An Invisible Fate

It was as if some invisible fate had designed that very day. The date was right, and so was the hour.

It was a long, tedious process — a mother and daughter, strangers to the place, wandering through the sprawling buildings of the Le Havre Conservatory of Music and Dance in search of Pleyel Hall. But Dolores and her mother somehow sensed, without a word between them, that this would be the last stop on their itinerary, and they found the concert hall without complaint.

When they arrived at Pleyel Hall, the crowd was thick not only with students but with outsiders as well.

According to the usher, anyone who wished to sit and enjoy the performance properly would need a ticket.

Since Dolores and her mother had none, they had to resort to a small trick of their own, slipping in through a side door to stand at the back.

Had her father known, he would have been horrified, sputtering that it was behavior unbefitting the dignity of nobility.

Inside, the orchestra was already deep into a quintet.

They said it was a student recital, but the scale is enormous. What an extraordinary place.

Her mother marveled, but Dolores found it strange.

The members of the orchestra kept shifting formations as the performance went on, yet the one person who should have been at its center was nowhere to be seen. Looking closely, she noticed that the figures in formal dress standing behind the stage wore oddly dark expressions.

Dolores happened to lift her head. A young man stood on the second floor, looking down.

His hair, now sleekly swept back, was reason enough — but his features had changed so drastically that she nearly failed to recognize him at first.

What let her know it was him were those green eyes gazing downward, seemingly without a care in the world.

His hands were empty, no violin among them, and he watched the stage like any other spectator.

"Dolores?"

"……Give me a moment, Mother."

Dolores rose and left her mother behind. Her feet simply moved. Looking back, she could not claim that any thought had driven the action.

The spot on the second floor, once she reached it, looked nothing like it had from below.

Only moments ago Xavier had been alone, but now other young men had gathered around him in a loose ring, pressing in on him.

"Are you out of your mind? Is something wrong with your head?"

The voice carried not so much mockery as open, naked contempt. Then the accusations came pouring down — you made a spectacle of yourself because classes bored you, crushed everyone else's motivation, and now you refuse to graduate? — is life that easy for you? It was ugly, and it was serious.

Yet unlike the impassioned young men swarming him, Xavier was perfectly composed, without a flicker of tension. His face said he might not even be listening.

That indifference, no doubt, fanned their fury further, until one of the young men could bear it no longer and advanced on him as if to drag him out by force.

"The way you carry on — there's a limit to how much we can overlook it as a matter of character."

In that instant Xavier shoved the man away roughly and scowled.

"Don't touch me."

His voice was cold, and cracked at the edges.

A young man who had been glaring from half a step back, arms crossed, reproached him.

"Don't you think you've gone too far, even by your standards? Fine, you don't respect the professors — but is this your own private performance? Do you think the world exists for you alone? What's your reason? If you're going to behave like this, shouldn't you at least show some will to make us understand?"

Xavier tilted his head, a beat too late.

"Understand?"

The corner of his mouth lifted, ever so slightly.

"Why? Me — toward you?"

Dolores's step faltered, pure instinct. It was a coarse tone she had never once expected from his mouth.

"Doesn't it tire you, flying into such a rage over trivia?"

The moment the sound of her shoes cut off happened to fall on Xavier's final syllable, and the overlap produced a strange, unnatural silence.

Xavier's gaze turned slowly toward her.

There was not a trace of warmth in it. No — it had always been that kind of gaze. The look of a boy for whom the violin breathing alive in his arms was a given, and therefore dull.

But she had believed there was a genuine liveliness inside that boredom, and what she glimpsed now was an emptiness she had no words for…… it was simply that kind of feeling, hard to describe.

"We're fetching a professor."

"You'd better pick a good one."

Xavier had the last sardonic word, and the young men departed one by one, talking as though they were seven-year-old children running off to tattle to their parents.

"You'll see."

Xavier spared them not a glance; instead he rubbed his ear, as though something about it bothered him.

Then he stopped, his head still half-turned, and stared at her with an expression of incomprehension. The corner of his mouth slowly curved.

"Of all places, I run into you here. Dolores."

What series of events had driven him into that confrontation just now, she, the last to arrive and a complete outsider, could not say.

