IF ONLY I COULD PLUNGE this minute into the pool I loved at Bath. Scorch me, water! Wash away my self-recriminations. On the shortcut to the YMCA I pass tea shops, chemists, fashion outlets full of asymmetrical hems, the window of the store called Archambault, advertising musical recordings—but wait. I see through the glass a clerk with half his head shaved. He looks slightly familiar and I pop in, ask him about the fisherman’s son who sang a winter storm all last night in the tent.

“Who?”

“The famous Quebec singer.”

“Ben là!” The clerk has piled what remains of his hair into a luxuriant top-knot. “There are a lot of well-known singers from Quebec.”

“This one is—he’s beloved.”

“Do you mean Leonard Cohen?”

“I’d remember the name if I heard it again….”

“Rufus Wainwright?”

“No—the name is French.”

“Jacques Brel? Charles Aznavour?”

“I mean he’s from Quebec!”

“But you said French. Brel is Belgian. Aznavour was Armenian but he was born in France….”

“I mean he sings in French.”

“Is that all you can tell me?”

“He is a fisherman’s son. He sings a song about how this country is not a country, it is wintertime. He’s old, but not as old as Voltaire….”

“Then he is Gilles Vigneault. But you must not make this his only song you know. I can let you hear others.”

The clerk speaks of the fisherman’s son as if he’s a king.

How have descendants of Quebec fishermen, whose livelihoods I smashed in the name of England, come to be paramount in this land today? No matter where I search in Montreal for remnants of British conquest I find little. It makes no logical sense.

“Vigneault is the soul of Quebec.” The clerk looks even more familiar if I imagine him shorn of his radical hair. He hands me some headphones. Have I seen him before? His tattoo—a word, I see, though I can’t decipher it—is it Arabic? “You’re wrong about him being old.”

“I heard—”

“Yes, he is nearly ninety but has never become old. Do you know why he became a socialist and a poet?”

“I haven’t—”

“Vigneault was going to university. He was—how old are you? Late twenties? Early thirties? He was a few years younger than you. He went down to Quebec City from Natashquan and saw cod for sale, fifty cents a pound. You know how much his father was getting for those fish back home? One cent a pound. Okay, he said, maybe the package and the label cost seven cents…but who’s getting the rest?”

“Is this in any of his songs? I wouldn’t mind hearing one if—”

“It’s in all his songs. Cod made Vigneault a socialist. Listen.” And with that, the clerk presses a button and—headphones are amazing! My ears fill with sound.

—