That came back to the bash prompt without showing me anything, so I thought I'd try it in a Perl script using the Unicode code.
<code>
$sth=$dbh->prepare(qq{SELECT x'c3a1', hex('á');});
$sth->execute();
while (@records=$sth->fetchrow_array()) {
$text=decode('UTF-8',$records[0]);
print qq{-->$text<--</p>};
}
</code>
That showed me:
-->á<--