, a lavender T-shirt, and with a pathetic “I’m s-sorry,” he drove away, leaving behind a...