In examining current recollections about the Transición, it is crucial to understand, first, how memories are constructed and transmitted, and second, how they are embodied, forging deep connections between personal and collective experiences. One of the main criticisms of the political transition, as I show in the previous chapter, concerns the lack of discussion about the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the violence that continued after its end. The so-called ‘peaceful’ years over which Franco's dictatorship presided were not the result of consensus or reconciliation. As historians have documented, Franco ruled over a divided society in which the regime's opponents suffered death, incarceration, torture, or exile. Even those who did not actively resist the regime but belonged to the losing side of the war lived in constant fear of retaliation. In Spain, the end of the dictatorship did not bring a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but a consensus politics that chose amnesia (and silence) in matters of its past. As Paloma Aguilar has demonstrated, this deliberate act of forgetting was rooted in fear, successfully instilled in the population by the Franco dictatorship, about the possibility of another war. In other words, the silence that followed Franco's death in 1975 had more to do with the war that had happened almost forty years earlier than with the dictatorship (Aguilar 2002: 26–27). Critical readings of Spanish culture and fictional recreations of this period have taken note of this silence, but this ‘pacto de silencio’ has only been challenged publicly since 2000 (Alonso and Muro: 5). The civic work done by the grandchildren of the victims of the war and the dictatorship, demanding moral and economic compensation, has become visible to the public.