But this much was certain: it had been an easy situation for no one. Not for the young men who had brushed past her in their anger, not for Xavier, who stood on the brink of being reported to the professors, and not for herself either — the girl who had just met again the boy she had once longed for, buried for years beneath fantasy.

Before they had exchanged a single word, Dolores understood: the Xavier in her memory and the Xavier standing before her were entirely different people.

If the past three years had handed her hope and despair in turns and sunk her into a melancholy reality, she could only guess that his three years had changed him by some entirely different means.

One's teens were, after all, the age of wind and tempest. It was a time when such things could happen.

She had no idea what to say with her first word.

The formulaic greeting — have you been well? — came to mind, but it struck her as the very essence of hypocrisy. Instead, she spoke honestly.

"I came to see your graduation recital."

"Too bad for you, then."

"Everyone seems to be waiting for you……. Shouldn't you be getting ready?"

Dolores gazed quietly at the unanswering Xavier, then moved softly to stand beside him, leaning against the railing. Below, the grand orchestral performance was receiving round after round of applause.

"You still play?"

It was Xavier who asked, having let her question fall unanswered.

The words were cut off at both ends, but somehow Dolores knew what he meant.

"Yes."

"You held out a long time."

"I didn't hold out. I love ballet. I got into Le Havre too. I couldn't enroll, but we almost became classmates."

"……Why not?"

Dolores did her best to sound as though it meant nothing.

"It's far away, and there are circumstances at home."

"Then why come all this way?"

"Since it was a place I could never attend anyway…… my mother thought I should at least see it once, for the first and last time. She seems to believe that will ease my lingering regrets. Why are you here?"

"I'm a student. Still because of your father?"

Dolores, who had assumed she would meet his follow-up questions with composure — who had told herself she could — wavered for an instant.

Had they ever spoken of her father? A hazy memory flickered past, but it still came as a shock. She had been certain Xavier would have forgotten every trace of her.

"You have a good memory."

"Without at least this much of one, you can't memorize sheet music."

"……Well, it's not unrelated. Things have grown difficult for the family, but my father wants us all together. I have to look after Pablo."

"Count of Artois' daughter', is it? ……I don't know how dire your straits are, but you're a Count's daughter in name, at least. It's a shame. For you, this could well have been a glorious opportunity."

Dolores burst out laughing before she could help it.

"You never used to talk like that."

"However lacking I was in sense, I never denied objective fact."

"……You speak well of the place you belong one moment and ill of it the next, and in the end it's all however you happen to feel, so I don't know how to interpret you. Are you trying to confuse me? If it's such a glorious place, why won't you give your graduation recital? Don't you have to perform it in order to graduate?"

Xavier only gave a faint smile and let his gaze drift down to the railing below.

She was not hurt. This was a young man who had not so much as fluttered an eyelid at the desperate pleas — or the fury — of fellow students with whom he must surely have breathed the same air and sat in the same classes. He owed no answer to a girl he was meeting after years apart.

Because she knew, she did not pester him sordidly for reasons. And yet one corner of her chest felt hollowed out, achingly empty.

The girl she had been had believed, all this time, that when she met Xavier again, he could never, ever be like this.

Dolores turned her eyes downward. At the edge of the stage, standing just inside the side door, her mother was absorbed in the orchestra, her face bright with delight.

In the past — when they had been respectable nobility. No, Dolores could no longer tell whether that era had been her father's exaggeration or not; but in any case, back when people still spoke the name "Artois" with respect, her mother had loved music like this, she said.

"My mother has sacrificed so much her whole life. I think she has the right to hear music done properly."

"It's an orchestra led by seniors who fancy themselves talented and lord it over everyone. Don't underestimate them too much."

"You know perfectly well what I'm saying. We came to see your graduation recital."

"You put far too much meaning on…… a mere student's recital."

"Your playing meant something. At least to me."

Dolores looked Xavier straight in the eye.

"I don't know what you're thinking. ……Honestly, I don't understand you either. We're hardly close, so I suppose it's only natural. But whether or not you intend to graduate, my mother and I have come to Le Havre's graduation recital for the first and last time, so I'd like today not to be ruined. That's why I'm telling you this as a paying patron. Go down there and show them. You have to graduate eventually anyway."

"Shouldn't you be asking me first whether I even want a diploma from an academy like this?"

Xavier, chin propped stiffly on his hand, tossed out a meaningless jest with practiced ease.