24 years ago, Pedro Gonzales was born in Brazil. At the age of seven, he moves to Germany with his mother and his brothers to seek new opportunities. He was always a good boy in elementary school, but in high school things got complicated. “I turned bad.” Simply that. Sometimes evil takes over a teenage body with acne. Pedro found bad companies on his way that offered him very tempting prizes: large amounts of money. For a 17 year old it didn’t seem like a problem, it was an opportunity. And he started the bad luck.
“During those years I was not able to connect with God, temptations followed one another in my life. All the time. It was a constant, ”she says, recalling times that are undoubtedly dark for him. After a series of catastrophic misfortunes, Pedro committed more serious crimes than teenage sprees. The police wanted him for theft of a significant amount of money. “My first serious crime was robbing my neighbors house, and from there, I got into a horrible loop,” he confesses. For Pedro, a young boy barely 19 years old, the situation “made a ball” for him and he decided to escape from the robbers. He fled to various countries such as Belgium or Austria, until he was caught in Germany. “The truth is, I was very happy that they caught me. I knew I deserved it. I could not continue living poorly in that way, ”says the young man.
He escaped for four months and was captured in the city where he grew up in Germany (a beautiful place, with a huge lake, according to Pedro -he means Schwerin-). He remembers his arrest as the opportunity to travel in first class with his feet warm, and feel safe, even if it was only for a little while. Then he was waiting for a year and a half in jail.
The prison. Pedro spent a year and a half in jail while the outside world suffered from a global pandemic. The “coronita”, as he calls it in Spanish, was a vague rumor that he barely remembers. Prison is an aside, a mask that isolates, with its own rules and suffocating routines. But even though there are more rules than ever, the prison world is a jungle. Sometimes, Pedro shared a cell with other prisoners, those who were new, but most of the time he had his own room – like Virginia Woolf – in which he developed a whole inner world. “I didn’t feel afraid, although at first it was very difficult and I had many emotions to manage, but I took refuge in God, although not completely,” he says. Pedro had to deal with his problems of addiction to pornography to feel closer to his Faith and to be able to endure that year and a half behind bars. “Now I no longer consume that type of content, I don’t even masturbate, it is not a practice in accordance with my beliefs,” he says.
What is prison really like? “It’s like shouting loudly in the middle of the forest and the echo doesn’t shout back. That’s how I feel it”, analyzes Pedro. He compares prison to chess, his favorite board game, where you need a strategy to survive. Well, both of the same.
Pedro only got into two fights during his time in prison. One of them was a fight within his Bible reading group. “I don’t think that human beings are violent by nature, I think that they are corrupted by the environment,” he says, “that’s why I try to do things better now and avoid temptations.”
In addition to being separated from his family, Pedro already had a romantic relationship with his current wife. She visited him two or four times a week. She became pregnant by another man, although she decided not to have the baby. Love suffered injuries during that year and a half, but survived. After his time in jail, he had problems with his papers and they deported him from the country. He can’t go back to Germany for three years. He separated from his wife and his family for three years. He had to emigrate to Spain and start over, but he had Faith.
Jesusis King. His family is an evangelist. He does not believe in religions, only in Faith as an intimate act between the person and God. It was after leaving prison and arriving at his grandmother’s house in Pontevedra, when he recognized inside him a connection with a deeper entity. “He always read the Bible with my grandmother and with my cousin, he was very nice. At that time I didn’t do anything, I just smoked weed. I feel that God came to get me out of that bad path, ”he confesses excitedly. He prayed with his grandmother and his cousin in a sincere and honest way, which made him feel different. “I don’t want to open the door to the Devil again,” he says.
Pedro lived a stage in Portugal, in some shacks. He remembers that as a dark, turbulent memory: alcohol, many prostitutes and violence. He says that he found Satan in a man who constantly tried to tempt him, lure him into sin. He was running away. On that same trip, God appeared in an elderly woman who recited to her a Bible verse that spoke of temptation (“Blessed is he who resists temptation, for when he is approved, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him” James 1:12). “God appears in different characters, who are his image, to try to teach us things. Perhaps in this case it was the way he had to get me away from the block ”, he reflects.
The present: music, Guarana and wide coats. In Pontevedra with his granny, Pedro works in a Kebab, although for a short time. Being black and an ex-convict is not a good combination for job search and opportunities in this country, but he is a strong believer in social reintegration. One of his dreams is to dedicate himself to music (here his project), but without losing his vital goals. He would like people to connect with his ideas, leaving the rest aside. “The fact of being human is a business in itself, one has to work and polish his being”, says Pedro. He would like to relate his musical career to his spirituality, to create his art for God. He is interested in gospel and its variants.
As a child he did not like school because he felt that he was not accepted and no one would lend him a hand when he was in trouble. Now he hands it out to the rest: “come to my pharmacy, it’s not what you think – he jokes – for me, the only pill that works is Faith and it doesn’t cost any money”. He is now a calm and optimistic guy, although he claims to have always had that characteristic, just as he boasts of his sense of humor. He used that humor many times as a strategy to face problems and take life with philosophy.
A teetotaler by conviction, he always carries a Guaraná Antarctica in his hand. He loves loose coats and wearing helmets. On his face he has 444 tattooed, an angelic protection number and the phrase “Jesus King”, near his eyes, the mirror of the soul. He is going to be a dad. He believes that from a girl, he has a gut feeling. After remembering his whole story, he shares a verse from the Bible on his networks: 28. “Then, Pedro replied, Lord, save me!!
31. Immediately Jesus, stretching out his hand, seized him, and said to him: O man of little faith! Why did you hesitate?” Matthew 14:28,31