On his calf, I saw the knot of a second, smaller calf: he’d torn his Achilles tendon and the muscle had climbed, retracted. He kept crying as he rolled onto his back, beneath the porch ceiling. His elbow was bleeding, his arm twisted.

I looked inside the house: there were vivid shadows and the smell of pine resin. The yard was well-kept, but the grass had yellowed and coarsened in the sun. Small birds chirping, the quiet where tragedies occur, though this wasn’t a tragedy.

I ran to the first-floor bathroom to look for a packet of analgesic, then into the kitchen for a glass of water. I returned to find my father’s bald head resting on an outdoor cushion. Barbara knelt beside him, stroking his forehead.

We tried to get him to eat a little of the pizza we’d left on the car roof; the car door still hung open, the key in the ignition.

Instead, he wanted an antacid, and as he wiped the sweat off his forehead with his knuckles, he pleaded: “Don’t call Mom. Just let me rest here a moment.”

The day of the wedding, I told Barbara it was her zeal, her zeal while eating her pizza, that tore my father’s ligaments.

According to my therapist, a worn-out institution like marriage can still represent a rupture in a person’s life. As I stopped feeling embarrassed by the idea that I was getting married, certain emotions of mine began to thaw. But freezing over had been my means of survival—now what?

It was pretty much the same for Barbara. So, in one of our honeymoon spots in Cambodia, we found ourselves sleeping in a raised bungalow over a green river, and we realized we were terrified of being together. In that remote and utter calm, we experienced a sense of horror we’d never encountered before: it was born from our harmony, perfectly formed and articulated, in sensations hitting us in the head and gut, a feeling of imminent danger, a weakness in the limbs.

It hit us one afternoon while we were swimming a couple of meters from the stilt house after a downpour. We were treading the water, heads raised, the ripples revealing a layer of clear water over a layer of green; on the opposite bank, the foliage murky and impenetrable and swallowing a windowless hut.

We’d reached this bend in the river the day before, coming by motorized gondola. The boatman picked us up at an open market under a high bridge, where a bus had dropped us off. We’d traveled for hours on a road riddled with potholes, the air heavy, past sugar palms, racks filled with bottles of gas, schoolchildren in uniform walking single file along the shoulder. The road had been mesmerizing, and we found the seclusion of this resort unsettling.