"For generations and generations," Italo Calvino observes in the foreword to this edition, "the only thing that women on earth have done is wait and suffer. They expected someone to love them, marry them, turn them into mothers, betray them. And so it was with the protagonists of Ginzburg. Published in 1947, And that's what happened, the second novel by Natalia Ginzburg, is the story of a desperate love; A confession written in simple and touching language of the heartbreaking lucidity of a lonely woman who for years has endured the in fi delity of her husband and whose feelings, passions, and hopes cause her to stray inexorably.